As many of you know, this week (Aug 31 - Sept 3) CIDOC and MCN are holding the Cultures Connected: Automating Museums in the Americas and Beyond conferences. During the week, daily updates of the procedings (of which this is the first) will be posted here. Sunday started off with a light breakfast at which Mary Case, Andrew Roberts and Yolanda Deckers welcomed the conference attendees. Additionally, the chairs of the Working Groups each gave a brief explanation of their various groups' plans and efforts. Given the fluidity of the conference schedule, the day's events flowed smoothly. Following the introductory breakfast, the Working Groups - with one exception - convened to meeting rooms at the Rennaissance Hotel. The one exception was the Archaeological Sites Working Group, which held their meeting at an archaeological site in Alexandria, VA. Much was discussed at these meetings. The Multimedia Working Group discussed their ongoing efforts to publish a document for museums on multimedia standards - hopefully in time for next year's ICOM conference. It was also mentioned that the future of the Working Group's newsletter will depend heavily upon contributions from all the members of the Group. Discussed at the CIDOC Services Working Group meeting were the logistics of distributing CIDOC publications - in particular, "FAQ-sheets", printed in several languages, which suggest a methodology for approaching specific areas of museum management. An essential concern of the comittee was that these documents be easily accessible to museums off as well as on the Internet. The Data Model Working Group and the Data and Terminology Group met together to discuss the publication of MICMO, a proposed standard for minimum information categories. Afterwords the two groups split into seperate sessions. At the Data Modeling Group's meeting, the pros and cons of developing a data model independant of implementation questions were discussed, as were plans for making the Group's work more publicly available over the Internet via online instructional programs and anonymous FTP. Then, after a short break, a sub-group reconvened to go over the list of specific concerns in the proposed model itself. The Data and Terminology Group continued the discussion started in the joint meeting with an emphasis on the challenges involved in fully standardizing MICMO's terminology. In the afternoon the CIDOC board met to reveiw the day's workshops and to discuss new and old business. The day's activities concluded with a reception at the Smithsonian Institute Building ("The Castle"). These, of course, are only some of the many topics brought up on Sunday; since our reorting "staff" comprises two members, we regretfully could not take notes on all meetings. Look out for another update tomorrow.