It is good that Bristol City Council's Museum Service is finally gearing up for the digital age by creating a massive online library of its extensive museum collections (Evening Post, September 18).

This will help make things more accessible. Britain's first "virtual museum" was created 10 years ago so we're catching up.

But it begs the question of what we do with the collections, and how we best look after them. We won't be effective stewards of the collections if significant numbers of curators and collections specialists lose their jobs, as looks to be on the cards and has been reported in the past in the Post and specialist press. Treasures need guardians.

Will there be job cuts to pay for the new Museum of Bristol? This project was due to open in 2006, then 2008, then 2009, now it is 2011. It is millions of pounds over budget, some of which has happened because of poor cost control and management.

The 21st century is the digital age. Rather than having a static new museum to showcase Bristol's history, we could instead be using modern technologies to take history out of the museum glass showcases and make it come alive by using digital city trails and story-telling. Hand-held digital devices have great potential and this is already being done around the harbourside and elsewhere. This seems a more engaging way of telling Bristol's stories, and could be a lot cheaper. We risk ending up with a vastly over-budget and outdated city history museum which is no more popular than the old Industrial Museum. It will be a tragedy if this is at the expense of the care of the existing collections.

George Blythe,

By email.

● YOUR report dated September 18 stated that work has started on the creation of an online record of the 1.9 million items held by Bristol's Museum.

This welcome development is of great educational importance which will increase access to these hidden materials for students of the many subjects covered, including senior pre-university students who without this record might be hampered in their studies.

The museum's main functions are to display as many suitable materials as possible and to conserve the even larger number of items too fragile to display or are more specialist than most of us want to see. Most of the materials in store fall into this second category, but this sensible development draws attention to the serious lack of display space in Bristol's museum. You mention that we have "one of the biggest museum collections in the country". Where is the building to match?

The fact is that Bristol does not have a general museum fit for a city the size and importance of Bristol. It was not always so. There was a City Museum which suffered bomb damage during WWII. The surviving collections were, on a temporary basis, crammed into the Art Gallery, where, 60 years later, they still remain.

The then city council handed the shell of the burnt out museum over to Bristol University and never built the replacement they promised us. After using the ex-museum as a refectory for a few years the university flogged it off to Brown's Restaurant. Neither the city nor the university come out of this with much credit, and both the Museum Service and the Art Gallery suffer from the resulting congestion. So do the citizens of Bristol.

Roger Crudge,

Westbury Park.