Copyright 1999 Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.
Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony
April 14, 1999
SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY
LENGTH: 2941 words
HEADLINE:
TESTIMONY April 14, 1999 EDWARD H. ABLE, JR. PRESIDENT AND CEO AMERICAN
ASSOCIATION OF MUSEUMS HOUSE APPROPRIATIONS INTERIOR FISCAL
2000 INTERIOR APPROPRIATIOONS
BODY:
STATEMENT OF
EDWARD H. ABLE, JR. PRESIDENT & C.E.O. AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF MUSEUMS
before the SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERIOR AND RELATED AGENCIES COMMITTEE ON
APPROPRIATIONS U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES on Fiscal Year 2000 funding for THE
OFFICE OF MUSEUM SERVICES in The Institute of Museum and Library Services THE
NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES & THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS
April 14, 1999 My name is Edward H. Able, Jr. I am President and C.E.O. of the
American Association of Museums (AAM), the national museum organization that has
helped America's museums and their staffs serve communities and families since
1906. For over 30 years, the Federal cultural agencies have provided invaluable
financial assistance to museums of every kind, from art museums and aquariums to
youth museums and zoos, in their mission to serve and educate the public. I urge
you to bolster this effort in FY 2000 by funding the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) at the levels
requested in the President's budget. In addition, I encourage you to
substantially increase the Office of Museum Services (OMS) within the Institute
of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to $40 million. This increase would
accommodate both the president's budget request of $10.45 million for new
technology and leadership initiatives as well as the museum community's request
of $6 million for a much needed boost for major programs, such as General
Operating Support (GOS) grants, which have been level funded for several years.
As my time is very limited, I will simply underscore the critical support the
NEH and NEA provide museums, and will focus my attention on the importance to
museums of OMS General Operating Support (GOS) funds. General operating support
funds for museums, though fundamental, are very difficult to obtain from
foundations or corporations, which generally prefer to fund higher profile
programs. A museum's ability to serve its community well stems from the health
of the museum's most basic operations. Funding for such operations are the most
difficult to obtain. The Museum Boom Over the past ten years museums have
witnessed a huge increase in attendance. For evidence, we do not have to look
further than down the street to the National Gallery of Art, which during the
Van Gogh exhibition accommodated 5,339 visitors a day for a total of 480,496
visitors. The new California Science Center had over 2 million visitors in the
last year. There are more examples from 1998: An exhibition of Leonardo da
Vinci's "Codex Leicester" at the Seattle Art Museum had 2,916 visitors a day;
"Titanic: The Exhibition," drew approximately 5,000 visitors a day for a total
of about 830,000 visitors to The Florida International Museum in Saint
Petersburg, Florida; and The New York Historical Society during "Treasures from
Mount Vernon: George Washington Revealed" served 45,264 visitors in a three
month period. This is not simply a blockbuster phenomenon. According to a recent
and conservative AAM estimate, museums get 865 million visits per year compared
with around 600 million only a decade ago. That's an impressive 2.3 million
visits to American museums per day. More people visit American museums today
than in any time in history. And this trend shows no sign of slowing down. This
attendance boom is not just at our nation's biggest institutions. The Telfair
Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, the oldest art museum in the South, has seen
its attendance double over the last four years to 146,000 per year. And this
increase in popularity is not just for art museums - museums of all types and
sizes are being built, expanded, or renovated to serve the needs of children,
families, and life-long learners. We estimate that $4.3 billion will be spent on
museum construction between 1998 and 2000 and that more than 150 museums will be
built or expanded during the same period. So what are the reasons for this boom?
While no doubt our healthy economy is a major contributor, the real reason for
museums' popularity goes much deeper. Museums are now benefiting from the
results of their efforts to reach out to communities and families, which was key
among recommendations put forth to the field six years ago in AAM's landmark
report Excellence and Equity Education and the Public Dimension of Museums. This
report urged museums to become social and community centers and to ensure that
"they are an integral part of the multifaceted human experience." Museums have
become what a recent supplement in the Washington Post dubbed "The New Town
Square," "offering everything from jazz concerts to education forums" while
remaining places of learning for children, families and adults; of scholarly
research; and quiet contemplation of beauty, our cultural heritage, and
civilizations past and present. No doubt museums are succeeding because they
invest tremendous resources to ensure that they are both intellectually
understandable and that they meet real community needs. To demonstrate the
impact of the Office of Museum Services at IMLS, I turn back to the Telfair
Museum. The museum was awarded a 1998 OMS General Operating Support grant of
$112,500 (GOS grants span two years) to help support market research to
determine what Savannah wants from the museum and incorporate the findings into
its new building and mission. According to the museum, this GOS grant will help
take its Needs Resulting from the Boom1.Infrastructu 1.Infrastructure Stress:
Mor1.1.Infrastructure Stress: More than ever, museums are being asked to be many
things to many people. They greet this call with enthusiasm and a strong sense
of responsibility. However ' all this success places tremendous demands on
infrastructure. With regard to art museums, for example, it costs an average of
$38 per visitor while the average admission charge per visitor is $1.46. With
the huge increases in attendance, the main reason for establishing the OMS in
1976 -- "to ease the financial burden borne by museums as a result by their
increasing use by the public" (P.L. 94-462, Title 11, Museum Services Act) --
has never been more true than today. According to a recent AAM survey, almost 90
percent of museums believe that "funding to meet basic commitments" is a
critical need for the coming years, with 70% ranking this issue first among
their needs. Only 8% believe that the museum community has adequate resources to
cope with the critical issues in the near future -- especially funding issues.
One of the hallmarks of GOS grants is their flexibility. While these awards
cannot be used for construction or renovation, they can be used for a multitude
of purposes from education programs, to collections care, to providing increased
access to collections via technology. For example, the Utah Museum of Natural
History in Salt Lake City received $112,500 that it will use in part to hire
additional security guards to meet the demands of increased attendance. The
museum had received state operating support funds, which allowed it to extend
its hours, which in turn had led to increased use by the public. The museum also
has an insect infestation problem, which threatens a very important ethnographic
collection. The funds will be used to rent very large cold storage trailers to
freeze the artifacts and eliminate the infestation. In addition, the collections
storage room will be sealed and fumigated to ensure the long-term safety of the
collection. Another example of GOS being used for critical collections care is
the Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum in Bisbee, Arizona. This museum will use
its $39,140 GOS grant in part to help preserve its highly regarded collection of
25,000 historic photographs, which are in need of proper archiving and storage.
According to the museum, archival supplies are very expensive and it is
especially difficult for small museums to find the resources to care for
collections at the level of current professional standards. GOS is the only
funding they can find for collections care. 2.Education. While education has
long been critical to museums, in recent years it has moved to the forefront of
their public service missions. Museums are a tool of learning for us all. They
put us in touch with the past. They bring us information about history's
successes and failures. Museums help us make real choices today as we learn to
value who we are, where we came from, and what we have. For children, museums
open new and wonderful doors to the universe. They broaden our children's
horizons, enrich their lives and introduce them to new opportunities and
experiences. Museums help young people to learn and grow for the future. We know
from a recent OMS survey that museums in the U.S. spend $193 million annually on
K- 1 2 programs and provide nearly 4 million hours on educational programs such
as guided field trips, staff visits to schools, and traveling exhibits in
schools. 88% of Americas museums now provide K-12 educational programming.
Seventy percent of museums have at least one full-time paid staff who offers K-
1 2 educational programming. More schools everywhere recognize the value of
museum resources and are taking advantage of them. Museums commitment to
education programs for schools is increasing: Over 70% of museums surveyed
report an increase in numbers of students, teachers and schools served in the
last five years. Museums use GOS funds to support their education missions
including expanding geographic outreach. For example, the Museum of New Mexico
in Santa Fe will use its $112,500 GOS grant to continue circulating its
,.education van" throughout the state. In this program, museum staff go through
intensive planning (working with community leaders) to meet community needs. For
example, staff worked with Navajo elders of Crownpoint who were concerned that
their weaving traditions were not being passed on to future generations. Museum
staff brought artifacts to study and held weaving, tutoring, and mentoring
classes with the elders, to ensure this important tradition will continue. The
"education van" has been to 30 communities in its first fourteen months of
operation. According to the museum, this program would not have happened without
IMLS funding, which attracted funding from five additional sources - giving yet
another example of how relatively small amounts of Federal funding leverages
significant public and private support at the state and local levels. For the
Green Mountain Audubon Nature Center in Huntington, Vermont, which has an island
sanctuary for endangered species on Lake Champlain, a GOS grant of $42,700 was
"a shot of whole blood." The museum was able to keep the educator it employed on
a seasonal basis and work him into all of its on-site and outreach education
programs throughout the year. The museum hopes to use this grant to build a
constituency for their outreach program so it can stand on its own when the
grant runs out - as happened at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson which
received ESEA Title I funding from local schools to sustain a
program begun with GOS funds. 3.Technology. Our country's museums house an
enormous wealth of information for scholarly research and public education --
more than 700 million objects and associated documentation of our cultural,
artistic, and scientific heritage. However, a museum at any one time has only
approximately five to ten percent of its collection on exhibition, and access to
objects in storage is necessarily restricted. Before the advent of the digital
age, museums were only able to share their collections with the public in
teaspoon amounts to on- site visitors. Now, however, museums are leaders in
developing interactive exhibits and applying new technologies to increase their
accessibility through distance education. "Virtual visits" and school
programming via satellite, one and two-way video, over the Internet, or with a
combination of these and other communications technologies, can supplement the
more than 865 million actual visits each year to America's museums. A $60,439
GOS grant will allow the Sheldon Museum and Cultural Center in Haines, Alaska to
hire a specialist curator to enter their entire collection, including local
pioneer-transportation, mining, local industries, Tlingit and other northwest
coast Native American artifacts, on computer for access by the public. For part
of the grant's matching requirement, the museum was able to leverage a digital
camera so they can sustain the process of providing the public on-line access to
their collection. Similarly, the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire is
using part of its $112,500 GOS grant to fund full time staff for data collection
and digitizing of their collection. The grant has enabled the museum to provide
an impressive level of detail about its collection so that any student or
faculty member at any time can access the collection for meaningful study. This
effort has brought the museum into a closer relationship with students who are
increasingly taking advantage of all of the museum's resources. The museum would
not have been able to serve the students and faculty so well without this
funding. But such examples are too few, too sporadic, and have only begun to
scratch the surface -- fewer than ten percent of the nation's museums have
websites at this time. While 90% of the nation's teachers believe that using the
Internet boosts student achievement and prepares students for a future requiring
technological literacy, 60% of the teachers are concerned about the quality of
on-line content. The president's budget calls for $5 million to make museum
resources part of a National Digital Library for Education. This funding is part
of a $30 million initiative to create a digital library that could be used in
American classrooms and throughout the world. The library will include special
collections from the Park Service and Smithsonian, math and science resources
from the National Science Foundation, and through IMLS, books and museum
collections. In addition, the president's budget calls for $7.6 million for OMS
National Leadership Grants for Museums, such as Museums Online to help museums
use technology to create regional electronic networks, support networked museums
through training and technical assistance, share best practices in the
development of educational resources and implement and upgrade Internet access
at museums. These well-ti--d initiatives would provide much needed coordination
and focus facilitating museum efforts provide distance education and increase I
access to their collections We have made great strides in U.S. libraries in
terms of information access and navigation. To be effective partners with our
library colleagues, it's critical to make the same advances for museum
collections, if we are to maximize their potential impact on the education of
our youth. 4.Other GOS Statistics: While need has increased, the OMS has shrunk,
despite an exemplary record. Funding has dropped dramatically since FY 95, when
it was $28.7 million, to today's level of $23.4 million. This has meant that the
General Operating Support program was able to fund only 20% of applications in
FY 98versus26%inFY95,anddownfromahighof46.3%inFY81. The20%figureisverylowwhenyou
consider outside peer reviewers determining that 59% were worthy of funding.
While GOS grants can be used for multiple purposes, 88% of grantees use their
awards to improve visitor services, while 94% enhance their educational
programs. The proposed $40 million is modest relative to the demonstrated need.
Funding all of the recommended applications would cost nearly $65 million.
Nevertheless, $40 million would significantly increase the ability of the agency
to help a broader range of museums across the country to reach out to their
publics and use the OMS award to leverage more private funding. The number of
awards would increase significantly and while most of those additional awards
would be small grants, they would have a strong multiplier effect on private and
state funds for the recipient museums, given past experience. Additional funding
would also help museums increase and enhance services to local school systems
and other community organizations. In closing, the OMS is of enormous support to
the museum field beyond providing GOS grants. OMS provides much needed funding
for conservation, professional development, important leadership initiatives and
awards which "shine a spotlight" on best practices and replicable programs, and
also funds a critical program to improve individual museums' standards and
performance -- the Museum Assessment Program, which is produced by AAM.
LetmejustendbyapplaudingtheOMSasanincrediblyefficientandeffective agency. With
its staff of 20, OMS's total non-program costs -- including research -- are 6.3%
of requested funding, less than its authorized cap of 10%. Over 93% of all
dollars go directly to museums. The public's expectations of museums are higher
today than ever before, and they are likely to continue to rise. Museums are
facing the challenge to meet and exceed these expectations. I urge you to answer
this challenge in partnership with us and ask that you recommend funding for the
Office of Museum Services (OMS) within the Institute of Museum and Library
Services (IMLS) at $40 million and recommend funding for the National Endowment
for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) at the
levels requested in the President's budget. Thank you for the opportunity to
submit this testimony.
LOAD-DATE: April 21, 1999
