In response to our letter of January 5, Eleanor Fink replied that while the GII is excited about the AMICO project, "our vocabulary vocabulary system won't be in place until next year, so that at this time it is premature to give you a precise time frame in which new terms would be added and again made available to AMICO as part of a merged resource."

She went on to state: "I am confident that for many museums, checking to see whether terms and names are already in our vocabularies could be a routine part of their normal data work..." and promised to process terms submitted in this way to the best of their ability.

We need to know if your institution already does, or would be willing to check terminology against the GII vocabularies (AAT, ULAN and TGN) and to submit terms you do not find in them to the GII. If you have these processes in place, could you guarantee that terms used in specific fields in the AMICO Data Dictionary had been compared against the GII vocabularies and that terms not found there had been submitted? Please respond to the Hypernews Discussion, before * January 23rd * so that we can give her an answer.

For now, we'll reply that:

* until the GII can accommodate processing a batch file against their terminology, AMICO itself won't be able to send individual terms. We do not have staff to check the terms individually against the vocabularies.

* we look forward to working with the GII towards developing batch submission techniques. The Techical Operations Committee will gladly discuss matters of file exchange formats and functional requirements for matching terms with GII staff in preparation for such a capability.

* we are investigating the willingness of individual AMICO members to incorporate checking the GII vocabularies as part of their data preparation processes.