As many of you know, this week (Aug 31 - Sept 3) CIDOC and MCN
are holding the Cultures Connected:  Automating Museums in the
Americas and Beyond conferences. During the week, daily updates
of the procedings (of which this is the first) will be posted
here.
 
Sunday started off with a light breakfast at which Mary Case,
Andrew Roberts and Yolanda Deckers welcomed the conference
attendees.  Additionally, the chairs of the Working Groups each
gave a brief explanation of their various groups' plans and
efforts.
 
Given the fluidity of the conference schedule, the day's events
flowed smoothly.  Following the introductory breakfast, the
Working Groups - with one exception - convened to meeting rooms
at the Rennaissance Hotel.  The one exception was the
Archaeological Sites Working Group, which held their meeting at
an archaeological site in Alexandria, VA.
 
Much was discussed at these meetings.  The Multimedia Working
Group discussed their ongoing efforts to publish a document for
museums on multimedia standards - hopefully in time for next
year's ICOM conference.  It was also mentioned that the future of
the Working Group's newsletter will depend heavily upon
contributions from all the members of the Group.
 
Discussed at the CIDOC Services Working Group meeting were the
logistics of distributing CIDOC publications - in particular,
"FAQ-sheets", printed in several languages, which suggest a
methodology for approaching specific areas of museum management.
An essential concern of the comittee was that these documents be
easily accessible to museums off as well as on the Internet.
The Data Model Working Group and the Data and Terminology Group
met together to discuss the publication of MICMO, a proposed
standard for minimum information categories.  Afterwords the two
groups split into seperate sessions.   At the Data Modeling
Group's meeting, the pros and cons of developing a data model
independant of implementation questions were discussed, as were
plans for making the Group's work more publicly available over
the Internet via online instructional programs and anonymous FTP.
Then, after a short break, a sub-group reconvened to go over the
list of specific concerns in the proposed model itself.
 
The Data and Terminology Group continued the discussion started
in the joint meeting with an emphasis on the challenges involved
in fully standardizing MICMO's terminology.
  In the afternoon the CIDOC board met to reveiw the day's
workshops and to discuss new and old business.  The day's
activities concluded with a reception at the Smithsonian
Institute Building ("The Castle").
 
  These, of course, are only some of the many topics brought up
on Sunday; since our reorting "staff" comprises two members, we
regretfully could not take notes on all meetings.  Look out for
another update tomorrow.