******* THE ICOM INTERNET FAQ *******
Frequently asked questions about ICOM services on the Internet
Summary: The International Council of Museums provides information about the
organization and its activities via the Internet using standard services.
Several ICOM committees contribute to the organization's central network
facilities and/or maintain additional facilities of their own. This FAQ
describes these services including means for accessing them and guidelines
for contributors.
Version: 2.00 (last revised 1998-08-10 11:00 GMT)
This contains significant revisions to the preceding version. Subject
headings have been retained for the sake of continuity and may therefore
appear somewhat anachronistic.
CONTENTS
Part 0: Administrative notices
0.00 Copyright
0.01 Introduction
Part 1: Basic aspects of ICOM services on the Internet
1.00 Why start with electronic mail?
1.01 What about the World Wide Web?
1.02 What about FTP and Gopher?
1.03 How is ICOM's multilinguality being accommodated?
1.04 Who may contribute material?
Part 2: Basics of electronic document style
(This part was dedicated to the production of e-mail based material.
Several of its subheadings have been removed.)
2.00 How does an electronic document intended for e-mail
transmission differ from any other?
2.04 How are MIME facilities applied?
Part 3: What are the ICOM document repositories?
3.00 How are ICOM's e-mail based services structured?
3.01 What is ICOM-L?
3.02 Is there an FTP server?
3.03 Is there a Gopher server?
3.04 What about the World Wide Web?
3.05 How do I contribute?
Part 4: Appendices
4.00 How do I obtain the latest version of this FAQ?
4.01 What changes have been made in the latest version?
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Subject: 0.00 Copyright
THE ICOM INTERNET FAQ, Copyright (c) 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998
The International Council of Museums and Cary Karp
This document may be reproduced in its entirety and shared without
restriction as long as this copyright notice is retained, except that it may
not be licensed or sold for profit as a portion of any software product, and
it may not be included in or distributed with commercial products or
otherwise distributed by commercial concerns to their clients or customers
without the written permission of the person responsible for its
maintenance.
This document may be quoted in part subject to the same restrictions as long
as any such quote includes an attribution providing, at a minimum, the name
and e-mail address of an individual identified as the document's maintainer,
its revision date and version number, and a network address from which the
latest revision of the entire document may be retrieved.
A suitable attribution for the present version of this document is:
Cary Karp , THE ICOM INTERNET FAQ, Version 2.00
(1998-08-10).
This document was developed by volunteer contribution as a public service,
and is furnished without warranty of any kind. Neither the International
Council of Museums, nor any of its constituent bodies, nor any individual
author, nor any other institution or individual that has contributed to its
development warrant it in any way.
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Subject: 0.01 Introduction
The International Council of Museums (ICOM) is devoted to the promotion and
development of museums and the museum profession at an international level.
ICOM is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) maintaining formal relations
with UNESCO. It has consultative status to the United Nations Economic and
Social Council.
ICOM was created in 1946 and has 13,000 members in 145 countries. The
membership participates in the activities of 112 National Committees and 25
International Committees. Some National Committees have also organized on a
regional level to reinforce their action.
ICOM actively endeavors to develop and maintain a presence on the Internet.
It has its own network domain and maintains a repository of electronic
documents. ICOM operates an e-mail distribution list, ICOM-L, that is
intended to provide the electronic network community with a source of
official information about the organization's activities and serve as a
feedback channel and forum for the public discussion of matters relating to
ICOM. Individual ICOM committees and their working groups have also
established e-mail distribution lists, contribute documents to the network
repositories, and maintain sites on the World Wide Web.
This FAQ is intended to provide information about the current scope of these
activities with special emphasis on the technical requirements for the
contribution of new material to the central document repositories. It is not
intended to serve as a general source of information about the Internet or
museum related network resources.
The central point of entry to ICOM's Internet facilities provides access
both to material housed on the central server (presently located in
Stockholm, Sweden) and to material maintained at independently operated
external sites. Conformance to the guidelines provided in this FAQ is
required for all material placed in the central document repositories. The
maintainers of external sites may have their own requirements although some
degree of adherence to the present guidelines is expected if links to these
sites are to be placed on the central site.
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Subject: 1.00 Why start with electronic mail?
ICOM initiated its network service at a time when e-mail was the sole
ubiquitous means for addressing the target community. Although the World
Wide Web was well-established at that time, it was by no means clear that it
was destined to attain its current prominence. The following three
paragraphs from the initial statement of purpose are provided here for
historical interest:
"ICOM attempts to provide material to as large a segment of the global
community as possible. Although many people have access to the full
complement of the Internet's tools for the location and retrieval of
information, the only network access available to a larger number is
provided by e-mail.
E-mail also has the advantage of being the only means by which the majority
of network users can actively contribute their own ideas and opinions to the
network community. E-mail distribution lists are, for this reason, one of
the most widespread platforms for the interchange of information.
It is fundamental to the purpose of any network document repository
established by ICOM that as much of its contents as possible are provided in
a manner that is easily available to e-mail users."
These conditions were fulfilled to a reasonable degree until very recently.
The present revision of this FAQ was prepared in response to a debate that
was triggered by the appearance in the ICOM document repository of a
document that required technical resources far in excess of those available
to the primarily e-mail oriented user. (The previous version of the FAQ was
substantially out of date, in any case.)
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Subject: 1.01 What about the World Wide Web?
ICOM maintains a central WWW site that provides access to the full scope of
its document repositories. This site also provides links to additional sites
maintained independently by other ICOM bodies and associates. "Mirrors" of
the central site are maintained at various locations worldwide. Two are in
operation in North America, one in Australia, and one in the UK. Additional
mirror sites are planned. (The main site is located in Europe.)
Documents in valid HTML 4.0 or earlier standardized formats (as defined on
the W3C site at http://www.w3.org/) may be submitted to the repositories.
If it is truly necessary to include elements unique to a higher number
HTML standard, authors should do everything possible to ensure that the
results are displayed reasonably by clients that only support lower
versions. (HTML 2.0 is the baseline.) Proprietary extensions to HTML should
be avoided, altogether. Similarly, the use of complex graphic effects that
are devoid of information content is discouraged. If it is not possible to
conform to these strictures, the requirement for reasonable display by
clients which lack the extended functionality must be observed.
Authors of Web documents should note that, despite any industry claim to the
contrary, a large segment of the Web community does not use whatever is
being presented as the latest most powerful Web browser. Any document that
is reliant on non-standard or experimental functionality will be accessible
to a more restricted audience than will a document based on HTML 2.0.
Recognizing technical contraints that still very much exist, primarily in
terms of the rapidity with which many users can retrieve material from the
Net, when addressing the entire ICOM community the use of any non-text
element of HTML should be restricted to cases where it is of fundamental
importance to the message being conveyed. A text oriented document has the
advantage of not only appearing properly when accessed via the World Wide
Web but also retains its utility if transported via other network channels.
A reasonable balance among the requirements of these various media may be
struck by providing minimally tagged documents, placing the tags in the text
in a manner that does not impede its legibility, and being cognizant of how
the document would appear if viewed as plain text. This FAQ, iteself, provides
an example of absolutely minimalist tagging.
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Subject: 1.02 What about FTP and Gopher?
ICOM maintains an FTP server but has terminated operation of its Gopher
server. The FTP server provides access to all the material housed on the
ICOM Web server.
Please note that incurrent documents no longer linked into the hierarchy as
accessed from the Web may still be visible to FTP clients. It is preferable
to enter the repositories via the Web, if at all possible.
The FTP server address is provided under its own heading below.
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Subject: 1.03 How is ICOM's multilinguality being accommodated?
The language used for maintaining basic international services on the
Internet is English and the protocols underlying the standard complement of
information location and retrieval facilities all use English commands.
There are, however, no inherent restrictions on the languages of the
documents and information made available via these services.
The successful use of network services in a multilingual context requires
attention to a number of details that are neither obvious nor intuitive.
(These were described at tedious length in the previous version of this
FAQ.) It should be noted that although the ICOM e-mail distribution lists
are configured to allow for multilingual communication, many subscribers do
not currently have access to the tools necessary to accommodate this
facility.
Introductory pages on ICOM's WWW site are maintained in both French and
English. Additional documents are maintained bilingually to the extent
possible. Translations of this material into any other of ICOM's working
languages are encouraged and will be posted upon receipt.
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Subject: 1.04 Who may contribute material?
Contributions to the distribution lists may be made by their members
according to the charter and policy of each individual list. Please note,
however, that membership in an ICOM list does not in any way confer
membership in either ICOM or in the committee which operates the list.
Material intended for the document repositories may be submitted by
designated representatives of any official ICOM body. If the scope of the
material is extensive there may be some discussion about the appropriate
host site for it. In particular, ICOM cannot presently provide central host
services on the World Wide Web for all its component bodies. Please note
that these services are maintained to provide information about ICOM,
itself, and not about the programs and activities of individual museums. All
decisions about the scope, policy and content of ICOM's central network
facilities are made by the ICOM Secretariat.
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Subject: 2.00 How does an electronic document intended for e-mail
transmission differ from any other?
The previous version of this FAQ contained an extensive discussion of
technical aspects of the correct structure of a document intended for
transmission via e-mail. This material has been excluded from the present
version. The interested reader may wish to consult the previous version at
the address provided farthest below.
The only of the previous subheadings under this subject that retains current
interest follows (truncated) directly below.
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Subject: 2.04 How are MIME facilities applied?
One of the most common means for creating multipart messages is the use of a
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) compliant mailer to "attach"
files to an e-mail message. This is done by providing the mailer with a list
of the names of binary files that are to be included in the message in
encoded format. Such attachments provide a convenient means for transmitting
binary material. If the sender and recipient of a message have confirmed
that they are both using mailers which can process attachments, the entire
encoding and decoding process will be of no further concern to either of
them.
Unfortunately, many people make the erroneous assumption that the ability to
receive attachments is universal and habitually use them for the
transmission of text that, in fact, could have been directly transmitted as
plain text. People who do not use mailers with MIME support are thus often
confronted with messages they cannot read.
The sender of an e-mail message must realize that binary attachments should
never be used unless it is certain that all recipients can deal with them.
It is rarely appropriate to send a binary attachment to an e-mail
distribution list, nor should attachments be used to transmit text that can
be presented as plain text. This means that text prepared in a word
processor should be stored and transmitted as plain text, rather than stored
in the word processor's native format and transmitted as a binary
attachment. Even if recipients can deal with the binary attachment it cannot
be assumed that they will be able to read the resultant word processor file.
It may be worth noting that MIME content description is fundamental to the
transport of World Wide Web material. However, the encoding scheme for 8-bit
displayable characters on the WWW is derived from SGML and differs
substantially from the scheme used for e-mail.
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Subject: 3.00 How are ICOM's e-mail based services structured?
The LISTSERV installations at L-Soft International, Inc., and at the Swedish
Museum of Natural History are the hosts for several distribution lists
maintained on behalf of ICOM bodies. (LISTSERV is L-Soft's trademarked
designation for a software package developed by Eric Thomas designed for the
management of distribution lists. Lists are often erroneously referred to as
"listservs". Doing so is equivalent to calling a word processor document a
"wordperfect".) Individual lists will be open to various segments of the
community and requirements for membership in them vary. Additional ICOM
distribution lists are maintained on other sites. An entry point into the
central ICOM distribution list system is maintained on the ICOM home page on
the World Wide Web as described below.
Selected documents from the ICOM repositories are available from a document
server on the ICOM host. A list of these documents and instructions for the
use of the document server may be obtained sending a message to:
docserv.index@icom.org
This message need contain no other text of any sort. The subject line in
the request will be echoed in the server's reply and may be used
for convenience.
This service is not actively maintained and the documents retrieved from it
may not always include the latest revisions. The document server is still in
operation primarily to demonstrate its basic utility. It may be discontinued
at any time.
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Subject: 3.01 What is ICOM-L?
Notification of documents placed in the network repositories, as well as
general news and information about ICOM's scheduled events, is sent to the
ICOM-L distribution list. Notification is also made of e-mail distribution
lists and other Internet facilities provided by ICOM bodies. It is assumed
that the subscribers to the other ICOM distribution lists will all be
subscribers to ICOM-L and general announcements of interest to all will be
posted on the latter list, only. ICOM-L is not used for notification of
local activities at individual museums or for information of interest to the
museum community that is not explicitly anchored to ICOM.
ICOM-L also provides a forum for the public discussion this material and any
other matters relevant to ICOM and its activities. Contributions intended to
serve as official ICOM announcements are subject to the approval of the ICOM
Secretariat. The list is moderated and contributions may be edited to remove
material not directly related to ICOM's corporate activities without
consulting the original contributor.
Contributors to the document repositories are requested to provide an
abstract suitable for posting on ICOM-L for each document.
If you wish to join ICOM-L send a message to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com
containing the commands
SUBSCRIBE ICOM-L Yourfirstname Yourlastname
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Subject: 3.02 What about the FTP server?
An FTP server is operated to provide access to the ICOM hypertext documents
housed on the World Wide Web site. The FTP server is located at:
ftp://ftp.icom.org/pub/http/
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Subject: 3.03 What about the Gopher server?
The Gopher service has been discontinued.
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Subject: 3.04 What about the World Wide Web?
The ICOM site on the World Wide Web provides access to the FTP site, to the
LISTSERV archives, and to hypertext material in the central document
repositories. Links are also provided to ICOM resources maintained by other
hosts.
The ICOM introductory page is:
http://www.icom.org/
Links to mirror sites are provided there.
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Subject: 3.05 How do I contribute?
Material for the ICOM document repositories may be submitted by designated
representatives of any ICOM committee, any committee working group, the ICOM
Secretariat, and the ICOM governing bodies.
All material intended for any facet of the repositories should be sent via
e-mail to:
admin@icom.org
If the material is in accordance with the guidelines provided here
(including what is said in Subject 1.04 about the restrictions on the scope
of the central platform) it will be placed in the repositories and announced
on ICOM-L.
The ICOM Secretariat is in the process of defining its role in the
administration of these facilities. Procedures for the submission and
approval of material for the repositories, as well as the network addresses
assigned to them, are subject to modification during this process.
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4.00 How do I obtain the latest version of this FAQ?
Periodic announcements about the availability of this FAQ will be made on
ICOM-L, including notification of any substantive changes in the text.
The most current version will be found at:
http://www.icom.org/internet.faq
A copy may also be retrieved via e-mail by sending a message to
internetfaq.html@icom.org
This message need contain no additional text of any sort.
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4.01 What changes have been made in the different versions?
In 2.00: This is a major revision. The previous version was based on the
premise that the primary document delivery mechanism used by ICOM's entire
target network community was e-mail. Corresponding constraints were imposed
upon all material included in the document repositories. It is now assumed
that all users of the Internet have access to the World Wide Web.
This version has been stripped of extensive technical material about e-mail.
The previous version, including its revision history, is available at:
http://www.icom.org/internet.151.faq
An equivalently detailed treatment of the preparation of material for
direct publication on the Web is not provided here. Literature on that
subject is readily available from other sources.
******* End of THE ICOM INTERNET FAQ *******