For several years, the ASA's Material Culture Caucus has maintained an online presence through ARTIFACT, its e-mail discussion list. Hosted by the American Studies Department at University of Maryland, College Park, ARTIFACT@umdd.umd.edu is an electronic forum for the discussion of material culture scholarship within the American context. Messages posted to ARTIFACT are distributed to an international community of scholars in fields including history, art history, folklore and folklife, anthropology, archaeology, museum studies, preservation, cultural studies, literary studies, visual culture and public-sector museum, heritage, or other non-profit cultural work. It would be fair to say that so far the strength of ARTIFACT's diversity has also been the list's greatest weakness. We have tended to lack a strong center or clear sense of audience, and in-depth discussion too often gives way to the straightforward information-sharing which many academic lists suffer from. This is not so much bad, as disappointing.

As we seek to define our place within the ASA, the Caucus has made some changes to ARTIFACT, and more are in store. Last year I took on the role of moderator for the e-list, and have begun the task of setting up a comprehensive Web site. Random spam is no longer a problem, nor are well-intentioned but off-topic postings. Though the Caucus has sponsored the list, ARTIFACT has not been used consistently to communicate with our members, and we have hundreds of subscribers who are neither members of nor particularly familiar with the Caucus or the ASA. This situation will change. The list will become our main forum for discussing the business and projects of the Caucus. It will also continue to serve as a clearinghouse for focused discussion and information-sharing on material culture topics. Our hope -- our plan if we dare to presume -- is that the ARTIFACT e-list will become a meaningful site of ongoing, online communication for material culture scholars. And that its presence, in turn, will enrich the effectiveness of the Caucus.

This decision to focus our audience is significant, and perhaps more complex than it seems. For a small field, we are intensely diverse. Material culture is everywhere; it is literally all around us, and practiced in a broad range of institutional settings. For these same reasons, though, material culture scholars tend to feel homeless at heart, and with the exception of small oases like the Winterthur Museum and some hospitable academic departments, they are left to wander the halls in search of a place to call their own. I turn my attention to the ARTIFACT Web site, then, with the goal that it will further help to nurture and define the still-emergent form of the ARTIFACT community -- homepage as home, if you will. Yet, if you search Yahoo or Altavista today, you will quickly discover that there is no existing Web site for material culture study as a whole. It is therefore equally tempting to use our Web site to fill that gap, to stake our claim and create for the world a large a virtual center for material culture study where none has been before. As a student of built form who finds myself teaching courses on cyberspace, I should not have been surprised to find that the seemingly straightforward task of creating a Web site can so quickly become an exercise in mapping the whole of a scholarly terrain.

For now, then, our goals are pragmatic ones. ARTIFACT will be both an e-list and a Web site, focused on the needs of Caucus members while promoting and facilitating a sense of community. We will be linked with, but separate from, the ASA-Crossroads project hosted at Georgetown. In terms of content, we perceive the greatest needs to be the sharing of information and resources for teaching and research, and we will privilege quality of content over quantity of topics. Initial areas of development will therefore include: pedagogical examples and sample syllabi, clear discussions of method and theory, annotated bibliographies, directories of online and offline resources divided by categories, the creation of an image bank, and Caucus news. Plus, we want our members to feel at home with the site -- to like it, use it, contribute to it, and identify with it. It is our hope, of course, that those outside of the field will come to our site and find it useful, and too, that members of the ASA beyond the Caucus will engage with our concerns and ideas in constructive and mutually enriching ways.