The International Council of Museums (ICOM) is a non-governmental organisation of museums and museum professionals based in Paris which is, to put it briefly, concerned with museums and their contribution to society.

ICOM has formal relations with UNESCO and it carries out part of UNESCO's programme for museums. It also has a consultative status with the United Nations' Economic and Social Council. ICOM’s activities revolve around 116 National Committees in countries across the world and 30 International Committees.

The latest International Committee to be set up is CAMOC: the International Committee for the Collections and Activities of Museums of Cities. It owes its origins to the initiative of Moscow City Museum and museum professionals in other countries who felt the need for a Committee which would focus on museums of the city.

The Committee also reflects the growing focus world wide on cites: their economic importance, their spectacular growth and the problems and possibilities they present. The matters for debate on the city are almost endless: pollution, regeneration, the private car, public transport, the flight to the suburbs, the destruction of heritage, insensitive development. The Committee aims to be at the centre of this debate, not least through supporting and encouraging museums of cities in their work of collecting, preserving and presenting original material on the city’s past, present and future, work which can reinforce the city’s identity and contribute to its development.

The Committee was approved by ICOM’s Executive Council during the ICOM General Conference held in Seoul in October 2004. Then, at a meeting in Moscow in April 2005 organised by Irina Smagina and her colleagues at Moscow City Museum delegates from 13 countries drafted the Committee’s aims and objectives and elected an Executive Board.

CAMOC’s first conference in Boston 30 April – 2 May 2006

We began our conference on the Sunday with an American Association of Museums/ICOM lunch address by Alissandra Cummins, President of ICOM. The real work started on the Monday morning on the campus of Northeastern University in downtown Boston. The conference was organised, superlatively, by Bob Macdonald with the assistance of the AAM, and Anne Emerson, a Bostonian who is Director of the Boston Museum project which aims to create a museum about the city.

We had 77 delegates from 15 countries including Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Canada, the USA, Brazil, Mongolia, Korea and Guatemala. Almost half of us were from the Russian Federation, with delegates from Moscow to Siberia. In total there were 21 papers with another seven presented in an Open Forum which concluded the conference. Alissandra Cummins attended part of our sessions, as did Eloisa Zell from ICOM.

[Ana Rodrigues describing the Marquesa de Santos city museum project in Soa Paulo]
[Ana Rodrigues describing the Marquesa de Santos city museum project in Sao Paulo]

Keynote speeches can be just a string of platitudes. Ours was different. Robert Archibald, President of the Missouri Historical Society in St Louis spoke about memory and continuity, the loss of the city’s uniqueness and sense of community. Museums, he said, are means, not ends, and “urban museums are special because they are precisely positioned in those places where we make the future”. It set the tone for what followed. There were so many presentations that we split into concurrent sessions. Jack Loman from the UK spoke about the city museum in a global world, Gail Lord from Canada spoke about city museums in the new city states of the 21st century, Sergey Grishin gave us an account of his museum in Western Siberia,


[Victor Kolosov, Chita Regional Museum, Russia]

Tatiana Gorbacheva from Moscow spoke about representing human values in city museums, Gennady Mukhanov and Gulchachak Nazipova described the challenge of representing the variety of cultures in the Tatarstan Republic. Mike Houlihan described his remarkable experiences of running a museum service in Belfast during the troubles, Ana Rodrigues, a Brazilian architect, gave us an account of setting up a city museum in Sao Paulo, Maggie Russell-Ciardi described place-based education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, Helena Friman spoke about a museum without walls in Stockholm. That’s just a small selection.

At the CAMOC dinner Byron Rushing of the Massachusetts House of Representatives spoke with considerable eloquence about time and place in Boston. It was both impressive and moving.

Byron Rushing speaking onj Time and Place at our dinner
[Byron Rushing speaking about time and place at our dinner]

We ended with a general discussion on cities and museums about them. Feedback so far suggests the conference was really successful, which is pleasing considering that it was our first. As you know, our next conference takes place in Vienna in 2007, during the course of the ICOM General Assembly. Our conference presentations provided many questions to be answered in Vienna and we started preparing for it at our business meeting on the Tuesday evening, chaired by Galina Vedernikova. We will keep you posted via the web site and by newsletters, as we need your active participation at all stages. We are hoping to have a planning meeting in Copenhagen during September, and before then we need your views, ideas, suggestions and proposals.

[Byron Rushing with our Chairperson Galina Vedernikova, Bob Macdonald our Vice Chair and conference organiser, and Irina Smagina]
[Byron Rushing with our Chairperson Galina Vedernikova, Bob Macdonald our Vice Chair and conference organiser, and Irina Smagina]

The proceedings of the conference are to be published in the autumn edition of Museum International.