Students get museum connected

By GUY PRIEL

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- In the waning days of the 20th century, officials at the Brown County Historical Society Museum are getting connected to make their records available to the general public.

The project is becoming a reality, with the help of five computer science majors from Minnesota State University, Mankato, who have been working on the project since the beginning of the semester.

The students were at the museum Saturday installing the system.

"This is actually a two-phase project," Brown County Historical Society said Director Bob Burgess. "The first phase is being completed now, with the second phase being completed in the next few weeks."

The students are in Mahbubur Rahman Syed's computer science class at Minnesota State University. They were given a list of proposed projects to choose from. They also were given the opportunity to develop their own project, Christina Hogen said.

"We are one of those groups," Hogen said. "We had a lot of help with the project from some technical writers who helped with documentation and writing the help files."

The goal is to have a computer data and collections networking system available for the museum. This will help officials find artifacts instantly for research and exhibit purposes, Burgess said.

The files and catalogues currently are stored on five discs which must be searched individually to locate something. Family files are stored the same way, making for a long process, he said.

"There are some areas the students were able to help with, such as keeping some information private," he said. "Names of donors, value of artifacts and locations are sometimes confidential. With a computer system, we can develop security blocks, which they helped with."

The Mayo Health Care Facility donated five computers to the museum for the project. One of the computers is a server. The four remaining computers will be connected into an in-house network for staff volunteers and the public. Two of the computers will be located in the lobby for public access, Burgess said.

"They will eventually be made web compatible," he said. "At this point we are still trying to get a domain name we can be comfortable with. A project of this type would be expensive if we tried it ourselves, and I am not sure what else would be involved."

Another group of students will be involved in the process of getting the Website running in the spring.

The museum board has been urging Burgess to get everything more updated and to catch up with technology.

"This will be great for us," he said. "Once we find a server it will be easier, because connecting in direct will take money we don't have available. This will get us down the road. We can see where things go later."

The class began as a Web development project in Dick Christenson's client server class at MSU. In the past, students had to develop web pages in a classroom laboratory setting.

In the class, students get hands-on experience in designing the web page, creating the data, and hooking up the computers, as the students were doing on Saturday.

"All the groups in the class are working on a similar project with other organizations," Hogen said.

The results will be an asset to the study and preservation of Brown County history for many years, Burgess said.

"Some of these students already have computer-related jobs lined up after they graduate," he said. "This means a lot for us."

Those involved in the project, in addition to Hogen, were Donny Chau, Saroj Aryal, Adam Tagarro, and Laura Fairbank.