At 08:25 06/08/98 +0200, you wrote:
>The ICOM "Handbook of Standards; Documenting African Collections"
>is now available in full text in both English and French at:
>
>     http://www.icom.org/afridoc/
>

Despite others comments, like Joris, I have reservations.

I first accessed this site on my Pentium, 16Meg RAM, 33k dial up modem,
Netscape Communicator 4.04.

Load up times reasonably fast, not too annoying. Took a while to get the
frames environment sussed, but then reasonably easy to get around.

Then I cross-checked with my 486, 8Meg RAM, 14k dial up modem (same
telephone line) and Internet Explorer 3.1.

Pages took between 1 and 3 minutes to load - some annoyingly slow. I have
yet to be able to access the lists of minimum standards, and there were
numerous error messages about images that could not be found/loaded.

Now if I remember the African Internet Working Group meeting in Namibia
earlier this year, the latter configuration is more representative of those
participants listed on the pages - in fact somewhat faster than most!

My question is - what audience was this aimed at!? If it was those listed as
participants/authors then I am sure they would all be as frustrated as
Joris, Eugene and others. If this is intended as a show piece to show what
Africom has achieved (BTW - check out www.africom.org - you may be
unpleasantly surprised) then it is probably a good advertisement.

If it was meant to make the Handbook more accessible to museums in Africa
then it is probably a failure.

I guess we have a lot to talk about during the upcoming Hanbook of Standards
meeting in South Africa in November.

Cheers for now, Glyn

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