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/