Speaking from experience...

We first registered our museum in the way that Jonathon suggests.  Our url was


http://www.lam.mus.ca.us

We found that this name was very difficult for people to remember

e.g., [log in to unmask]

We recently registered a second domain so our homepage is now

http://www.nhm.org

and my email is

[log in to unmask]

Much shorter and cleaner.

I would support the idea of creating a new top level domain, however "mus"
is probably not it.  I would like to see a domain which includes museums,
zoos, aquaria, planetaria etc.

Any suggestions?

Jim Angus


>I would recommend that national museum organizations start to address
>the problem of museum names on the Internet. I suggest national
>organizations set up sub-somain names for museums and use existing
>registered names if available. For example, in the UK, the
>Museums Documentation Association (MDA) could negotiate to
>manage a new UK sub-domain such as "mus.uk", similar to the academic
>"ac.uk" sub-domain. There is already a "sch.uk" sub-domain for schools.
>This could save a lot on registration costs of $100+ per individual
>domain name. Museums in a whole country could be registered en masse
>by an appropriate national organization. There could even be a top-level
>"mus" domain (like "edu" for educational establishments and "com"
>for commercial sites). Perhaps ICOM could administer this top-level
>domain. These suggestions could help prevent the fragmentation of
>museum site names between "edu", "org", "com", "ac.uk", "gov.uk",
>"co.uk", etc. which is currently occuring and also save the museum
>community a lot of money in name registration costs.
>
>Any comments? I would be particularly interested to here from
>appropriate national museum organizations who could take on such a
>role.
>
>I am happy to link to relevant initiatives in the Virtual Library
>museums pages "museum contacts" section under:
>
>  http://www.icom.org/vlmp/contacts.html
>
>BTW, there was an article in the September issue of Wired magazine
>about on-line museums, including a (positive!) mention of the
>Virtual Library museums pages. These have now received around 3/4
>million virtual visitors since the service started in 1994.
>Currently there are over 1,500 visitors each day.
>
>--
>Jonathan Bowen,  The University of Reading,  Dept of Computer Science
>Whiteknights,  PO Box 225,  Reading,  Berks RG6 6AY,  England
>Tel: +44-118-931-6544 (direct) -8611 (enquiries)  Fax: +44-118-975-1994
>Email: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.cs.rdg.ac.uk/people/jpb/

Jim Angus
Internet and Hypermedia Programs
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
900 Exposition Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA  90007

http://www.nhm.org/nhm

voice:  213/744-3317
fax:    213/746-2999
eMail:  [log in to unmask] = [log in to unmask]
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