Without wishing in the slightest way to do anything that might hamper the
development of the fledgling ICOM-L, I would like to remind everyone that
this list has a very specific mandate. It is intended to serve as a forum
for the discussion of matters specifically relating to the International
Council of Museums, most particularly as announced on the companion list,
ICOM-ANNOUNCE.  Anything concerning the organization and its activities is
appropriate for posting here. To be sure, ICOM deals with general
museological issues, but the MUSEUM-L list serves admirably for the
discussion of such topics and neither list will benefit from ICOM-L being
seen as a duplicate effort.

A more specific intent behind ICOM-L is to provide a feedback channel for
commentary about ICOM's efforts at establishing a useful network resource.
In an attempt to elicit such discussion I would very much appreciate
knowing how the list members feel about the following matter:

A fundamental tenet of ICOM's network services is that material provided
via the network should be available to the largest possible segment of the
community. As a result, much emphasis has been placed on the maintenance
of e-mail distribution mechanisms. In practice, however, little use has
been made of the e-mail-based document retrieval facilities. The
subscriber base for ICOM's various e-mail distribution lists is impressive
enough but the number of active contributions to the lists is very low.

Both the contributors of material to the ICOM resource and its users have
indicated a very clear preference for utilizing the World Wide Web. Given
that the essence of Web material is its multimediality, the maintenance of
an alternative e-mail-based service of Web documents is not a trivial
technical matter.

My question is simply this -- How many of you who use ICOM's e-mail
services could as easily access the ICOM Web site?  My impression at this
point is that people whose network access is limited to e-mail tend to
be generally restrictive about their use of such facilities (for financial
reasons?).  Those who are more active tend to use the service of their
choice, but often have access to the full complement (e-mail, FTP, Gopher,
WWW).

???

 --
Cary Karp <[log in to unmask]>       Department of Information Technology
Phone: +46 8 666 4055       Swedish Museum of Natural History
Fax:   +46 8 666 4235       Box 50007, 104 05 Stockholm, Sweden