Hello,

As you may know, December 1 is national AIDS Awareness Day, and also the
"Day without Art" to illustrate in a tangible way the effect of the AIDS
crisis on the Arts community.

On December 1, the University Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive at UC
Berkeley will close down it's WWW site to help illustrate a day without
art.

Actually we won't turn off the Web Server entirely. Rather for that day
we'll put up a new home page that has no links to the rest of our site, but
that briefly states the reason for the national day without art, mentions
the other programs we have relating to this day, followed by links to a few
AIDS awareness sites on the WWW.

I mention this to this list for two reasons; one is to alert anyone that
has a link to us that for that day things will be different, but our site
has not gone away. The other reason is to ask what other museums are doing
for this day, and to invite other museums to participate in a day without
art by "turning off" or modifying your WWW pages too.

Please let me know if you are doing anything similar, as I'd be curious (in
fact a list of these museums sent to the New York Times might help the
impact of the message....?). Also, it is specifically a day without art,
but since there are many other types of museums besides art museums, I
think the theme could be expanded to be a "day without cultural heritage
information". The impact of AIDS is widely felt, so the response should be
too.

Richard Rinehart
Systems Manager & Education Technology Specialist
University Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive
University of California, Berkeley
http://www.uampfa.berkeley.edu/