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Original Project Proposal
Participating Libraries
Project co-directors
Marlene McGonigle
David Goudy |
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Original IMLS Project Proposal
Background and Objectives This proposal seeks to establish a collaboration between Montshire Museum of Science and eight small community libraries to create eight traveling science exhibits coupled with programming packages that can travel to each of the participating libraries. The exhibits and their companion programs will be designed to increase family participation at the libraries. The model for both the effectiveness of product and for the process of collaborative interaction of library and museum staff will be tested. Increasing national attention on the well documented challenges facing our formal education sector has spawned a growing recognition of the value and contribution of the so-called "informal" education providers such as libraries and museums. As noted by the American Association of Museums, "as institutions that encourage lifelong learning, museums and libraries have much in common." The roles of these providers of ongoing educational support for independent learners of all ages, and their ability to foster family oriented learning experiences, are of special importance and are a focus of this proposal. We know from a large body of research that families are critically important in supporting children's learning. Home learning resources, parental expectations, and parental support are also strongly related to school achievement. The importance of parental involvement has been recognized in Goal 8 of the national education goals. Family structures are changing. More and more households are headed by single parents or by other adults (e. g., grandparents, foster parents). With limited time to devote to adult-child learning activities and an increasing recognition of the limitations of the schools, families are seeking alternative sources of structured, quality educational opportunities. Both libraries and museums have stepped up to this challenge. Museums and libraries bring different skills and community relationships to their common agenda of creatively enhancing family education in a changing culture. Science museums in recent years have played a leadership role developing innovative techniques for family-centered learning by creating stimulating interactive and hands-on formats to excite people about science, technology, and mathematics. During a decade when television and other media have consumed an increasingly large amount of family non-school, non-work time, at the expense of many traditional family activities, science museums have successfully increased attendance and family participation. Recognizing the limitation of applying these concepts solely within the museum setting, science museums recognize the value of community partnerships as they seek new formats for exporting their ideas into their communities. Libraries are perhaps the most common and treasured informal education resources in our communities. They have a long and rich tradition of service, bringing ideas and information in print, audio/visual, and, increasingly, electronic forms. In addition to their collections, libraries offer programming for all ages to actively encourage people to discover the pleasure of self directed learning and discovery through literature. Faced with a changing culture and different patterns of learning, libraries aggressively seek new models to assure meaningful use of their collections and information resources by the community. We thus have an immediate confluence of interest and purpose for partnership: museums seek venues more closely tied to local community, and libraries can benefit from the educational models pioneered by science museums. Valuable as this may be, a much deeper rationale for collaboration is provided by educational theorists who have helped guide recent innovations in informal science education. They have encouraged an educational philosophy that reflects multiple modes of learning within our audiences, that helps participants relate new information to life experiences and thereby construct broader and more personal meaning, and that encourages participants to synthesize rather than particularize. In this arena, museums and libraries have opportunities for truly exciting collaborations by combining the training of library staff with literature and information resources, with the expertise of science museums in the process of hands-on, inquiry investigations in science and math. Our proposed collaboration has an additional overlay of importance. The preceding arguments supporting collaboration are essentially generic, fitting museums and libraries nationwide. When these institutions operate in a rural environment, additional constraints and conditions must be addressed and this project will consider these library - museum opportunities from the perspective of an under-served, rural constituency. The special challenge faced by rural libraries has been characterized as the "national crisis no one really cares about." This proposed program will operate in a very rural part of America. The eight Vermont and New Hampshire towns served by this project range in population from 2,400 to 14,000. Regarding schools and libraries, the Federal Universal Service Telecommunications Act of 1996 defines both New Hampshire and Vermont as rural. By the U. S. Census Bureau definition, Vermont is classified as the most rural state in the nation. Both Howe Library and Montshire Museum of Science have received major recognition for their leadership in bringing the highest level of professional service to this rural environment. Project Description The Howe Library of Hanover, NH and Montshire Museum of Science of Norwich, VT are the partners for this application. The directors of the two institutions will serve as project co-directors and as such will coordinate the project logistics and assure that all aspects of the project truly reflect a synergy of the resources of libraries and of science museums. In addition, with Howe as the coordinating library, seven other small libraries from towns in both states will be participants. Each of the eight participating libraries will designate one professional staff member to serve as its project representative and will provide adequate time for full participation by that person. Montshire Museum likewise will provide professional educational and exhibit staff to support the project. A kick-off symposium will bring a speaker of national prominence to discuss the challenges and opportunities for increasing family oriented education activities by informal community centers. All project participants will participate as a means of focusing and energizing them at the project's inception. In addition, museum and library professionals from throughout New Hampshire and Vermont will be invited to participate in this event, providing a service to the larger professional community and giving the project a high level of visibility at the outset. A total of 150 participants is anticipated for this event. Stimulated by the challenges posed in the symposium, project participants (the eight library representatives, two project co-directors, three Montshire professional staff, and the project evaluator for a total of 14) will then hold a full day planning workshop at the Montshire Museum. The workshop will be designed in four major segments:
Based on the results of the workshop, Montshire staff will, after researching feasibility, cost, and materials available, propose a set of eight exhibit themes. Each of the eight libraries will select one of the themes and play a collaborative role with the Museum staff in creating the traveling exhibit and companion materials. Each library will thus be "sponsor" for an exhibit and related programming. The exhibits, eight in number at the conclusion of this project, will be composed of various interactive devices, objects, and/or natural history specimens as appropriate to the theme. They will be designed to engage learners of multiple ages (six and up) and to facilitate family learning. Each will have a set of companion activities suitable for a library setting, a bibliography of related books and electronic materials, and printed activity guides to encourage families to further their investigations at home. Reflecting the limited space of rural libraries, each will be designed to fit on a tabletop, to be low maintenance, and to be easily transported in a commonly available mini-van. The exhibits will serve as engaging points of interest to intrigue library visitors with new ideas and to provide libraries with a set of changing foci for programming and positive public relations. They will help libraries build their images as dynamic and interesting places for families to gather for positive and non-threatening learning opportunities. For each of the eight exhibit themes, one Montshire exhibit specialist and one Montshire education professional will form a design team with the professional library staff person attached to that exhibit (that is, there will be eight teams - Montshire staff common to all of them and each with a different library professional). Following a work schedule suitable to all on the team, they will develop the exhibit concepts, create exhibit prototypes to be tested with visitors at the Museum and the sponsoring library, develop the companion materials and activities, and ultimately fabricate the final results. While the library staff will provide the lead with integrating literary and information resources into the final result, and Museum staff brings the greatest expertise to the exhibit design and fabrication area, the intent is to create a truly collaborative team sharing expertise and learning from one another. The product is thus not simply a physical one, but a process leading to a new set of understandings enriching the professionals from both library and museum disciplines. For example, one theme could be about moving air. The exhibits, resources, and activities for this theme could explore how moving air effects us, how nature takes advantage of it, and how it can hold up objects like airplanes. The exhibit table might include a small, quiet, blower motor that would power several air streams coming out of vacuum cleaner-sized flexible hoses that could be used for a variety of simple and delightful experiments. It could include protected examples of different shaped seeds that use wind for their dispersal and a mounted specimen of a native bird with wings extended to illustrate the airfoil shape. Illustrations and graphics would help develop the overall theme and suggest larger connections. Adjacent bookshelves could include a great variety of related materials for parent-child sharing. Catch the Wind by Gibbons, Jack and the Whoopee Wind, by Calhoun, Windy Day Stories and Poems, edited by Bauer, the video Let Me Tell You All About Planes, and the CD-ROM The Way Things Work are but a few possibilities. Special activities for families, hosted at the library, could include kite design, build, and fly workshops; making paper airplanes and exploring the effects of different designs on flight characteristics; playing with different seed shapes and their behavior when dropped or blown by a fan followed by families designing and building their own "seeds" to achieve maximum dispersal; or mapping the movement of soap bubbles or other "floaters" to discover that there are currents of moving air even in a seemingly quiet room. These workshops would include reading and discussion from appropriate literature interspersed with the hands-on activities. The exhibit would also include take-home idea sheets for parents as a way of encouraging similar kinds of activities in the home environment. The resulting exhibits will be handled by an estimated 52,000 library patrons (per exhibit) during their circulation among the participating libraries. They will be installed and de-installed multiple times. In order to remain functional, attractive, and to require minimal maintenance, they will need to be carefully crafted of quality materials. Montshire's experience, particularly that of Bob Raiselis, an experienced museum exhibit designer/fabricator who will serve the project, in exhibits suitable for travel and for heavy use will be an important asset to assure the success of the project. After the eight teams have completed their eight tabletop exhibits and companion materials, all participants will again gather, as a full group, at Montshire for a second training workshop. This session will focus on an orientation to the products of the previous several months. Each library representative will take the lead for a training session on the exhibit she/he has worked with, presenting all of the programming ideas and companion materials that have been developed in relationship to the exhibit. A detailed written packet for each will be distributed at this time. It will include everything a host library will need to know about the exhibit, suggested bibliographies, detailed "how-to" descriptions for the suggested programming activities, and take-home family guides. In addition, press packets to support and encourage local publicity, developed by Montshire's PR specialist, will also be included. Although the suggested collections materials to enhance each exhibit will be chosen to reflect materials commonly found in the smaller libraries, each exhibit will no doubt suggest a few very special book or other resources that may not be in all of the participants' collections. The project includes funds committed as matching support from participant acquisition budgets to assure that collections materials will be available to support the programming activities. In addition, the Institute of Museum and Library Services funds are budgeted to support non-collections materials for the activities and hand-outs to accompany each exhibit. Following the second workshop, Montshire staff will deliver and install the eight exhibits, one in each participating library. With the accompanying bibliographic materials, program ideas and outlines, the libraries will schedule a series of public programs using the exhibits as a focal point. While the exhibits will stimulate and enrich these programs, they will also stand-alone, serving all visitors to the library. At the end of a six week venue, Montshire staff will handle the logistics of a rotation so that each library will receive a new exhibit, with the cycle continuing until each library has enjoyed all eight exhibits. The actual rotation will be conducted by Mr. Raiselis so that if any minor repairs or adjustments are needed, they can be handled on-site, and also to provide whatever "refresher" orientation might be needed for the host library as the exhibit arrives at its new venue. Following the completed cycle, each library having had all eight exhibits, each exhibit will revert to its sponsoring library where it may be informally shared with other libraries or with other local venues such as local schools. Based on attendance data from the eight participating libraries and the lengths of venues for the traveling exhibits, the eight exhibits, after traveling to all eight libraries, will have been enjoyed during an estimated 410,000 visits by library patrons.
Communication Because of the limited time available for understaffed libraries to schedule their representative to participate in the project activities and because of the travel distances involved in a rural setting, the project has been designed to minimize the number of meetings required and to achieve maximum impact from each one. Much of the routine communication not requiring the in-person gathering of the entire group of participants (or of an entire team) will be facilitated by the Internet. Each library has Internet capability for both email and WWW browsing. Through these formats, exchange of visual and textual information among the entire group and within the working teams can be facilitated throughout the entire project. A project email listserve will facilitate routine sharing of ideas and information among the eight teams. Montshire Museum operates its own Internet provider service to serve the regional educational community including the special frame relay equipment needed to serve the Internet needs of most small New England libraries and schools. Montshire thus has the resources to support the technical requirements to assure that all participants will be able to participate in this aspect of the program. In addition, Montshire is the lead organization in a small museum collaborative, funded by the National Science Foundation, which is exploring the institutional cultural issues of creating and sustaining collaborative projects (in this case, collaboratively designed museum exhibits) using the Internet as a primary tool of sharing and communication.
Evaluation Dr. Cynthia Char, an evaluator experienced in informal science education will serve as project evaluator. Her work will be focused in two areas:
In order to make most effective use of the evaluator's time, the first charge will be managed primarily by training the professional library participants to administer (directly or though the use of volunteers) simple evaluation instruments. The evaluator will be responsible for establishing the protocols and analyzing results. Both written and interview approaches will be employed to determine public response to the library exhibits and programs. The larger amount of the evaluator's time will be devoted to her participation in selected meetings and team planning sessions as an experienced observer, which, along with her focused interviews of participants, will inform her analysis of how the collaborative worked as a process. Though they have much in common, libraries and museums represent very different cultures. We will want to learn how well we brought these two cultures productively together, what contributions each made to the success of the final educational product, whether the experience influenced the overall growth and capacity of the participants, and whether the collaborative approach resulted in a net public benefit. In addition to the direct services of Dr. Char, the project will benefit in an important way from a current Montshire project supported by the National Science Foundation. As a part of this program, key Montshire staff (who will be involved in this IMLS project) are receiving extensive training by Inverness Research Associates of Inverness, CA in formative evaluation techniques using prototyping and audience collaboration techniques throughout the exhibit design process. These approaches will be an important element in the formative evaluation process for the exhibit development phase of this proposed IMLS project. While museums have increasingly involved professional evaluators and evaluation techniques in their work, staff in small libraries are less familiar with these techniques for assessing informal education activities. In addition to serving the evaluation needs of this project, the evaluation process will have a long term residual benefit by exposing library staff to these ideas and approaches. The second workshop for all participants will include a presentation by Dr. Char on this subject.
Dissemination and National Impact An important and underserved segment of the American population lives in rural regions of the country. Sixty-one percent of the nation's 8,900 libraries serve towns with fewer than 10,000 residents and most of our of rural population has access to a local library. The Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) has among its members 486 science museums. While the large urban science centers are the best known, collectively the smaller science museums serve a larger population and most libraries have a science museum within their region. Thus a collaborative model linking science museums and small rural libraries can serve an important and under-served constituency and can be replicated widely. The project will use two levels of communication to disseminate project results. First is an initiative for widespread distribution of summary information about the project. Museum and library media will be the prime outlets to make large numbers of professionals aware of the project and its objectives. Summaries will be provided for publication in the ASTC Newsletter, American Libraries, Public Libraries, and the journal Informal Science Review. Through the involvement of the co-directors, project information will be presented to colleagues at the annual meetings of ASTC and the American Library Association (ALA). In addition, the project symposium will receive widespread visibility among library and museum professionals within Vermont and New Hampshire. The second level of project dissemination will create a project site on the World Wide Web as a means to assemble all project details in a form easily accessible to anyone interested in following up on the initial summary information. Montshire's extensive experience using the World Wide Web for educational collaborations will be used to establish this project web page for posting all project information. This web page will contain a detailed overview of the project and the participants, text of the symposium presentations, illustrative photos and drawings of the final exhibits, full copies of all activity sheets and bibliographies, final project reports, and the evaluation report detailing the collaborative process, successes and weaknesses of the project protocols. The project co-directors, as part of their final reporting, will also create a document reflecting on what library and museum professionals can learn from this project's collaborative process. It will offer specific suggestions to others on how best to approach their own museum-library collaborations.
Continuation The eight participating libraries and Montshire believe that through this project, the momentum and shared staff experiences will facilitate continued collaborations on similar projects of mutual interest. Once the professionals from both disciplines have had the opportunity to explore the value of what the other has to offer, we expect to have created a community of on-going activity. Both Howe Library and Montshire Museum are committed to facilitating this process through techniques such as continuation of the Internet connection and hosting periodic gatherings to stimulate ideas and initiatives.
Personnel The project will be served by a team of highly experienced museum and library professionals. Project co-directors will be Marlene McGonigle, Director of the Howe Library, and David Goudy, Director of Montshire Museum of Science. Gregory DeFrancis, Montshire's Education Coordinator will provide the science education leadership. Robert Raiselis, an experienced exhibit designer and fabricator who has had extensive experience on projects for Montshire Museum and other museums will provide the leadership for the exhibit aspects of the project. A professional evaluator experienced in educational programs, Cynthia Char, will serve as project evaluator. Participating Libraries In addition to project partners, Howe Library and Montshire Museum, the following seven libraries will participate. A copy of the letter of understanding indicating the commitment of each is included with this proposal.
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