Dear all,
I have read the email from Eva Mæhre Lauritzen and will add some 
comments to the issues she bring forward.  I post this email to the AC 
member list and to the ICOM-L as a comment to Eva Mæhre Lauritzen’s 
email and because these matters are of interest for the all members of 
ICOM.  At the end of my email I list three suggested items for the 
agendas of the June meetings. These suggestions are also sent separately 
to  [log in to unmask]

In the beginning of April (2nd-3rd) the dates and the schedule for the 
General Assembly and the annual meeting of the Advisory Committee (AC) 
were announced on ICOM-L. The announced dates, 8th to 11th of June, are 
not in accordance with the recommendation given by AC in June 2008 and 
later decided formally by the Executive Council (EC) of ICOM where the 
dates were fixed to 8th to 10th of June 2009. On the ICOM web site there 
are no minutes from any later EC referring a decision to a change thees 
dates. Thus it is appropriate to ask on which formal basis the decision 
to move the meeting is taken. On the other hand: An adjustment of the 
dates of the meetings by one day will by many be considered to be just a 
trifle and nothing to complain about.

However, for many members of the AC this is a decision with serious 
consequences with respect to the possibility to participate in the 
meetings. The National and International Committees are not wealthy.  As 
Eva Mæhre Lauritzen points out in her email to ICOM-L, many of the 
delegates to the meetings have to pay for the trip out of their own 
pocket and for others it is necessary to book travel and hotel well in 
advance to keep the costs at a lowest possible level. As she also points 
out, the participation in the various ICOM activities is for most of us 
done by the uncompensated use of our spare time. Thus this change of the 
dates is a heavy blow to the enthusiasm of those who have been “clever” 
and made their travel arrangement early and squeezed the original days 
into an already full diary.

Eva Mæhre Lauritzen also expresses her concern about the cancellations 
of the meetings in the standing committees. I do agree with her that 
these cancellations can indicate that there may be a wish or plan to 
downscale the role of these committees. This will be a major change of 
the organization and should be discussed at the AC meeting and only be 
decided in a General Assembly.

The cancellation of the committee meetings and the very late and 
unexplained change of dates for the AC meeting, may lead even a not 
over-suspicious person to get a weak feeling that the importance of the 
AC, National and International Committees, and the standing committees 
is not considered by the ICOM that high as one could have thought. If 
such a feeling should be common in the group of ICOM’s core members, it 
would not strengthen ICOM. Therefore, it is extremely important for the 
future of ICOM that ICOM do what can be done to keep all members’ 
enthusiasm at the highest possible level. An absolutely basic measure is 
that the organization is lead in a predictable way and announced dates 
are respected.

Although it is true that not all members of the ICs are equally active, 
the active members of the 30 ICs constitute a group of many hundreds of 
highly skilled and enthusiastic experts in their respective fields. This 
group is indeed a very valuable asset for ICOM. ICOM should do what is 
possible with in the financial frames to facilitate the activities of 
the IC and especially encourages and facilitate collaboration between 
the IC. A basic effort in this respect would be a working membership 
database and a competence catalogue.

As a general rule ICOM should first seek the necessary competence for 
tasks inside the ICOM organization instead of hiring external 
consultants. This may save costs and also give the members a more active 
role in ICOM.  For example: CIDOC has many highly competent system 
designers and system developers among its members and has, at least 
since April 2005, several times in writing offered to assist ICOM with 
the development of the membership database. Unfortunately, we got little 
positive response on our communication.


ICOM is a typical non-hierarchical network organization. An immanent and 
well known problem with such organizations is that the nodes in the 
periphery tend  to behave as independent organizations and that the 
central node tends to forget the rest of the network. The result is a 
fragmentation and decay of the organization. I believe our new Director 
General are fully aware of this fact, that is, the central ICOM and the 
rest of the organization is mutually dependent, and hope he and the rest 
of ICOM's central node will address the connected problems so that ICOM 
can continue to be an organization for its members and for the museums 
as important custodians for our common natural and cultural heritage.


Kind regards,

Christian-Emil Ore
CIDOC Chair

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Items for the agendas of AC and the GA (sent separately to 
[log in to unmask]).

GA item: Membership database
The membership database has been under development since at least 2004. 
My suggestion is that the ICOM administration should give a detailed 
overview over the costs connected to the development of the membership 
database to date, give an estimate of the costs connected to the 
finalizing of the database and to the annual maintenance including a 
reasonable amount of adjustments.

GA/AC item: The change of dates for the AC
My formal suggestion to ICOM is to compensate those of the delegates who 
will have extra expenses as a consequence of the change in the dates. If 
this is need to be decided by the General Assembly, this email should be 
considered as a formal suggestion to the agenda of GA.

AC item: CIDOC’s principle of Museum Documentation.
CIDOC’s working group for documentation standards has developed a set of 
principles for what should be considered as proper documentation of a 
museum collection CIDOC Board has decided to ask ICOM to put a 
discussion of the principles on the AC agenda. The principles of 
documentation have close connections to the ICOM Code of Ethics. The 
principles are formulated to ensure that the items in the museum 
collections are properly documented both with respect to their 
provenience (to avoid that illegal object is included in the collection) 
and to ensure that objects can be tracked in case of theft.

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