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