Del.icio.us

I've been using My Del.icio.us for several months now and just love it. As someone whose preferred method of filing things is 'not', del.icio.us provides a nearly foolproof way to sort links to interesting websites and then actually find them again. As a museum director I am continually on the lookout for interesting new exhibits to bring to the area. My original search began with three words on a google search engine: free traveling exhibits. The results are now sorted in appropriate categories so that I can find them again easily and whenever I come across a new site it's easy to add. It sure beats having stacks of paper on my desk.

Library 2.0

In January I attended the Explore Minnesota Tourism Conference in Mankato and had the good fortune to hear Bill Geist talk about Web 2.0. The History Museum of East Otter Tail County has always been in the forefront of digitization projects but Web 2.0 is bringing a whole new look and feel to on-line access to information. For one thing, according to the statistics, 80% now have broad band access. This was unthinkable even a few years back. Our determination to make historical records available as full-text was based, in part, upon our desire to be accessible to all users. Now, video is considered essential to marketing anything. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a video worth?



One of the interesting concepts discussed by Bill Geist is that we are moving into a world where authority is no longer trusted. In a way, we are becoming more like the 60's when the mantra was - don't trust 'the man'. For librarians, archivists and historians, the rise of peer review sites this can raise some interesting discussion points.