Cary: You are right about the Euro - US$ conversion rate - sorry. However, the main argument remains. Paying the expenses of just the presidents of international committees could easily cost $100,000 a year, which equates to $7 or 7 Euros a head across the whole of the ICOM membership. I'm not advocating ICOM paying these expenses - it would be totally unrealistic within any foreseeable budget for ICOM even to pay the expenses of the ten members of the Executive Council, let alone of the 100+ members of the Advisory Committee. I'm just responding to the considerable number of demands in different places and media across ICOM over the past year or two. On your final point: I don't know of any international NGO like ICOM which pays the travel etc. expenses of the honorary officers of its expert committees or working groups. However, equally I don't know of any comparable international NGO which is an "open membership" organisation with many thousands of members. My own "other" UNESCO-linked NGOs - the International Union for the History of Geology - INHIGEO and the International Union of Quaternary Science - INQUA are each restricted to 5 or 6 members per country, each appointed for a 3 year period by the national academy of science of each member country, and in each case the national membership works out at something close to US$/Euro 1,500 per voting member, but this is of course paid by the national government organisation or agency, not by the named individuals actually serving on the NGO. Similarly, colleagues in my university department who serve on other cultural UNESCO-based NGOs report typical worldwide memberships limited to around 200 full members. ICOM - and ICOMOS which was modelled very closely on it - seem to be just about unique on two counts (1) their large individual memberships, and (2) membership dues that otherwise comparable NGOs regard as almost unbelievably low. IFLA, for example, charges its national committees 0.1% of the country's UNESCO dues assessment (around $12,000 - $15,000 for a country the size of the UK or France) with a minimum of 750 Dutch guilders (around 340 Euros or dollars), while its strictly non-voting "Personal Affiliates" (in effect "observers" allowed only to attend conferences and receive publications) pay a minimum of 200 guilders (around 90 Euros/dollars). Again, I am NOT proposing any increase in ICOM's subscriptions: I am just pointing out that ICOM is a totally different sort of animal, which has retained the old principle that if you want to play and active part in the organisation at the international level, you or a supporting institution, organisation or government has to pay for this, not ICOM. Patrick Boylan - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Change ICOM-L subscription options and search the archives at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/icom-l.html