[SPG_Active_Members] Your letter of 29th July

[Tim Shoppa]

"Richard P. Gabriel" <rpg at dreamsongs.com> wrote:
> In her emails to me, Ms Jabloner hinted that the CHM would be able to 
> find capable local volunteers to handle the material, and she 
> apparently made no effort to investigate the merit of having two 
> world-class volunteers at her disposal.

I think sometimes the CHM and other museum institutions are
not paying enough attention to the ability of folks around the
world to work on what they out of habit consider a local project.

I came up through the world of high-energy and nuclear physics in
the 80's and 90's and we had world-wide (way before WWW) collaborations;
I published many papers with collaborators who I had not yet met in person, yet
we had daily phone conversations and faxes and E-mails. Folks in
the business world had been doing the same for decades before (paying
phone bills or Telex charges that we in academia regarded as outrageous :-) ).

I think that being exposed to computer geekdom too much, we sometimes
mistake the enabling technologies as being more important than the work
being done, maybe sometimes to the extent that we don't do any actual
work. Perhaps this can be confusing if you think a good part of your
job is chronicling the rise of the enabling technologies.

Tim.