No, I don't own an i-Pod yet, but Carol Bohl does! She is the Director of the Cass County Historical Society in Harrisonville. They share a building with the County Library and it's state-of-the-art technology.

That's where the Border War Network met last Wednesday for an all-day training session on digital recording. The nineteen institutions of the network are going to take some oral history interviews about the Civil War era (admittedly hand-me-down information) and create podcasts. The grant to the Border War Network included some money for equipment and for people do to the finish work on the digital recordings.

The library's video conference room was packed! We learned how to hook up the two microphones to a blue box, and how to connect the blue box to the laptop computer, and how to use the recording software on the computer. Jaws dropped when we heard the outstanding sound quality of a demo recording. A woman read the minutes of the last meeting, and the playback sounded like what you'd expect from National Public Radio. You could feel the surge of morale.

We have another grant out to the Center for Archaeological Research at Missouri State University. There has been a lot of archaeology in an area south of Springfield that's known as "Delaware Town," where Wilson's Creek meets the James River. Information about the history and archaeology of that area is going to be available on an interactive web site.

These two projects follow a pilot project begun last year by the Waverly Arts Council, also with a grant from us. With more and more institutions learning about downloadable content, we thought it would be interesting to create a "social network" for people entering this field. My colleague, Beth Felice, set up a meeting place at http://missourihumanities.ning.com

If you belong in this group, please click the link above and come on in.

If you want to see a good example of a web site that gathers Civil War information from communities on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line, I hope you'll visit The Valley of the Shadow at http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/

And if you'd like to listen to a range of podcasts from a Midwest history organization, check out two flavors of podcast at the Kansas Historical Society: http://www.kshs.org/