I have read this discussion with interest.  As I understand it there are
currently three basic categories of institutional membership with
different levels of fee:

A. with 1-5 salaried staff	GBP 260 
B. with 6-20 salaried staff	GBP 390
C. with over 20 salaried staff	GBP 530

I'm not clear whether "salaried staff" is intended to mean paid staff or
paid professional staff.

As I understand it institutional members currently receive 3 cards which
ever category they fall into.

Also they are all entitled to join one (and only one) International
Committee as a voting member. 

As some background my institution as around 2000 paid staff of whom
about 800 are "professional" staff and about 35 are more strictly museum
professionals.

As a large multi-disciplinary institution we would really like to
participate fully in more than one International Committee (in fact 4 or
5).  When we originally joined ICOM institutions got 3 cards and could
join 3 committees as voting members. 

We would welcome the opportunity to participate as voting members in
more international committees.  However more membership cards by
themselves would not make membership more attractive.

We would not want to see the Institutional membership cards personalised
to individual members of staff.  There are a number of reasons for this
- staff change - even when they don't we may want to change who
represents us at a particular ICOM meeting.  

We do hold our Institutional cards centrally in the way that Patrick
Boylan objected to. However staff attending ICOM meetings have
overriding priority followed by staff on official travel.  Over the last
ten years they are been used on average only for one week a year by
staff on holiday.  Most staff (or possibly their families) don't seem to
want to spend their holidays visiting museums (or perhaps those that do
are already individual members of ICOM).

Perhaps a way forward would be to issue different numbers of cards to
the different sized museums based on the fee bands say:

0-1 staff	1 card 
2-5 staff	2 card	
6-20 staff	3 cards
21-100 staff	4 cards
over 100 staff	5 cards

The membership fee for a new 0-1 staff band could be reduced to an
amount no more than twice the individual rate to encourage small museums
with minimal budgets.   Large museums would pay more but get more
benefit.  Possibly the number of voting committee memberships could also
be tied to the size of the museum as the more staff you have the more
likely you are to be able to (and to want to) participate in more
committees.

Trevor Reynolds
Collections Registrar, English Heritage, Room 530, 23 Savile Row, London
W1S 2ET, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7973 3482  Fax: +44 (0) 20 7973 3209



_______________________________________________________________________________
English Heritage is subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
All information held by the organisation will be accessible in response to a
Freedom of Information request, unless one of the exemptions in the Act applies.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Change ICOM-L subscription options, unsubscribe, and search the
archives at:  http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/icom-l.html