The Virtual Museum of the Pacific (VMP) is a Rich Internet Application with a Web Services architecture used to manage and navigate 400 objects from the Australian Museum's Pacific Island collections. This project tests a new means of facilitating access for Indigenous people and researchers to museum-based digital collections whose artefacts are physically distributed and often not on public display. The project has two dimensions: at the technical level the focus is on leveraging metadata used in curatorial management to produce a Web-based content management system for representing collection resources as a dynamic associative network; at a museological level the focus is on studying the effective means of presenting and interacting with this semantic network for traditional owners, the general public, researchers and curators. This seminar will include live demos of the VMP.