An open letter to Cary Karp (ck@nrm.se)
President, Museum Domain Management Association
Director, Department of Information Technology, Swedish Museum of
National History

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In a time of accelerated change, small decisions can have far-reaching
effects–and that fact compels me to voice a perspective, outside of my
official capacity as Assistant Curator of Media Arts and not necessarily
representing the position of my museum, that I have not seen aired in
the debate thus far.

As you know, even as innocent a choice as how to name Web sites can
gently steer us toward a more open or closed society. Take the recent
decision by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, to add shiny new domain suffixes to dusty old ".org" and its
peers–the first such additions to the Internet's name space since the
1980s. As a driving force behind the Museum Domain Management
Association's proposal of a ".museum" suffix, you must have been very
pleased at ICANN's approval of .museum along with ".info," ".coop," and
four other generic Top Level Domains. By proposing to reserve a sector
of the Internet name space specifically to museums, you and your
colleagues have shown that you understand the profound identity crisis
facing museums at the dawn of the digital age. In a world where artists,
musicians, and other producers can tap into the Internet to reach a far-
flung audience instantaneously, it's understandable that brick-and-
mortar institutions would be anxious to redefine themselves beyond their
previous roles as centralized repositories of culture. From my dual
perspective as an online artist and a new media curator, I am convinced
that this redefinition is essential to the long-term livelihood of both
museums and the cultural heritage they are charged with preserving.

Of course, you can't redefine a plot of real estate–geographic or
virtual–without redefining your neighbors' estates. Yet one question
that I have not seen discussed in the public debate is how the addition
of a .museum suffix might affect online creativity that takes place
*outside* a museum setting. I personally believe that this issue should
be critical to anyone who cares about museums or the future of online
culture. Although I am writing from a visual arts perspective, I believe
my concerns may translate into other museological disciplines as well.

To understand the ways .museum might obscure online creativity, it's
important to understand why .org and company stimulated it. Before
.museum, all someone needed to try out a new curatorial paradigm was
twenty-five dollars for a domain name, a healthy dose of sweat equity,
and some interesting content. Armed with .orgs and .nets, creative
people found new ways to share culture outside of the constraints of the
offline status quo. For artists, this meant exhibiting on the Web's
boundless frontier instead of trying to get a foot in the door of a SoHo
gallery. For critics, it meant posting to unmoderated listserves instead
of pining to be published in _Art in America_. For viewers with a modem,
it meant looking at art anytime, anywhere–without paying MoMA's
admission price. Art thrived in this environment; in 1995 8% of all Web
sites were made by artists. And because there was no special naming
convention to segregate artworks from the rest of culture, many people
stumbled upon art sites who might never have stepped foot inside a
museum.

Enter .museum. In contrast to generic suffixes like .org and .edu,
.museum represents a much more restricted criterion. For the first time,
permission to register a top-level domain will be determined by
membership in a private association, the International Council of
Museums (ICOM), the vast majority of whose members–we must be honest
here–have hitherto treated the Internet primarily as an electronic
billboard to advertise their offline programs. (By comparison, academic
institutions have a reasonable claim to .edu given that they helped get
the fledgling Internet on its feet.) Leaving aside the question of
whether the unprecedented specificity of .museum opens the door to
comparable domain suffixes like .travelservice and .florist, I am
curious about the effect you and your colleagues expect .museum to have
on online creativity.

In its October 3rd press release, ICOM stated that a major goal of the
new domain suffix was to bridge the digital divide:

"Many museums already have a presence on the Internet, while others, due
partly to financial and technical limitations, are moving into
cyberspace more slowly. Developing a clear cyberspace identity for the
museum community as a whole is expected to help bridge this digital
divide. Proponents believe that .museum, along with value-added services
that can be provided to its members, will give museums that have not yet
participated actively in the development of the Internet the support to
do so."

I am sure that this argument appealed to ICANN, which is charged with
the difficult task of expanding the Web's name space without undermining
its open architecture. (ICANN seems to take this mandate seriously
enough to have rejected suffixes like .union and .health as
"insufficiently democratic.") Your own arguments echo this egalitarian
appeal to broaden the representation of cultural institutions online;
for example, you argued that a .arts suffix would exclude museums
devoted to science or history. So let's assume for the sake of argument
that .museum will encourage more smaller museums to take the leap to
cyberspace. What of the countless offline alternative spaces and
exhibition halls that do not maintain a permanent collection of objects?
Many have played critical roles in nurturing contemporary artists and
movements; you can't think of Cindy Sherman without thinking of Artists
Space or Robert Mapplethorpe without Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts
Center. Yet once we museums have claimed the best of the virtual real
estate, what chance do these numerous alternative spaces have of
competing for hits from the lay public? In an attention economy like the
Web, small advantages can make big differences. Jane Doe looks up the
artist Bill Viola in a search engine and gets links for five .orgs and
one .museum. Which link is she going to follow?

The gap between .museum haves and have-nots looks even wider once I take
into account the countless virtual studios and exhibition spaces where
artists create and exhibit their work. There are a host of fascinating
and valuable museumlike resources online that would not qualify for the
International Council of Museum's definition of a museum–which at its
root requires institutions to collect *material*
(www.icom.org/release.museum.html). This definition would exclude all
online cultural archives, whether they collect Internet art projects,
digital videos of political conventions, or audio testimonies to the
Holocaust. I believe that many in the online community will view the
International Council of Museums' support for .museum as a smokescreen
to cover the embarrassing fact that artist collectives and online art
sites, from ada'web to Nicholas Pioche's WebLouvre, established
important online presences well before their brick-and-mortar
equivalents. If the shoe were on the other foot, wouldn't brick-and-
mortar institutions balk at a rule that forbade them from using the word
"Museum" in their signage if they didn't have a Web site?

If .museum doesn't exactly bridge the digital divide, then perhaps its
true benefit lies merely in convenience. I've seen arguments that
.museum would make it easier for people specifically in search of brick-
and-mortar museums. Doubtless this may be true to an extent, but studies
indicate that very few people actually look for things online by
guessing the url; surely these people could use search engines or the
various category-oriented directories online (like the Musee d'Art
Contemporain de Montreal's excellent Mediatheque). Another convenience
I've seen ascribed to .museum would be the reduction in time-consuming
cybersquatting litigation. Yet registering "museumofmodernart.museum"
will do nothing by itself to stop others from registering such homonyms
as "museum_of_modern_art.org" or "museum-of-modern-art.org." (Memo to
MoMA: you missed these.) Do these marginal benefits to brick-and-mortar
museums justify decreased attention for Internet-based nonprofits? In
answering this question, it's important to keep in mind that our mandate
as museums is not to compete with the cultural production going on
outside our walls, but to reflect and preserve it. How unfortunate it
would be for established museums to unwittingly erase the heritage they
are meant to preserve by gerrymandering the name space!

Software engineers like Gene Kan predict that the rise of file-sharing
protocols, instant messenging, and other non-Web communication will
splinter the Internet's name space into enough competing protocols to
thwart the control of organizations like ICANN. Until that happens, how
do you propose to counteract the shadow that .museum might cast on the
broader cultural landscape? Do you believe the International Council of
Museums should drop the requirement that registrants of ".museum" fit
its definition of a museum? Or might it be better merely to require
registrants to supply new definitions to be uploaded to www.icom.org to
stimulate debate on the subject?

It would be especially misguided for institutions whose mandate is to
preserve history to condone a protocol that would encourage its erasure.
I am very interested in hearing your thoughts on this subject in the
hopes that a dialogue will help elucidate the proper function of a
museum in the 21st century.