Archive sites for material produced by several ICOM committee
working groups are now available for public access. These sites
also contain material produced by organisations which, either by
deliberate arrangement or through coincidentally shared
membership, are closely associated with ICOM.
 
Users who have access to FTP services will find document
repositories at:
 
     ftp://calvin.chin.doc.ca/pub/ICOM
 
and
 
     ftp://ftp.nrm.se/pub/ICOM                    .
 
The first of these sites is maintained by the Canadian Heritage
Information Network (CHIN) and the second by the Swedish Museum
of Natural History (NRM). Material is posted simultaneously on
both. Please use the one closest to your own location.
 
The Swedish site may also be accessed by Gopher and World Wide
Web users at:
 
     gopher://gopher.nrm.se
 
and
 
     http://www.nrm.se/
 
The Canadian site will be providing similar facilities early next
year.
 
Users who only have access to e-mail facilities may retrieve
documents from the FTP sites through ftpmail services. NRM also
operates a mail server which can access several of the documents
available on the FTP sites. A list of these may be obtained by
sending a message to:
 
     [log in to unmask]
 
giving the command
 
INDEX
 
on the first line of the message. This command will be ignored if
it is preceded by any blank space, even if only a single space or
tab. The command will also be ignored if preceded by a blank line
or a line containing an invalid command to the mail server, so
make sure that your e-mail program doesn't insert any text at the
outset of the body of your message. (Sorry to belabor this point,
but it's amazing how much difficulty people have in doing this
properly.)
 
The archives of several e-mail distribution lists operated by ICOM
committee working groups, or by organizations related to them, are
maintained at:
 
     http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/
 
or
 
     gopher://palimpsest.stanford.edu             .
 
These facilities are are part of Conservation OnLine (CoOL) which
also contains many of the ICOM documents available through the
FTP sites, plus much additional material of interest to the museum
community. CoOL also provides the ability to locate and retrieve
documents by index searching through a variety of points of
entry.
 
Further information about CoOL may be obtained from Walter Henry
of the Stanford University Libraries Conservation Lab:
 
     [log in to unmask]
 
Questions regarding the CHIN and NRM archive sites may be
directed to me. Although this announcement will be posted through
several channels (apologies to those irritated by the
duplication) the preferred forum for the discussion of ICOM-
related facilities of this type is CIDOC-L. (Please don't take
this as an attempt at steering the way people use the network.
It is simply a reference to the forum that is most closely
monitored by the people providing the services in question.)
 
 
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Cary Karp <[log in to unmask]>       Department of Information Technology
Phone: +46 8 666 4055       Swedish Museum of Natural History
Fax:   +46 8 15 22 77       Box 50007, 104 05 Stockholm, Sweden