It seems to me that the long-running "silly" threads have more to do
with community-building than with sharing information per se, and
though such activity can wear thin, a certain amount of it is
healthy and necessary and therefore not entirely a waste of
bandwidth. It's especially interesting to see responses that point
out the ethnocentrism of some threads (but hearing more about why
they seem ethnocentric would, I think, be very relevant). If as
museum people we are in the business of creating virtual microcosms
of parts of our world in order to interpret them, we might pay
attention to this online virtual microcosm of the museum world that
we are also creating. It's not surprising that we should like to
talk about interesting objects and the minutiae of culture: we
wouldn't be in the business if we weren't passionately interested in
such things.
Pat Galloway
Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History