CAMIO

1. Paul Revere - Maybe my history is a little fuzzy or I never learned this about Paul Revere: he's a wonderful silversmith! From tea urns, to salvers, to sugar baskets - what beautiful creations! There was also a hand-painted engraving that looks like it was probably used in a propaganda campaign against the British. Did I miss this part in history class?

2. Sioux - The first result at the top of page 1 was a scalp shirt. There's one of these in the art gallery at Red Cloud School. I know they aren't made of scalps and the hair on them is donated by friends and family...but I still find it kinda creepy. There are lots of artifacts in the results - a lot items with bead and leather work. Most of the items come from the Detroit Institute of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Interesting that there are no cultural or art institutions from South Dakota listed. I think maybe the Cultural Heritage Center needs to get on this.

3. I don't know if I have a favorite artist so I chose to search for works by Edgar Degas. I have always loved his ballerinas. My hope was to see what all was at the Art Institute of Chicago but after sorting by museum I couldn't find anything. To double check I did searches for Monet and Mary Cassatt, and I know the AIC has items from both artists, but still found nothing. So to triple check I went to the list of museums and collections that have contributed to CAMIO and guess what...no AIC! I'm going there later this month and I guess I'll just have to muddle through. Actually I plan to spend a good deal of my time walking through my favorite part of their collection - the Arms and Armor collection!

4. It's great to be able to have access to good photographs of so many works of art and artifacts. I especially like the idea of being able to access what I think of as "niche" collections - like the Lakota beading and leather work. And what a way to enhance a paper or project on a historical figure like Paul Revere than to show something else he did, besides riding a horse in the dark! I think it's almost more interesting to use the "Browse" feature, personally. I found some very cool things that way.

5. If I hadn't played around with the Browse options, I wouldn't have realized that things like purses and jewelry were in CAMIO. So I did a search for purses. One of the results I chose was a purse mount. I have no idea what that is because it doesn't look remotely like a purse, nor can I tell how it relates to purses. But it was cool looking and old. If I wanted to I could move the images around to put them in an order of oldest to newest or which ones were in the best shape. I'm sorry but I didn't create a web page. The thought of creating web pages that then float around in the Internet cloud forever more just bothers me. But I can see how doing this to go back to my search results would be handy.