ICOM provides its National Committees with names in icom.museum using their national language representations in native scripts. This is an extension of the long-standing practice of providing the committees with domain names in the form countryname.icom.museum, using their English language representation. The restriction to English was due to a lack of means for representing the accented characters needed for the other two ICOM languages, French and Spanish.
These names are assigned in order to maintain a unified identity on the Internet for the entire ICOM organization, with the International Committees being given names in the form committeename.icom.museum. They also provide committees with persistent identifiers for their own Web sites and e-mailboxes. These often change when administrative responsibility for the committee shifts. Standardized names eliminate the need for public concern with tracking current addresses.
The following examples illustrate the extended service:
In languages where the acronym "ICOM" appears in some other form or script, the alternative can be included in the name of the committee, for example, as:
The national and English language names may also be used to distinguish between separate resources, as illustrated with:
A more extensive (but still incomplete) listing of the national committee names that require the use of IDN characters is available at http://icom.museum/idn/natcoms.html The correct display of the all characters in either list may require fonts that are not immediately available. A presentation version of the extended list that should display properly in all cases will be found at http://icom.museum/idn/natcoms.pdf.
Localized domain names are intended to help the Committees develop multilingual presences on the Internet. Modification to the lists presented here will be made at the request of the named committees if they find errors in their assigned designations or require names in other languages. ICOM's institutional members are also encouraged to acquire domain names in their local languages directly under .museum. For information about how to do this see http://about.museum/idn/. The range of languages available for this purpose is smaller than what is displayed above. The administrators of .museum will, however, consider the inclusion of new languages upon application.
Technical note:
A Web browser may need special configuration to display a wide range of scripts on a single page. This is done with the browser's "encoding" or "character coding" settings. The basic encoding should be set for "UTF-8" but some experimentation may be needed to locate a font that includes all desired scripts. A suitable shareware font is located at http://www.code2000.net/code2000_page.htm. The links on this page will all work in any browser, even if it does not support all of the display characters.
The ability of a browser to deal with IDN can be tested by cutting and pasting any of the URLs listed above into the browser's address line. If the result is the same as the one given by clicking directly on the corresponding link, the browser has full support for IDN. Two starting points may be suggested for a user wishing to acquire an IDN-aware browser with integral IDN support or for a plug-in extension to previously installed software. Detailed instructions about how to include IDN characters in Web documents is located at http://about.museum/idn/tutorial.html.
Latest update: 22 October 2008