Grand River Museum

["Roger A. Stephenson" <roger@dtgnet.com>]

Greetings Everyone,

The Grand River Museum has now reopened after the mid-winter closure and we
have some news to share.

The scholarship program for our summer field season is now open for
competition. The "Female Planet Scholar" is open this, its second year, to
ALL undergraduate students with a major in earth sciences. The award money
will cover the fees for participating in one of the two three week dig
sessions we now operate. These sessions are the last three weeks in June,
and the last two weeks in August and the first week in September. Please
indicate the session for which you will be applying. The awardee will also
receive a $200 (US) stipend for expenses. Closure for the competition will
be June 1, 2000. Please refer to the Grand River Museum's web site (see sig
file below) for details about the field program and the scholarship.

We are attempting to have in place, before the field season begins, a
method to send a video feed of the dig out via a live webcam. We hope to be
able to archive the day to day operations and establish a searchable
database so that teachers and others can select portions of this video
archive, and download them, for their class or personal studies. If we can
do this it will be a first, as far as we can tell, of a dig being broadcast
over the web. We hope to be able to provide a streaming TV-like feed
without the stop motion effect of some webcams. We also would like to
provide a 3-D map that is also searchable and linked to the video whereby
remote research can be done with our data, both with specimens and
stratigraphy. We are open to suggestions, and contributions of both
resources and technological expertise in this effort. If we can prove this
technology works we will continue the program for some years to come.

The "Virtual Tour" Segment of our museum's web site is now operational.
Please remember that we are a cultural as well as natural history museum
and the tour is designed to provide the visitor with complete exposure to
our facility, aside from areas visitors are not normally allowed. In other
words the "Virtual Tour" will include more than fossil material.

Please feel free to forward this message in all or part to any party you
feel might be interested.

Thank you,
Roger A. Stephenson
Director
The Grand River Museum
Lemmon, South Dakota
605-374-3911
http://www.iw.net/~roger/
http://www.grandrivermuseum.org/
"Put the bunny, back in the box!"