I pulled into Eric Anderson's driveway on a warm Saturday afternoon. From the trees, the fuzzy caterpillars were dropping all around me faster than IP packets on a rural telephone switch. Anderson has served as the fiscal agent for the cluster and as a key member of jackweb, the clever name given to the Jackson County web project, which began long before MIRA. In the 1980's I had read his articles in "The Wired Librarian" a pioneering column for the librarian involved in computers in the 1980's. When I made some technology grants at Apple, Ohio Valley Area Libraries received one to install faxes in many of their branches in Jackson County. At that time and through most of the MIRA project, Eric was the director. Ohio has some of the best support for public libraries, and for years every little library that needed it could have access to a high speed T1 circuit for Internet access. Oddly enough, the state largess for individual libraries made interlibrary cooperation less of an issue than if the members had come together to share scarce resources. CTCNet had many members in Ohio who were running community technology centers, and there is a state organization that grew out of a technology center project funded by funds from a penalty slapped on Ameritech (now part of SBC) by the state public utilities commission. Ohio, the home for many of the old Free-nets (not the peer-to-peer file sharing program that has emerged along with other Napster-like services), is a hotbed of citizen computer projects. I believe that it signifies the willingness of various groups of non-profits, librarians, educators, and citizens to use technology to reduce the inequities associated with rapid deployment of technology in those sectors that see its value and can afford it.

Anderson's team is still going strong. Their steering committee met while I was staying at the Anderson's. Once they completed the training and received their project funds, the jackweb team moved the pages to a Windows NT server, which allowed more people to design web pages for the site than when the site was hosted on a Unix server. In addition they selected several local businesses to design a web site and provide training for the business owners. This took a lot longer, and this year timswoodshop.com went online. The catalog functionality of this site is unique, in that it contains patterns for all the types of hard wood molding produced by the firm. When they first went online they received an order for 13 doors from a client in Illinois, and now the business is expanding to meet the demand from online customers.