On Fri, 4 Oct 1996, Jonathan Bowen wrote:

> 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 not sure what the policy is now, but when we were assigned our
domain name there was an attempt to restructure Internet names in the
United States, hence the mus.nm.us (Museum/New Mexico/United States)
domain was born. Our domain is nmmnh-abq.mus.nm.us (same stuff, except
the name of our museum followed by location). The machine name is DARWIN.

We are proud to lay claim (even if in jest and not reality) to having the
longest e-mail address in the world. I have since configured our system
to accept e-mail addressed to our domain AND to our machine plus domain
name.

Given the way museums seem to be connecting to the Internet, it might be
time to advocate a mus domain, similar to edu and org. Organizations that
request addresses have much more say in their naming scheme that we had
when we got our address.


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John Chadwick, system analyst
New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science
1801 Mountain Road NW
Albuquerque, NM 87104
[log in to unmask],     http://www.aps.edu/HTMLPages/NMMNH.html
phone: (505) 841-2843 FAX (505) 841-2866
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