• US/ICOMOS Headquarters will move to new location
• Internet Resources for Cultural Heritage
• World Heritage Information Network
• The Chairman's Report
• Calendar

US/ICOMOS HEADQUARTERS WILL MOVE TO NEW LOCATION On June 15, 1996, US/ICOMOS will leave its long-time home at Decatur House and occupy an office suite at the National Building Museum, located in the Pension Building at Judiciary Square, NW, in Washington, DC. We are grateful to Decatur House and the National Trust for Historic Preservation for providing the impressive setting on Lafayette Square, in Washington's premier historic house museum, that US/ICOMOS has enjoyed for the past 14 years. We are also eager to move into our new space in another very different and very distinctive historic building. We look forward to meeting all our neighbors at the National Building Museum, where there are many opportunities to be developed for cooperation. Members are invited to visit us at the new offices when in Washington and the National Building Museum. Our new address is:   US/ICOMOS 401 F Street, NW Room #331 Washington, DC 20001 US/ICOMOS telephone numbers will remain the same: Gustavo F. Araoz, AIA, Executive Director: 202-842-1859; Ellen M. Delage, Program Director: 202-842- 1862; Switchboard: 202-842-1866; Fax: 202-842-1861.

INTERNET RESOURCES FOR INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL HERITAGE PROTECTION

US/ICOMOS. <http://www.icomos.org/usicomos/>
US/ICOMOS' homepage includes information about the organization, events and all newsletters since 1993. A "search engine" allows the reader to search for words or phrases. Although no photographs are included, the newsletters are illustrated in other ways, with imbedded links to projects and organizations mentioned in the text. Words in boldface [or underlined] in this article represent hypertext links in the online issue of this newsletter.

 

US/ICOMOS MISSION STATEMENT US/ICOMOS fosters heritage conservation and historic preservation at the national and international levels through education and training, international exchange of people and information, technical assistance, documentation, advocacy and other activities consistent with the goals of ICOMOS and through collaboration with other organizations. US/ICOMOS membership includes professionals- practitioners, supporters and organizations committed to the protection, preservation and conservation of the world's cultural heritage. US/ICOMOS is the U.S. National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the international nongovernmental organization dedicated to the preservation and conservation of the world's heritage. US/ICOMOS NEWSLETTER The US/ICOMOS Newsletter is published by US/ICOMOS six times per year as a benefit of membership. Members are urged to submit brief articles with illustrations and editorial items for inclusion in the Newsletter. Materials will be edited by US/ICOMOS as appropriate. There are no submission deadlines; items will be used as space and time permit. Contributors are solely responsible for the facts and opinions stated herein, and publication in this Newsletter does not constitute an official endorsement by US/ICOMOS. Please send submissions and any inquiries to the Editor, US/ICOMOS Newsletter, 1600 H Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006.

World Heritage Sites in the United States. <http://www.cr.nps.gov/worldheritage/>
The web site is a joint project of the National Park Service and US/ICOMOS. The site includes links and descriptive text about all the United States sites on the World Heritage List.

National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT). <http://www.cr.nps.gov/ncptt/> The new web pages are a graphical interface to the extensive materials in the Internet gopher established by the Center a year ago. The NCPTT now includes the subject guide, Internet Resources for Heritage Conservation, Historic Preservation and Archaeology <http://www.cr.nps.gov/ncptt/irg/>. For two years a feature of the ICOMOS site, this resource guide was transferred in March 1996 to the NCPTT, which now maintains it. Included in its listings are web and gopher addresses of most national (and many international) organizations. For cultural resource issues, this is a better guide than the more visible Internet subject guides such as Yahoo! or the WWW Virtual Library.

International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS). <http://www.icomos.org/> The homepage of ICOMOS, originally developed by ICOMOS Canada, contains most of the formal ICOMOS documents, including the Venice Charter (in three languages); the Declaration of Amsterdam, and close to three dozen other international instruments and agreements. Both National Committees (to date: US, Canada, Argentina) and International Specialized Committees (Wood, Photogrammetry) are represented. Discussions have been taking place with the Paris Secretariat about ways the site can continue to expand.

World Heritage Centre, UNESCO. <http://www.unesco.org./whc/> The intergovernmental secretariat for the World Heritage Convention has maintained its own web page array since early 1995. The site includes a hypertext version of the World Heritage List, the text of the Convention, Operational Guidelines, and specialized reports such as the Nara Document on Authenticity and the Report of the Asia-Pacific Workshop on Cultural Landscapes. In the near future, watch for the significant expansion of this site, which, together with other partners in the World Heritage Information Network, will be expanding its offerings.

International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and the Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM). <http://www.iccrom.org/> ICCROM is now rapidly developing this group of web pages, including course descriptions, reports, and a new initiative, Integrated Territorial and Urban Conservation.

Cultural Protection Treaties and Other International Instruments. <http://www.tufts.edu/departments/fletcher/multi/cultural.html> The site, a part of the larger Multilaterals Project at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, includes the full www texts of most Conventions since the 1935 Roerich Pact and links to the texts in other sites listed here.

Other sites of international interest:

Archaeological Resources Guide for Europe (ARGE). WWW page array with a rich collection of links relating to European archaeological investigations. <http://www.bham.ac.uk/BUFAU/Projects/EAW/>

[Australia] Australian Heritage Commission. <http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage>

[Canada] Parks Canada. <http://parkscanada.pch.gc.ca/>

[European Union] The Raphaël www site outlines the EU's "Community action programme in the field of cultural heritage." <http://www.cec.lu/en/comm/dg10/culture/en/heritage/raphael.html> [Document has been relocated since the publication of the newsletter; ed.]

[France] Le Ministère de la Culture. The oldest and still one of the most extensive Internet sites in the field of cultural protection, the site includes a link to the new www database for the Inventaire Général, the inventory of immovable cultural property in France. <http:/www.culture.fr>

[Japan] Kyushu Machinami Archives. <http://www.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp/faculty/bdarling/machinami.html> One of a growing number of Japanses web sites, Kyushu Archives describes both the Japanese Preservation movement and its laws and the preservation of Kyushu's cities, towns and villages.

[Netherlands] Culture Heritage Protection in the Netherlands. <http://odin.let.rug.nl/CB/CBe_nl.htmll>

Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA). PATA is the "Voice of Pacific Area Tourism" and includes virtually all nations between Pakistan and the United States. PATA's activities include important initiatives on the Environment, Heritage and "Values-Based Tourism." <http://www.pata.org>

[SE Asia] SEAMEO Regional Centre for Archaeology and Fine Arts (SPAFA). Based in Bangkok, SPAFA is a project of the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO). The site includes an extensive schedule of upcoming workshops and training activities. <http://www.seamo.org/spafa>

[United Kingdom] Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME). <http://www.rchme.gov.uk/>

[United States] Links to the Past, the cultural resource programs of the National Park Service. It now includes a link to the databases of the National Register Information System (NRIS). <http://www.cr.nps.gov/>

For other sites, readers should consult the Internet Resource Guide noted above. Of the many general-purpose Internet search engines (e.g., Lycos, Infoseek, Yahoo, Excite, etc.), one of the best is Alta Vista <http://altavista.com/>. For more basic assistance, write to the Committee on Communications, Information and Technology at ccit@world.std.com or to US/ICOMOS for the Committee's publication, Internet Access..., available in mid-May.

Peter H. Stott, Chair
US/ICOMOS Committee on Communications, Information and Technology

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¹ Internet sites are identified by their unique Internet address or "URL" (Universal Resource Locator), usually beginning http://... No URL should have internal spaces or concluding period (.).

WORLD HERITAGE INFORMATION NETWORK The World Heritage Information Network (WHIN) is a partnership of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, its advisory bodies (ICOMOS, IUCN and ICCROM), States Parties to the Convention and World Heritage Properties all over the world. Using the World Wide Web, electronic mail and other communications tools, the WHIN will allow participants and the public greater access to information about the World Heritage Convention and the properties it protects. At a technical meeting held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris last September, participants agreed on a set of principles and recommendations that should guide the network's development. The working document adopted by the meeting was approved by the World Heritage Committee at its annual meeting in Berlin in December 1995. As adopted by the Technical meeting, and subsequently refined by electronic discussion list by the meeting participants, the WHIN will be developed in stages. The first, prototype stage, to be completed by the time of the World Heritage Committee's Bureau meeting this June, will be the development of a working prototype World Wide Web array with a working search engine capable of querying all of the partner world wide web pages. The World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) isproviding the technical expertise for the search engine's development. Further news of the WHIN will be reported in the next newsletter. P.S.

CHAIRMAN'S REPORT
US/ICOMOS ANNUAL MEETING, SAN ANTONIO, MARCH 31, 1996

FUNDING
Many of us were taught as children that it wasn't nice to talk about money. As adults and as preservationists, we are finding that many of us talk about little else. Perhaps is all a part of the decline in civility. It is certainly a part of the decline in the availability of public funding. The perspective from inside the Beltway on historic preservation funding as it relates to US/ICOMOS seems little changed from that which we shared with US/ICOMOS members a year ago. The National Park Service continues to be supportive of our efforts and is committed to increase its level of funding for US/ICOMOS for FY 1997. The problems of course are what will happen to Park Service funding from the Congress and further whether FY 1997 will begin on October 1 or whether we shall see a repeat of the delays and close-downs which occurred in connection with FY 1996 funding (unresolved as of late March at the time of this writing). The State Department funding is still unresolved. Those funds are important to us and make it possible for US/ICOMOS to realize some of its very basic objectives as an international cultural organization.
The Annual Meeting provides an opportunity for looking at what we are doing, who we are, where we have been and where we are going.
First of all, at the September 1995 Board meeting, I set forth a series of specific administrative goals for the organization for the next three years. I think that they are worth restating here:

1. A financially stable US/ICOMOS through effective management and a combination of financial development, membership development and other means.

    

2. A qualified staff with professional and administrative support appropriate to the programs and activities that need to be undertaken.

    

3. Programs that truly serve the needs of the national and international preservation communities.

    

4. Partnerships with organizations and committees inside and outside of US/ICOMOS in order to heighten program effectiveness.

Several months ago I asked that the US/ICOMOS Mission Statement be included in or on every document that comes out of the organization and its committees. Members as well as the public need to be reminded of what we do and who we are.

WHAT DO WE DO? The Mission Statement tell us that:

US/ICOMOS fosters heritage conservation and historic preservation at the national and international levels through education and training, international exchange of people and information, technical assistance and documentation, advocacy and other activities consistent with the goals of ICOMOS and through collaboration with other organizations.

 

US/ICOMOS membership includes professionals, practitioners, supporters and organizations committed to the protection, preservation and conservation of the world's cultural heritage. US/ICOMOS is the U.S. National Committee of ICOMOS, the international nongovernmental organization dedicated to the preservation and conservation of the world's cultural heritage.

 

GOAL 1: TO STIMULATE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL AWARENESS ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CULTURAL HERITAGE AND TO ADVOCATE ITS PRESERVATION AS PART OF A BROAD CONCERN FOR THE WORLD'S ENVIRONMENT.
According to the Strategies we have adopted for accomplishing that Goal, what should we be doing?

• We should be serving our own membership better.
• We should be doing a better job of communicating with all audiences through a variety of media and means.
• We should look to the level of public relations that we can or could provide.
  
• We certainly should be taking steps to stimulate professional exchanges.
  
• And we need to work harder to get out the message concerning the World Heritage Convention.

GOAL 2: TO PROMOTE INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS FOR THE PRESERVATION OF THE WORLD'S CULTURAL HERITAGE.
In recognition of the Strategies which US/ICOMOS has adopted for accomplishing that goal,

• Are we doing enough to inform and serve the US/ICOMOS membership and other constituencies concerning such standards?
• Should we be doing more to communicate information concerning those standards to professionals and to the public?
• Should we be using our national specialized committee programs to promote understanding and the adoption of those international standards?
• Should US/ICOMOS seek to ensure the incorporation of those standards in World Heritage monitoring efforts?
• What priority should US/ICOMOS assign its efforts to ensure the adoption of and adherence to international standards?

GOAL 3: TO INCREASE THE LEVEL OF PRESERVATION SKILLS NATIONALLY AND INTERNATIONALLY THROUGH PROFESSIONAL NETWORKS AND THE EXCHANGE OF INFORMATION, TRAINING AND EXPERTISE.

In terms of the Strategies that were proposed for US/ICOMOS,

• Have we done enough to recruit a highly professional and skilled membership?
• What priority should US/ICOMOS assign to efforts to use every means possible to spread the word concerning the need to use skilled professionals and professional techniques in the protection of the cultural heritage?

GOAL 4: TO ADVOCATE INCREASED GOVERNMENT SUPPORT FOR INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL HERITAGE LAWS, AGREEMENTS AND POLICIES AND TO ADVISE ON THEIR DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION.

In terms of the strategies that were proposed at the conclusion of the Strategic Plan,

• What priority has US/ICOMOS assigned to the realization of public policy issues relating to the protection of the cultural heritage? Is that the appropriate priority?
• Has US/ICOMOS assigned appropriate priority to the need for stimulating public awareness about policy issues relating to preservation and conservation?
• Should US/ICOMOS go farther than it has in terms of developing its role as an advocate on the development of policies, legislation, domestic and international laws and agreements and relating to international cultural heritage issues?

GOAL 5: TO DEVELOP AND EXPAND RESOURCES COMMITTED TO THE PRESERVATION AND CONSERVATION OF THE CULTURAL HERITAGE.

• What priority should US/ICOMOS assign to its efforts to recruit individual and institutional members with financial means and access to those with influence in both the public and private sectors?
• What priority should US/ICOMOS give to encouraging membership renewal and upgrading?
• Has US/ICOMOS assigned appropriate priority to possible special programs designed to attract potential donors?
• Has US/ICOMOS been sufficiently energetic in its efforts to identify itself as an important player in preservation and the World Heritage Convention in particular?
• Has US/ICOMOS established (in the words of the Goals Statement) "...a clearly identifiable fund-raising program" with financial and program targets, with a database of potentially supportive decision makers, individuals, corporations and foundations?

GOAL 6: TO BUILD A PROACTIVE, FINANCIALLY SECURE ORGANIZATION THAT IS RESPONSIVE TO A BROAD CONSTITUENCY.

• Should US/ICOMOS do more to establish a profile of its ideal membership?
• Should US/ICOMOS do more to involve its membership in its operations? How? Where?

In conclusion, I like to think of myself as a realist and I like to think of US/ICOMOS as an organization that has a sense of reality as to what it is doing, what it should be doing, and what it might do better. I hardly need remind you that these are not your normal times and that reality means different things to different constituencies.
Where were we when we established US/ICOMOS Goals just 15 months ago?
US/ICOMOS began its strategic planning before the birth of the Contract with America (although it was more than a gleam in the eye of its supporters) when we were busily identifying what US/ICOMOS should be doing and, equally importantly, what we should not be doing. In government, continuing resolutions were a concern, not a way of life; government shutdowns were conceivable but hardly probable.
The facts of life in Washington, of preservation life and of life at US/ICOMOS have changed a great deal in a very short time. However, US/ICOMOS' Mission remains very clear and very appropriate; its Goals seem appropriate; its Strategies seem realistic.
As of now, I would suggest that what US/ICOMOS must do in the coming year and in the years ahead is:

1. Establish priorities for the organization as a whole and for tasks that we will seek to accomplish.
2. Reconsider the means available to us and seek to expand and develop the existing means, and to go beyond them to identify new means for accomplishing our objectives.
3. To plan: not just to plan what we are going to do but to plan what we are not going to do and to resist the temptation to do too much, just as we resist any suggestion of doing too little.
4. To stick with the Mission: to remind ourselves and the US/ICOMOS membership of it constantly. If it is not appropriate, to think long and hard about changing it þ how, why and where.

Once more, I would like to remind you of the Mission of US/ICOMOS as adopted in 1995:

US/ICOMOS fosters heritage conservation and historic preservation at the national and international levels through education and training, international exchange of people and information, technical assistance and documentation, advocacy and other activities consistent with the goals of ICOMOS and through collaboration with other organizations.

 

Ann Webster Smith, US/ICOMOS Chairman

CALENDAR

• June 5-8, 1996. ICOMOS Executive Committee Meeting, at ICOMOS headquarters, Paris, France.

   

• October 29-31, 1996. International Conference on Tourism and Heritage Management, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. An international conference sponsored by the several government Ministries of Indonesia and UNESCO to promote an interdisciplinary discussion on tourism and heritage management from among representatives of anthropology, archaeology, sociology and tourism planning and management. The discussions will focus on key issues of concern to tourism experts, heritage site managers, archaeologists, decision makers and private tourism industry representatives. Themes & Issues of the conference are: Heritage Site Management (access & control, carrying capacity, hawkers & souvenirs, human resource training, site preservation, conservation principles and ethics, marketing issues); Problems of Interpretation (guidelines, multi-media & technology issues, signage, publications, site presentation, authenticity and quality issues); Heritage & Living Communities (local community involvement, conflicts & competing interests, developing vs. developed countries, colonial heritage). International Secretariat: 2 Sandalwood, Guildford, Surrey GU2 5NZ, UK, tel/fax: 44-1483-564498, e-mail: msp1wn@surrey.ac.uk

   

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