Reedsburg area historic photo collection now online

I am proud to announce that the Reedsburg Public Library's collection of Reedsburg-area historic photos is now online for public viewing.  The collection of over 5000 historic images from Reedsburg, La Valle, Loganville, Rock Springs, Plain and Ironton is now viewable HERE.

The image collection has been housed on CDs at the library for the past 10 years; now is the first time the public will be able to browse the images online.  It is a remarkable collection, with some of my favorite images being area soldiers, 1970's Halloween costumes, big bucks, kids, wild fires, swimming holes, early settlers, Indian natives, cigarettes, fun people, the Badger Theater at its best, and local cartoons.

For the past several months, I have been talking with Reedsburg Public Library director, Sue Steiner, and staff about the challenges and benefits of putting the historic photo collection online.  Our goal in putting the images online is not only to provide a valuable resource for area people, but also to provide more exposure to the collection and encourage sales of full-resolution versions of the images.  The library currently sells full-resolution images for $5 through the request form on their website.

With support from the Reedsburg Public Library and a grant from the Sauk County UW Extension, Arts & Culture Committee, I was able to go forward with the project by transferring the library's 19 GB photo collection from 37 CDs onto my computer, use Picasa (free) software to organize, edit, annotate, tag, (even made a map) and then upload the collection to Flickr.

Here are a few photos from the collection:

Please take a moment to browse the collection on your own, and if you find an image you really like, consider buying it at full resolution!  Also, if you have information about any of the photos, feel free to leave comments.

abandoning iTunes, finding new music sources

One day at work, our IT department told us all that we could no longer use any third party applications on our computers without explicit approval. This included iTunes. When I heard this, I panicked, I got bitter, I thought about leading a revolt, but in the end I hesitantly uninstalled my sole means of computer-work-environment survival, iTunes. As difficult as it was, uninstalling iTunes opened up a whole new world of musical discovery for me.

I used Pandora when I was lazy, Last.fm too.  I fell in love with The Hype Machine, which lets people listen to the music people are blogging about. My other favorite listening method was to subscribe to a podcast´s RSS feed in Google Reader and then stream the mp3s from there. When there was a specific full-length song I was looking for, somehow YouTube was (strangely) almost always the easiest way to find it.  All these ways of streaming music allowed me to continue listening to music without iTunes. And what I first looked at as a hindrance became a new channel to musical discovery.

Today I wanted to share a source I just came across, which is NPR´s podcast of free live concerts.  In my opinion, this is a gold mine.  Have a look at the list of concerts you can stream or download and you are sure to find an artist you like.  For me, I´m going to be listening to the hour-and-a-half Neko Case concert, and watching the Rodrigo y Gabriela video, and Dan Deacon, and Radiohead, and The Avett Brothers, or Doc Watson.



UPDATE ... January 11, 2010.  Pandora will not work from a Peru IP address, and the last.fm website appears to no longer be free, so I´m back to loving The Hype Machine for my music streaming.