Judy Luther is up next with Emlyn Koster, President and CEO of Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. His presentation title is "Museums in Greater Service to Society and the Environment". Heritage and cultural institutions include museums, botanical gardens, zoos and aquaria and site interpretative centers. He will naturally discuss museums most specifically which he indicates have gone through three stages of evolution. Initially they just collected researched and presented artifacts and specimens to understand the past. Then in the '60's, science museums took on the job of increasing scientific literacy in the younger generation. Now they illuminate how science and technology are integral to our culture and future. They teach the community about the science underlying major issues facing our society. LSC is an innovative learning resource for lifelong exploration of nature, humanity and technology; that's part of their mission statement. They seek to serve as a new model of sustainability and relevancy for the museum community. They seek to get attendees up close and personal with science. They want to get the message across that it is within the power of the museum's attendees to take informed action on any scientific subject.

The fact that they aren't burdened by legacy collections of artifacts that must be preserved and displayed allows them to operate differently and perhaps more economically than other members of the museum community. (That to me seems significant and he is consistently referring to his institution as a science center rather than as a museum.) They don't have curators or conservators. Those aren't key skill sets in their delivery of services to the public.

They're using such technologies as video conferencing to support teaching in the classroom. They are trying to integrate Web resources into the overall discussion but in ways that perhaps influence viewers in adopting more enlightened life style choices. Clearly they see their educational mission in entirely different lights from the traditional museum. For example, how they mount an exhibit on the topic of infectious disease in an urban environment? They would do surveys to attempt to define what people don't know and why they would like to know about the topic and then design an exhibit that focuses on the experiential learning for attendees rather than a static learning experience. They don't preserve the exhibition. They want attendees to come away with a new and practical insight from their museum experience. That's more important to him than the number of people who cross their doors (ie. standard metric of attendance within the traditional museum community). He'd rather have fewer one-time visitors and more repeat traffic for laboratory experiences and multi-media theaters. He thinks science centers can be a channel for public dissemination of research results.

Judy references the shift from institutions offering snapshot views of information (as done by museums and publishers) to finding new ways of presenting information in a broader context. He responds with a comment about science pulsing all around us, not dealing with factoids but dealing with the here and now.

Funding is a continuing issue for the museum community. LSC has about 15 different sources of revenue to depend upon rather than some national museums that are strictly dependent upon a single stream of funding from the government alone. Institutions have to be both "nice" as well as necessary; they must be relevant. They must combine entertainment (painless learning) with education (intensive learning).