| Founded | 1946 |
|---|---|
| Location | Paris, France |
| Services | Conservation, continuation and communication to society of the world's natural and cultural heritage. |
| Website | icom.museum |
The International Council of Museums (ICOM) is an international organization of museums and museum professionals that is committed to the conservation, continuation and communication to society of the world's natural and cultural heritage, present and future, tangible and intangible.
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Created in 1946, ICOM is a non-governmental organization maintaining formal relations with and having a consultative status with UNESCO. As a non-profit organization, ICOM is financed primarily by membership fees and supported by various governmental and other bodies. Museums and individuals who are members are part of a network with newsletters, and free or reduced entry to each others' museums. It carries out part of UNESCO's programme for museums. Based in Paris, France, the ICOM Headquarters houses both the ICOM Secretariat and the UNESCO-ICOM Museum Information Centre. ICOM provides the policy basis for the operation of the .museum ("dot-museum") top-level domain.[1]
ICOM comprises international committees that focus on certain types of museums (e.g. art museums, military museums, transport museums, ethnographic museums) and national committees that represent all the member nations. The international committees meet annually, as does the executive committee, while there is a full general conference of ICOM every three years. The first meeting was held in Paris in 1948. In recent years, General Conferences have been held in Seoul in 2004 (the first meeting in Asia), in Vienna in 2007, and in Shanghai in 2010.
ICOM-CC is the largest of the International Committees of ICOM with over 1,500 members worldwide from every branch of the museum and conservation profession.[2] ICOM-CC aims to promote the conservation, investigation and analysis of culturally and historically significant works and to further the goals of the conservation profession.
ICOM-CC is built up of specialist Working Groups (See Specialties within the field under Art conservation), which actively communicate with their members through newsletters, meetings and at the Triennial Congress.
The Triennial Congress brings the membership of ICOM-CC together to report and to review current research. Over a thousand papers have been published in the peer reviewed Congress Pre-prints in the past twenty years.
CIDOC focuses on the documentation requirements and standards of museums, archives, and similar organizations. It has over 750 members in 60 countries.
CIDOC has defined a Conceptual Reference Model (also known as the CIDOC CRM), which provides a formal and extensible ontology for cultural heritage information. It is currently an ISO International Standard (ISO 21127).
The International Association of Museums of Arms and Military History (IAMAM) is an affiliated body of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The purpose of IAMAM is to establish and maintain contact between museums and similar institutions, and to foster the study of objects within those fields.[3]