Tom Moritz is Director of the Library at the American Museum of Natural History and currently is Principal Investigator on a $2 million, five year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to produce a digital library integrating all forms of natural history information -- including collections (specimen and artifact) data.  He is a long time participant in initiatives to develop inclusive strategies for capture and managment of museum information. (SEE
Spectra: (International Journal of the Museum Computer Network), Summer 1989, v.16(2):18,20. )  And at the Annual ESRI Users' Conference [GIS] in 1997 co-authored a presentation on the use of ARCVIEW to plot multidisciplinary, multi-institutional museum specimen data.  He is also Chair of the Information
Management Task Force for the World Commission on Protected Areas of IUCN (The World Conservation Union) and is vice-Chair of BCIS (the Biodiversity Conservation Information System) an international consortium of international organizations focusing on the managment and delivery of biodiversity information (SEE <www.biodiversity.org>).

Hopes for this meeting are that the needs for inclusion of retrospective ("obsolete") place names as needed by the museum, archaeological, art history and historical community can be entertained in gazetteer development and that a mechanism or mechanisms for distributed contributions to a common utility that meets this need can be developed.  Development of effective access to inclusive global map servers (current and retrospective maps) is another intertest.