This is an administrative announcement relevant to the ICOM-L and
ICOM-ANNOUNCE distribution lists. It is therefore being sent to
both. Those of you who receive two copies of this message are
asked please to forgive the duplication.

Several e-mail distribution lists are maintained on ICOM's
behalf. These are not all being used to best advantage. ICOM-L,
for example, has been essentially dormant since the outset
although one would expect it to be among the more active. The
charters of some of the ICOM lists are, therefore, being
modified.

The following changes are going to be made to ICOM-L and
ICOM-ANNOUNCE:

ICOM-ANNOUNCE will remain strictly a one-way list for
announcements about ICOM's official activities. This includes the
activities of the ICOM Committees but it does not include those
of individual museums or material of general interest to the
museum community. If your interest in ICOM's activities is
restricted to receiving such announcements you will probably wish
to be a member of this list.

ICOM-L will remain a platform for the free discussion of all
aspects of ICOM's activities, including things that might be of
general interest to the ICOM community. All material sent to
ICOM-ANNOUNCE will henceforth *also* be forwarded to ICOM-L. It
will, therefore, no longer be necessary for anyone to be a member
of both lists in order to participate in the full scope of the
activities thus far shared between them.

It will not be necessary for any of the lists' members to take
any action in order to keep receiving the messages that otherwise
would have been sent to them. The membership rosters of the two
lists will be consolidated automatically. Everyone who is
presently on both ICOM-L and ICOM-ANNOUNCE will be removed from
the latter list. Those who are presently on ICOM-ANNOUNCE, only,
will be sent a notification of this change once it has been made,
with a reminder about how they may join ICOM-L in case they wish
to do so. Anyone wishing to anticipate this development can join
ICOM-L by sending a message to [log in to unmask] containing the
command:

     SUB ICOM-L Yourfirstname Yourlastname

on the first line of the body of the message.

Modifications to the charters of some ICOM Committee distribution
lists are planned that will result in at least some of their
traffic being redirected to ICOM-L. Details about this will be
forwarded as it becomes available. The list's new charter will be
distributed to members during the next few days.

Once the dust has settled after this reshuffling it is hoped that
some genuinely useful activity can be generated on ICOM-L.


Cary Karp               Department of Information Technology
mailto:[log in to unmask]        Swedish Museum of Natural History
http://ck.nrm.se/       Svante Arrheniusv. 3
Phone: +46 8 666 4055   Box 50007
Fax:   +46 8 666 4235   104 05 Stockholm, Sweden