Bill Ritchie had a life-changing, college experience in the 1960's when his art professor gave him the key to her library. It was a privilege only a few of her students enjoyed. After college Bill Ritchie became an art professor. He believes such access to his professors' libraries shaped his teaching philosophy.An early adopter of new technologies such as video and computers, his journals and unpublished work morphed into digital files. By the 1990's, he had mastered electronic publishing. He learned about expert systems, knowledge engineering and data mining as ways students could access their teachers' digital libraries.Although long retired from formal college, he imagined what it would be like to be an art student taking art online in a Massively Open Online Course, or MOOC, a distance-learning experience. Would one be interested in picking the art professor's brain? Would an anthology of abstracts be interesting?On the Internet, buried treasures await students studying art online. It's like having access to all the worlds' art teachers. In the volumes of the Ritchie Mined series one can drill into this professor's library to mine selections from among his musings - like mining for nuggets of wisdom and finding veins of strange thinking.His daughter Nellie Sunderland compiled this index of 539 entries - insights into Professor Ritchie's art and teaching philosophy and his continuing old, odd professor's ways.
