Guampedia Missionaries

Missionaries for good, for the spread of knowledge, we hasten to add, not zealots…

Shannon Murphy and her staff of two are practically missionaries. But it isn’t religion they’re hawking. Instead, the trio is spreading the good word about Guam and behind them are more than a hundred others following in their path.

To deliver their message, Murphy and company are relying on the Internet and the Guam Humanities Council project Guampedia, an online encyclopedia about the island.

“We think it will make for a better understanding about the depth and history about the people here,” says Murphy, Guampedia’s managing editor who holds a hefty passion for Guam and its people.

[From Sharing Guam: Guampedia aims for understanding of island | guampdn.com | Pacific Daily News]

The federal government can be a positive factor in people’s lives sometimes:

The Council jumped on board with the project in the year 2000 when the National Endowment for the Humanities began offering grants to create online encyclopedias around the country.

“We had to spend two years developing the content, figuring out what kind of software,” Murphy says. “We had to hire someone to do all the software and do all the programing.”

As an aside, these sort of federal grants are anathema to Republicans like John McCain. He considers them waste, but happily throws away billions in tax-payer dollars for oil corporations.

Anyway, congratulations to Guampedia for a successful launch, we look forward to watching their continued growth. The Guampedia is one of the first National Endowments to actually get off the ground (fourth to start, per Shannon Murphy), many states considered the work a bit too challenging to tackle, at least at first. Now, if only the Guampedia could add an RSS feed of new content…

Here was a television interview on the topic from last week, including statements from my aunt Shannon :

The video clip includes Guam commercials, so you can feel like you are actually watching Channel 8 KUAM on Guam, plus a flashing error message about “No disc”.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.