>>From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. 
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>>Peggy Bulger: Well for those of you who don't know me, I'm Peggy Bulger and I'm director of the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress.  And I'm very pleased that our staff is working very closely with the Institute of Museum and Library Services to bring you this two-day symposium which is being recorded for our archive as well for a webcast that should go up on the Library's website within about three weeks.  So if you do have a cell phone or something that beeps -- makes noise -- you might want to turn that off right now as we begin.  We've got a very full day ahead of us.  I do want to say a special thank you to Betsy Peterson and Nancy Gross for all of the work that they've done to really bring this together and lead the team.  And also Thea Austin who does all of the logistics for this.  So if things are running right, tell Thea.  If things are running wrong, don't tell anybody.  Anyway, we're going to get started first of all with -- very much I'm pleased to introduce Michael Taft who is the head of our archive here at the American Folklife Center.  Our archive is probably one of the largest ethnographic archives in the world, really, with over four million collections.  And they keep coming in at a fast and furious pace.  And so without further ado, let me introduce Michael Taft.
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>>Michael Taft: Good morning everyone.  I'm going to give you an infomercial on the archive before we get to the panels.  I will be speaking on Occupational Traditions and the Culture of Work: A Survey of Archival Collections held by the American Folklife Center.  The archive of the American Folklife Center was established in 1928.  And over the last 82 years, as Peggy has said, has amassed over 4 million items, including over 300,000 hours of sound recordings from Jesse Walter Fewke's 1890 wax cylinder recordings of the Passamaquoddy Indians to the most recent digital sound files.  Because the archive began as the archive of American Folk Song, the preponderance of its materials relate to traditional music, song and dance.  But especially after the founding of the American Folklife Center in 1976, the archive expanded to include all areas of interests to folklorist and other [inaudible].  As our reference librarians will attest, research has come to the Center to investigate a tremendous range of subjects.  And we can usually find collections relevant to their needs.  Some subjects, because of their rather highly focused nature, are easy for our librarians to handle.  Many of our researchers need information on a specific genre, place, time or culture, such as, 'What does the center hold on religious songs sung my African Americans in Virginia in the 1930s?'  We might respond, 'Well, we have recordings of the African American Congregation of the Baptist Church in Alexandria in 1933 and the Emmaus Baptist Church in Goochland in 1936, among other recordings.'  Or a question such as, 'Does the Center have samples of speech from American Spanish speakers before 1950?'  And we might reply, "Our online presentation of the music and culture of the Northern Rio Grande includes a recitation recorded in Spanish in 1940, made by Ricardo Archuleta of Cerro, New Mexico," among many other possible answers.  Less focused questions are more difficult to answer.  Confronted with, 'What do you have on animals,' or 'What songs do you have that I've never heard?'  Our intrepid reference staff will work with researchers to help them to articulate their needs in more specific terms.  The questions of what the Center's archive holds on occupational traditions and the culture of work is just such a difficult question.  Virtually all of those interviewed and recorded for our archive worked in one or more occupations.  And they are likely to have referred to their work in one way or another in the course of being recorded or told a story or sung a song related to the theme of work in some way.  Recorded interviews in our archive with professional musicians, such as Jellyroll Morton or Hootie Ledbetter, who discussed their lives and work, are by definition examples of the occupational traditions.  Even the recordings of children whose work is play might fall into the culture of work.  Take the following example.  In September 1942, Duncan Emrich, who was one of the directors of the archive, entered the Delta Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada and made a number of recordings there.  Here's the description and the collection's bibliographic record.  'Collections of field recordings of Powder River Jack Lee and others, singing songs of miners and cowboys and playing dice with a recitation of, 'When You Were Old' composed by poet, William Butler Yeats.  One disc includes a performance of Powder River Jack Lee, Kitty Lee, and their singing dog Possum Lee.  First lines and titles of the songs performed include: 'There Were Miners from Bisbee,' and 'Oh a Miner  Was Sleeping at Home from His Work', sung by Powder River Jack.  One verse of 'Home on the Range', sung by Mister Canter -- not Eddie Canter, I don't think.  'I Came from Salem City with a Washbowl on my Knee', sung by several men.  'Chisholm Trail', an advertisement from Texaco Oil Company sung by Powder River Jack, to the tune of 'Oh Susanna', 'My Lover's a Cowboy While Ground He Does Break' and 'Oh Mexico', sung by Powder River Jack.  And 'I'm Just a One-Eyed Dog, My Name Is Possum Lee,' sung by Powder River Jack and by the dog Possum Lee.  The songs are accompanied by banjo, guitar and accordion.  Recordings include conversations and questions asked Duncan Emrich.'  Okay, that's the description.  Is this collection related by occupational traditions and the culture of work?  There are certainly songs about mining and cattle ranching.  The Texaco advertising jingle relates to the oil and gas industry.  The Delta Saloon is, in some sense, a workplace.  Although there's no indication that any of those recorded work there.  In fact, the performers may have had not connection with the occupations that they referenced.  Powder River Jack may have been a cowboy at one time, but by 1940, Jack, Kitty and Possum Lee were seasoned traveling performers who sang cowboy songs in venues from the Cheyenne, Wyoming rodeo to Stanford University to Bellevue Hospital in New York.  The connection of Duncan Emrich's collection to occupational traditions is clear enough through the contents of its songs.  But it seems at least one removed from the occupations of mining, ranching, and oil extraction.  In the same way, the archives holds recorded interviews with thousands of people, some of whom might have been miners, cowboys, or oil workers, but their professions were not the subject of the interview.  Despite the difficulties of establishing the parameters of the archive's occupational materials, there are certain collections that address the topic more directly than others, especially in terms of the collector's interest in the occupations of those interviewed or in expressive genres related to work and workers.  The first director of the archives, Robert W Gordon, is a case in point.  Among his interests were sea shanties, the work songs of mariners from the days of sail.  In the 1920s, he collected shanties in both San Francisco and Darien, Georgia including this version of hold the woodpile down, sung by an anonymous Bay Area sailor in the early 1920s.  Note that Gordon recorded the singer's instructions to an imaginary shipboard crew before the singing of the shanty.  Play the first one please.  The recording, when we hear it, is from wax cylinder.  And if you're not familiar with wax cylinder recordings, the fidelity is usually not very good.  This is one of the better ones.  It's a fairly short piece.  Although it's getting longer by the minute.
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>>That's our anonymous sailor from San Francisco.  The archive contains other collections of maritime occupational songs, most notably William M Doerflinger's 1940s recordings of sea shanties and James Wharton's 1957 collection of Menhaden Fisherman songs from Wharton Grove, Virginia.  The songs of canal boat captain, Pearl Nye of Ohio fall into this category, collected by Al and Elizabeth Lomax and Ivan Walton in 1937 and 1938.  The song repertoire of Nye may well be representative of the types of songs sung by canal boat workers.  But only a few of the songs relate directly to work, such as, 'The Old Skipper' sung by Nye in 1937.  Go to the next one please.
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>>You can stop it now.  The archive also contains several collections of songs of miners most notably George Korson's recordings from the 1940s of Pennsylvania and West Virginia coal miners as well as Wayland Hand's 1940s collections of songs of Montana silver miners.  The songs of loggers have long been of interest to folklorists.  And the archive contains a few examples such as duplicates of the pre1970 recordings conducted by folklorist Sandy Ives, who documented the logging/fishing traditions of Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces.  Beyond these early recordings, the archive's largest collection of work songs stems from the field recordings of the Lomaxes who an abiding interest in the songs of African Americans incarcerated in Southern prisons.  Among these songs are a variety of work songs, mostly related to the coordinated activity necessary for digging, shoveling, chopping, lining track and other forms of manual labor.  For example, here's a group of convict let by Charles Clark and Henry Wesley at State Farm Camp Number Nine in Arkansas, singing 'Poor Lazarus' for John and Ruby Lomax in 1939.
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>>While the archive has many recordings of work songs and songs of workers from the pre 1970s, there are few early collections that document the traditions of the labor movement.  The most notable exception is the North Carolina field work of playwright Arthur Miller and sound engineer John Langenegger.  Here's the bibliographic description of their collection, 'Interviews with miners at a quarry.  Foundry workers, shipyard workers, unemployed laborers, housewives, a restaurant owner and worker, cab drivers, bus drivers, a labor union organizer of strikers, the city manager, police chief, and secretary of the commission of public works at Wilmington.'  This is all in the fall of 1941.  'The recordings include protest and union songs, composed by African American workers, mostly women members, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America who were on strike at a local plant.'  I don't know that we have any other collection that documents protest and union songs sung by workers engaged in a labor action.  We do, of course, have many such songs sung by folk song revival singers and activists from 1940s recordings of Woody Guthrie to our recent acquisition of the papers and recordings of labor activist and songwriter Joe Glazer.  The recordings of Miller and Langenegger represent an innovative form of documentation, however, where the recordists were as interested in descriptions of work and the lives of workers as they were in their songs.  Another example from this era is Charles Harold's interviews with carnival workers recorded in Washington DC in 1941.  Here's a portion of his interview with a fortune teller.
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>>The recordings of Miller, Langenegger and Harold [inaudible] the kinds of occupational collections more commonly acquired or generated beginning in the 1960s and especially after the founding of the American Folklife Center in 1976.  With an expanded mandate to collect, according to the American Folklife Preservation Act, all traditional expressive culture shared with various groups, there was an incentive to document work itself in a detailed way beyond songs and music.  Thus, rather than concentrating on the singing traditions of mariners and fishers, documenting the overall culture of maritime occupations was central to two more recent collections.  The Florida Maritime Heritage Survey of 1986 sponsored by the American Folklife Center and the Bureau of Florida Folklife Program examined the maritime folklife to the Apalachicola region of Florida, including boat building traditions and occupational lore.  In the Adelaide de Menil's Men's Lives Project collection, also from the 1980s and sponsored by the Rock Foundation, documented the history and occupational culture of a small fishing community of surfmen and baymen on the east end of Long Island, New York.  Similarly, the Alicia J Rouveral collection on Northern Neck, Virginia waterman sponsored by the Greater Reedville, Virginia Association comprises a series of interviews that Rouveral conducted with watermen in 1991 and is one of several collections held by the archive on the occupational traditions of the Chesapeake Bay.  In 1977, one year after its establishment, the American Folklife Center began an ambitious program of field work projects, often cosponsored with other agencies or institutions such as the National Park Service or state arts councils.  Almost all of these projects included an examination of regional occupational traditions.  For example, the Paradise Valley Folklife Project, conducted between 1978 and 1982, documented ranching culture in Nevada among other topics.  Here's the American Folklife Center's Carl Fleischauer interviewing Leslie J Stewart on the division of labor at branding, recorded at Ninety-Six Ranch Nevada on April 9, 1981.
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>>In the 1990s Center staff conducted detailed documentation of life and land use in southern West Virginia's Big Coal River Valley.  This project explored mining, gardening, foraging, and domestic work among other occupations.  Here's American Folklife Center's Mary Hufford talking to Sadie Miller about canning food.  The interview took place in Mrs. Miller's kitchen in Drew's Creek, West Virginia, September 28, 1995.
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>>Many of these projects continue the Center's explorations of occupations related to resource extraction and agriculture, documenting at a much more immediate and detailed fashion than previous field work -- the jobs of mining, fishing, gardening, ranching, drilling or the domestic duties associated with the land and sea.  Thus the Italian Americans in the West Project documented mining and ranching among other occupations.  The Maine Acadian Culture Survey looked at farming and logging among the Franco-Americans of northern Maine.  The Rhode Island Folklife Project examined fishing and boat building as well as other occupations.  The Pinelands Project looked at land and sea use occupations in southern New Jersey.  The Grouse Creek Culture Survey explored ranching in Utah.  Beyond the land, sea, and home, however, these projects took the Center's folklife research into the modern era of a holistic view of the traditions of work.  Especially in those projects that explored urban culture the Center expanded its investigations to include the factory, the retail store, the service sector, and the office.  The Rhode Island Folklife Project, for example, looked at traditions found in textile mills, local businesses and markets.  But even some of the more rural based projects broadened the boundaries of occupational traditions such as the New River Gorge Folklife Survey , which examined the tourist industry, especially white water rafting, in an area of West Virginia that used to rely for employment solely on mining.  The two projects that exemplify this urban, one might say indoors, approach to the culture of work were the Lowell Folklife Project and the Working in Patterson Project.  The Center documented various aspects of the urban ethic industrial cultures of the old mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, concentrating to some extent on the traditions of work in the city's textile mills.  But the very name of the Working in Patterson Project indicates that its primary purpose was to explore occupational life in America's first industrial city.  Since the 18th century, Patterson New Jersey has been a hub of heavy industry.  And in 1994, the American Folklife Center conducted a large field work project to document not only the city's factories but also its retail trade and ethnically related businesses.  A team of folklorists and other documentarians collected materials on, among other workplaces, the Watson Machine International factory, an Italian meat market, a Dominican dress maker, a large garment factory, and African American funeral home, and a restaurant specializing in hot Texas wieners.  Here's Luz Garcia, a hairdresser, explaining her work to Tom Carroll on April 14, 1994.
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>>These Center generated projects contributed thousands to documents to the archives, sound recordings, videos, photographs, manuscripts and even some artifacts.  But they also contributed new perspectives on the culture of work that guide the Center's present activities.  All workers have a story to tell.  All engage in the culture of their workplace.  Let me conclude by mentioning two other archival collections, that, although not primarily intended to document occupational traditions, they nevertheless represent a source for any interested in this topic.  For over ten years the Veterans History Project has been interviewing and collecting materials on veterans' memories of war.  With the stories of over 70,000 veterans, this collection is not only a window on military history, but also a many-voiced examination of the military as an occupation.  For over seven years the Center has been archiving the interviews generated by the StoryCorps Project.  StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit initiative that has allowed family members, friends, and coworkers to interview each other about their lives.  The result is over 30,000 recorded interviews in the Center's StoryCorps collection, in which people discuss just about any topic that you can imagine.  But many of these interviews discuss work.  In fact, in searching the StoryCorps' database for the topic 'workplace life', which is one of 17 work related topics searchable in the database -- in searching workday life, one can retrieve over 12,000 interviews.  While many of these interviews touch only lightly on occupational culture, a good portion will document work in a substantial way.  For example, there are 106 interviews that discuss office parties.  The American Folklife Center has a long history of documenting the culture of work and workers.  And this coverage has evolved over the last 82, but so has work itself.  The Center will need to explore the changing nature of work, the workplace, unemployment, the worker in the digital age, and other aspects of culture  that affect modern occupational traditions if it is to remain responsive to the public that it serves.  Thank you.
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>>David Taylor: Well thank you very much Michael.  I must say I look forward to examining our subject file on songs in the archive I've never heard before.  I'm sure everyone else does as well.  It's been my privilege to work on some of the field projects that Michael mentioned which have typically been team-based.  A number of us folklorists, historians, documentary photographers and filmmakers have worked together in the field in the various places that Michael mentioned and a few others besides.  I want to acknowledge two colleagues who are here today who worked on some of those projects, in particular the Working in Patterson Project, Tim Lloyd and Bob McCarl were hardworking members of those field teams as well.  And many other folklorists around the country have taken part in these large scale projects.  I think there have been 14 of them since 1976, something along those lines.  In any case, I'm David Taylor from the American Folklife Center.  And it's my pleasure now to introduce the next panel where you'll meet the last pair of Archie Green Fellows for 2010.  Yesterday, of course, we met the first two, being Bob McCarl and Steve Zeitlin, talking respectively about their work along the Eerie Canal and in the Silver Valley of Idaho.  And in the next session we're going to hear about work documenting the work lives of working musicians in New Orleans.  And to tell you about that we have the distinguished broadcasters and folklorists Nick Spitzer and his colleague Maureen Loughran, who are here.  And also one of the folks that's assisted them in their research, Derrick Tabb, is here as well.  And right now I want to call up Nick Spitzer to begin the presentation.  Let's welcome Nick.  
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>>Nick Spitzer: Good morning everybody.  You feeling pretty good today?  It was 70 degrees when I left New Orleans, folks.  But it's a little clearer and sunnier today.  So I felt pretty good.  And actually I told the Capital policeman on the corner, I said, 'How you feeling today, my brother?'  And he just looked at me.  I said, 'It's better than yesterday.'  He agreed to that.  I lived in Washington ten years.  It's always important to try to encourage people in their everyday lives to have some hope.  A lot of what we're about is the future of the United States and its culture -- the future authentic America if we could call it that.  And we are actors on this playing field.  We need all the archival work.  It's wonderful to hear that.  The fortune telling interview is fabulous.  Yes, it is about belief and it is about the encounter and the conversation and a little reassurance that maybe you might pull a lucky number.  We did a project and are doing a project called Roots to Recovery as part of the Archie Green Fellowship.  We were actually funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities quite generously to produce ten programs.  But we also had to find matching funds.  And also a lot of our work is focused in certain kinds of field research.  The NEH is sort of focusing us on being able to get the research out through American Roots, but they kind of dovetail nicely.  And Peggy and I worked together on this in the very beginning because there was time when we weren't funded to do some of the things we were trying to do.  But what I want to do very briefly is first talk about Roots to Recovery and one of the five programs that we're doing under the Archie Green Fellowship and then turn from that back to New Orleans.  Derrick Tabb is here from Rebirth Grass.  And we don't want to miss time to be able to chat with him -- sit down front and do a little conversation.  But let me just say that the five programs that we did Roots to Recovery under the Archie Green Fellowship or are doing, one was Cowboys Ride into the Future.  That's what we called it.  And we worked with the Western Folklife Center Folks and Christina Barr and others to gain the kind of depth information that people have those long term work relationships to the folks I communities so that we can deal with the breadth.  That's our role is to deal with the breadth, but have the substantial depth underneath it so that the programs are strong programs both from a humanities perspective, but also arts and entertainment perspectives of how you produce the program.  Recently in Philadelphia, working with the Philadelphia folks and Debra [inaudible] and other produced a show on the Philadelphia soundscape, dealing with sort of the old classic soul scene and Italian singers of sweet songs and the Mummers and many other folks -- the mayor himself a disco DJ at one point talking about transitioning from that kind of work.  You'll just have to listen to these on the website.  I should also mention that we're doing a program on the National Folk Festival.  That's coming up a little bit later into the 2011 American Roots Season.  And the program that kind of is a lynchpin of what I want to say today is our New Orleans 5 AD -- New Orleans five years after the deluge program.  And our basic belief, though we are in New Orleans and care deeply about New Orleans and south Louisiana and Gulf Coast culture, we believe there is something that is bigger than New Orleans.  Obviously culture, jazz, and the music of New Orleans soul, R&B and funk, the carnival, the food, the rituals, the festivals, the architecture have inspired people across the United States and the world to look at America's great Creolized city.  But we also think that one of the real messages from New Orleans today is not strictly a message of the [inaudible - ] life.  Yes we have that life.  But New Orleans has always had a deep tradition of hard work underneath it all.  So many jazz musicians, from the Seventh Ward in particular, were craftsmen.  I've spoken here about this at the Library in the past -- plasterers and bricklayers and iron workers and stonemasons and defined finished carpenters.  And so the roles of work and play have always gone together there.  And the decision to become a working musician often was a decision at to whether you'd continue to be a tinsmith or not.  And Louis Armstrong's banjo player, Johnny Saint Cyr, was a plasterer and he went back to that when he didn't want to tour anymore.  During the Depression he came back home to New Orleans to be a plasterer.  So we feel like New Orleans has a message in its way of life, not just the quality of life as the post Richard Florida generation talks about culture, but a way of life -- a cultural continuity that is of value to the United States and what it's represented in the recovery from this terrible disaster that is at once natural but also a manmade disaster -- manmade in the sense that our terribly poorly realized modernity led us to a bad sort of governance and a bad levy system.  And a lot of things that allowed what happened to happen, not just the forces of nature.  So what did we learn from this?  We learned that people come back to New Orleans because they want to be home.  They want to live inside the neighborhood, inside the family, inside all the art and the music.  They wanted to live within the intangible cultural landscape of the place.  So return and recovery have all been a part of reconnecting to culture and culture is the key agent of the recovery.  And we began to feel that culture and community based life, something all folklorists believe but have sometimes difficulty realizing it in economic and social terms -- we believe that this is in fact at the root of the American recovery as well at a time when Wall Street and Washington, with all due respect, offer little succor to people at local levels who have to rely on their creativity, their families, their sense of tradition, their sense of place and their sense of hope.  So we quickly will give you just a little look here at Detroit.  I think Detroit in our initial conversations was sort of the poster child for disaster in American recessionary terms.  It's been going on for awhile.  I won't belabor the history here.  And I think it's real -- I'm just going to give a few visuals to give you a sense of this.  I love this sort of old sign from the late 50s where you can get your car washed while you go to the soda shop or you can go to the little bookstore next door that says Pulp.  That means reading pulp fiction.  An art café, soul food -- no mention of music here.  This was  a white place at the time.  Of course Motown goes on later to transform America's understanding of race and to bring a sense of joy and possibility and romance in music that transcends race even while it is, of course, the great African American operated company of Berry Gordy.  So Enjoy Detroit, it seems a bit ironic I suppose as the letter fade here.  Okay.  In reality when you go around Detroit 60 percent of the population is present.  That means 40 percent is gone.  Vacant lots, burned down houses, cars -- the ethnomusicologists recently referred to the sort of gazing at this landscape as a kind of disaster porn.  That is the consumption of this sort of visceral sense of the landscape and in a sense a sort of exploitation of looking at it.  And I suppose at some level we can be seen as voyeurs at time.  I'd like to think, though, that you look at these landscapes and you imagine what they were and what they could be.  And sometimes you need something to stimulate you to do that.  And sometimes people have to look at the worse things in life to be able to figure out what the better things might perhaps be.  And in New Orleans we had a parallel example with all the tourists coming to look at the Lower Ninth Ward and locals objecting to the buses of tourists coming through.  But little by little it was sorted out.  Because people began to realize that the folks would buy something, would pay for a tour, or sometimes they'd bring the folks who were involved in the disaster in as tour guides.  And little by little a bit of that was reconciled.  And of course, New Orleans is a city which has had a huge amount of tourism for a very, very long time.  So the matter of reconciling tourism wasn't just going to be booze and blues on Bourbon Street or some other form of performance entertainment tourism.  So going around the landscape, one sees all these incredible buildings empty.  One sees all the graffiti, the gas stations, two guys whose job is not to work in the gas station but to clean weeds off the lot of the gas station.  This goes on and on and on looking at houses.  Everywhere you turn, it's just sort of overwhelming.  And then you go to a little festival and you see those shots from the 70s when they were building the renaissance center and putting in the monorail.  And you go downtown to Detroit and half the traffic lights aren't working in that zone.  And you just are amazed by how people sort of believed one thing at some broad public/civic/political/financial leadership level and something else seems so very much in place.  And there is that Renaissance Center for folklorists.  You may recall we had a folklore society meeting there back in the 70s when some of the inklings of the troubles were beginning to emerge.  And there it is gleaming in the distance.  And I'm shooting back from where you just saw the gas stations and the car lots.  So what do we do?  Well we go around and we did start to look at some of the kind of old culture that hangs on including this wonderfully beloved shoeshine parlor, Red, who has passed on.  But some of his folks are still there.  And everyone is of course always talking about shoes make the man and a shoeshine gives you a good vision of the day and all the things that go with styling and the shoe shining.  And here's a gospel preacher who actually has one of the guys shining his shoes that's in the chorus in his church.  So these social networks that are there.  Notice the interior red and black style of the place.  It's all about style and relaxation.  It's mostly men there, but no only.  They say Aretha Franklin used to bring all her shoes in.  I think it's been awhile since Aretha was in parlor.  But there is talk of people getting all kinds of treatment of their shoes across the world of show business for which Detroit's famous.  That D is everywhere - the gothic D that you see on the hats of the Detroit Tigers, but also shows up on the necks and arms of guys involved in rapping and everyplace else.  Sometimes it's turned into a hand grenade.  Sometimes it's turned into brass knuckles by creative artists.  People use Detroit.  They want Detroit to be strong and tough and creative.  People talk about it all the time.  People aren't ashamed to be doing this work.  They see this as prideful work, making something look better.  They see it as work that gives them some exercise -- get deep in somebody's cowboy boot and take care of things for them.  I can aestheticize this and step back and say, 'Let's just deal with it artistically.'  And I do believe that it's important to tell the truth through beauty.  I think that's one of our key, key tropes in the world as folklorists -- is not forget beauty in the midst of all the trials and troubles and ugliness.  But I'm not going to tell you that looking at these brushes is the way to start thinking about shoe shining in the network.  And essentially an old occupation that's sort of been revived and is sort of a tourist site in a sense now as well as a remnant neighborhood site where all around here the blocks are pretty much empty.  Interviews with these good folks in shoeshine scene will be in our show about Detroit called, 'By Day I Make The Cars', quoting from the famous song, 'Detroit City' that will come out actually for the Martin Luther King holiday.  Just a reminder that there are things on the streets that give people their own culture back in the local media, in this case a gospel record shop.  And let me contrast, in nearby Detroit anybody that's been there knows the enormous amount of migration, particularly from the upland south, mostly Anglo American, but not only.  And of course the word on the assembly line for years was, 'We may have lost the war, but we took over Detroit without firing a shot.'  Go to bar in Ypsilanti many years ago when I was working for the Smithsonian and there was a jar of dirt for every Southern state on the bar right next to the Wild Turkey.  Speaking of things wild and turkeys, there was a turkey shot, yes, but we came out to the Raccoon Hunter's Club 25 miles from downtown in Romulus, Michigan where bluegrass music is played.  And out back the baying of the dogs comingles with the sounds of the banjos and the guitars.  And on a windy night, it's miraculous to hear dogs baying and bluegrass indoors.  And this is the country life that surrounds the city.  Everybody depicted of the elders, including this lady were assembly line workers, proud of the work.  They speak of it with nostalgia and pride.  They speak of the current moment with a sense of sorrow and tragedy.  This lady books the bands.  This is her grandson who is starting to help her book the bands.  And while they are just barely hanging on, they intend to keep this little place going -- one of the many things that gives you some sense of the continuity of future tradition.  And they refer to Ypsilanti, for example, as Ypsitucky.  And you've heard all the different names probably over the years of mapping Southern spots to the North and industrial north.  I particularly like this flag motif for our Labor Day weekend where we were recording in Hamtramck where the car plants have basically closed.  But I love the intermingling of the guitar necks and the wrenches there and the gears and the flowers and all the other elements.  Hamtramck is dominantly a Polish American community, but a variety of people showed up for this.  It's your classic American weekend carnival/festival/fair.  I wouldn't say that the music was curated folklorically exactly, but there's a great deal of traditional music embedded in it.  A lot of Polish insignia there.  Well you notice here is the Detroit D with a little Polish flag and coloration imposed on it.  And of course the menus are always good to check out.  And the food's good to check out.  There are many, many Polish food booths here and then basically hamburgers and hotdogs.  So the dominant discourse was that sort of thing.  Pierogi eating contests, people find ways to contest with food symbols.  Everybody knows that.  I like this one in particular.  It's about shipping things to and from the Old Country and the language, of course, telling you what you need to do and have to make it work for the parcel service.  And longevity on the landscape, looking at the building facades and seeing the names of people who built certain building on the main drag there.  And a musician, Mister Big Daddy himself playing polka music.  He played the Automobile Polka for us.  Asked how many automobile workers here today.  We got this on tape.  And in a crowd of about 600 in front of the stage, two people.  So that sense of that work really feels past to a lot of these folks.  Here's the mayor of the town dancing.  And actually she studied folklore at the University of Michigan.  I'd go into a lot of detail on all this but I think it's time to begin to transition here.  I do want to also point out though that the kinds of folks at the festival, while African Americans were not present in large numbers, they were present.  Everybody finds places to be and community, including the Islamic Center here.  And of course if you go to Dearborn, you see Arabs and Arab-American culture and food and restaurants.  We couldn't deal with everything in one radio program.  We didn't really deal with that music, at least as an interview that will be playing some of it we didn't deal with it with interviews.  And of course what would a carnival weekend -- fair -- anywhere be without the Bingo.  A form of money making and redistribution of wealth in these hard times, I suppose.  You take your chances.  I actually like these hanging dolls made out of dollar bills.  I don't think these are piñatas exactly.  And we did actually do a little bit of work with a local accordion maker and distributor.  I'm not going to dwell on that -- the Castiglione family and what he's been able to do as a niche provider of instruments to a city that has a long tradition of Eastern European music.  But what I want to do now it just give you one clip -- a five minute clip -- from our Detroit work.  And this is from a museum.  And if we could go ahead and roll the tape, I'm just going to say a little bit as that music starts up.  This is originally Miller Motors, a Hudson dealership since 1926.  Jack Miller grew up in the father's dealership.  He'll speak at the beginning.  They mainly dealt Hudsons.  He's got 30 vintage sedans, wagons, and coups all on the showroom floor.  And the interesting thing is they look like they just rolled off the assembly line.  That's what's so amazing about this place.  It's the Ypsilanti Automotive Heritage Museum.  Crank it up a little.
^M00:49:38
[ Music ]
^M00:49:46
>>Nick Spitzer: And here's Jack Miller.
^M00:49:48
[ Film clip ]
^M00:54:30
>>Nick Spitzer: We fade out here so we can shift off to the second portion of what we want to talk about.  That just gives you just a little sense of the life in Detroit there and the importance of presenting the culture and the sense history and memory but now also talking to people about the future.  And if you hear the program, we have a big thing on the comparison of both Motown and the auto industry, both of whom cite family as critical.  Working on the lines, family in the studio, a sense of pride in the production.  And those are sort of the big wheels, shall we say, that turn the program.  So we'll end to that.  And let's turn to the New Orleans.  And I'd like to invite of Derrick Tabb to sit here and join me.  Give him a round of applause as he comes up.
^M00:55:11
[ Applause ]
^M00:55:23
>>Nick Spitzer: Alright.  Well I gotta tell you the Rebirth Brass Band's been around since about 1982 and they are a legendary band in the city of New Orleans.  And they've done so much for the city.  I have to reflect that in 1993, the Rebirth was with us at the American's Fourth of July -- if anybody remembers the Clinton administration, we had a show out there on the Mall then.  And Rebirth was part of that.  But this is a band with deep roots in the neighborhood and in the community.  And Derrick, just tell us a little bit about your work.  He's the snare drummer with the band -- a very, very important person if you're walking down the street.
>>Derrick Tabb: I've been in the Rebirth for the last 14 years now.  I play snare drum with the Rebirth.  I started a program called The Roots of Music.  It's a nonprofit organization for kids, 9 to 14, dedicated to preserving the musical culture of New Orleans and also taking kids off the streets and giving them other options than just hanging out doing nothing.
>>Nick Spitzer: How has the music scene changed for you, for musicians in general, since Katrina as far as kids learning and what's been going on in the city?
>>Derrick Tabb: Well in the city now -- when I was coming up you had a lot of inspiration by other musicians, older musicians.  Those older musicians are not in the city as much because they have to travel because of the lack of gigs that's in the city.  And you don't have the inspiration for the kids seeing musicians coming up and wanting to be a musician.  So that whole scene changed.  And right now you're dealing with budget cuts and stuff that are taking music and arts out of schools.
>>Nick Spitzer: Maybe would could go to that first slide.  I want to show you guys a picture of Rebirth out on the street.  You haven't seen this Derrick.  This is you.  I think you're buried there behind the big tuba.
>>Derrick Tabb: Yeah.  I'm always behind Phil.
>>Nick Spitzer: Behind Phil Frazier.  And this is actually for the Pigeon Town Steppers.
>>Derrick Tabb: Right.
>>Nick Spitzer: How many second lines a year do you play, you think?
>>Derrick Tabb: I've cut down a bunch of them myself.  But I believe right now they are at 70 second lines a year.  Rebirth does almost 60 percent of them. 
>>Nick Spitzer: Those are walking in warm weather at times, yeah.
>>Derrick Tabb: Yeah.
>>Nick Spitzer: What's it like out there in middle of a second line when you're playing snare?
>>Derrick Tabb: Well, being a big guy, everybody wants to be next to the band.  It's kind of difficult to play sometimes.  And it gets a little frustrating, but the atmosphere is always energy.  A lot of energy is in the atmosphere of a second line.  And it makes you want to play more.  And it's a different feel.  Everybody should have a chance to really experience a second line once or twice.
>>Nick Spitzer: Why don't you flip the picture and we'll show some of the folks.  You can't see it too well, but people get up in your special clothes.  And I'm sure having the dancers out there whether it's the Money Wasters or the Treme Sidewalk Steppers or any of them, they kind of inspire you to play a little bit.
>>Derrick Tabb: Yeah.  The second line club inspires the band to go far and beyond your regular just playing.  When you get out there and see people really enjoying what you do and really inspired by what you're doing and they're jumping around acting a little wild, it really inspires you to want to play harder.
>>Nick Spitzer: Now we should tell people that these social aid and pleasure club -- pleasure is part of it.  And you're part of the pleasure.  You're entertaining and making the music.  Everyone's walking, talking, drinking, eating a piece of pie or whatever.  But there is social aid too.  What are some of the things that the clubs do for the communities?
>>Derrick Tabb: Well the club gives back because they throw little dances and stuff where they help out different members of the club or different people that's there in neighborhood.  You may have an old lady that couldn't pay the rent or something.  And some of the social aid and pleasure clubs go there and help out with the rent.  New Orleans used to have a big family base before Katrina, too, I must say.  It was more family oriented.  A lot of people was down the street from their family.  After Katrina, you have a lot of people that's spread out all over the United States now.  So right now the social aid and pleasure clubs have really stepped up to the plate in a lot of places where the family was stepping up at.
>>Nick Spitzer: Well it does seem that one of the real helps in the recovery is this idea that keeping the culture going in the things people live and love in the city -- live for -- but also the things that take care of people.  And in the old days they helped with burial and they helped with medical treatment and education during Jim Crow segregation.  But you've taken the idea of social aid yourself.  Tell us a little more about Roots of Music and why you decided to form this group and what they're doing now -- what you're doing with them.
>>Derrick Tabb: Well I started the Roots of Music because like I said earlier, I've been in the Rebirth for 14 years.  The Rebirth is an institution.  And we say we can play for just about anything.  We play from the womb to the tomb, we said.  We play for just about anything and one of the things that we play for is jazz funerals, where I got tired of playing for them because I was playing for a lot of kids that I knew.  Me being in the Rebirth, we tend to meet kids a lot because we are out in the streets.  We are more hands on with the kids.  And when you start to meet kids, you start to develop a love for them.  And after awhile you start to see these same kids on the t-shirts.  And it starts to hurt a little bit.
>>Nick Spitzer: Those are the funeral t-shirts where they have the kid's picture.
>>Derrick Tabb: Yeah.  That's the t-shirt -- the rest in peace shirts as they call them in New Orleans.  And I got tired of playing funerals.  So I told Phil, my boss, that I wasn't going to do anymore jazz funerals.  And he took it as kind of surprise.  But it was just every time you look around I was dealing with a kid that I had just met or had been dealing with for a little while.  So that brought me to saying that I wanted to do more with the community and taking and looking at my life and saying what saved me from the streets.  And I came up with The Roots of Music.  And it was inspired by my junior high band director who took an interest in myself when I had lost my grandmother.  I was raised with my grandmother from three weeks old to 12 years old.  My grandmother passed.  I got a little rebellious.  I got a lot rebellious.  And I wanted to build a program that was at Andrew J Bell Junior High because it was one of the best marching bands in the city.  And I thought I wanted to be in this band until I really got there and seen it was lot more work than just coming there and getting in the band and that was going to be it.  I could just be in the band, no having to get academically right, physically right, and musically right to be in this band.  And it really saved me from a lot stuff that I seen a lot of my friends getting into -- going to jail, getting killed.  So I said I wanted to give back in same kind of way.  Because Mister Rich was like a father to me, in a sense, because you spend more time with your band teacher than you do with actually with your parents.  And I stared to Roots of Music, but they had a few things that I wanted to change.  The main thing I didn't like not eating until seven o'clock at night.  I'm a big fellow.  I didn't like walking home from band practice because I stayed one block less than what I needed to get bus tickets.  And I didn't like not having any help with my homework because I'd be done forgot some of the stuff that went on in class.  I thought that it made more sense for me to deal with homework right after I get out of school.  It's still fresh on my brain.  And if I had a little help, anything that I had a little problem, I could get some help with immediately and it helped me reestablish what I learned in school.  And I changed that in my program where I got tutors from -- Tulane University has been great.  I just signed a three year contract with Xavier University.  And that's for tutors free of charge.  Tulane actually offered transportation for the tutors.  The meals, I had to have.  So I wound up getting a couple of my parents -- really a couple of my grandparents -- one grandparent and one parent to cook the meals for me and we pay for the meals.  And transportation, which is a killer, we offer for all of the kids to get to and from the program.
>>Nick Spitzer: We should point out that one of the great things the New Orleans School System did, and it's a much maligned public school system and it's had its problems, but one of the things it did do is have great band instruction.  And that was what was lost in Katrina.  And even though the charter schools are good in many ways and better than they were, less exclusionary and many good things happened, the band programs really haven't been there at the same level they were when Derrick was coming up.  So what he's essentially doing is using his own informal networks and his knowledge to build a new network of instruction.  Let's listen to a little tape.  We got a little tape here.  This is one of your own teachers.  Because he always has to supervise music people -- musicians -- to be teachers.  Can we play that track just to give you a little taste for them?
>>Derrick Tabb: You got all kinds of surprises for me.
>>Nick Spitzer: We got surprises for you.
^M01:04:38
[ Recording ]
^M01:05:03
>>Nick Spitzer: How much practice should we let them listen to Derrick?
>>Derrick Tabb: Not that much.
^M01:05:08
[ Recording ]
^M01:05:15
>>Nick Spitzer: So tell me about how the kids respond to this.  How many are showing up and how is this going for you?
>>Derrick Tabb: Right now in the program we have 125 kids in the program.  On a daily basis, I have about 90 to 95 percent attendance.  I have practice five days a week.  The reason why we have so much practice is because the kids are getting like a college education in music in a little bit of time.  We have practice from 4 to 7 after school.  And on Saturdays, we have practice from 10 to 2.  Saturday's practice is no academics.  It's strictly music.  Monday through Thursday we have academic tutoring that happens for an hour and a half.  And then we have musical learning that happens for an hour and a half.  And I have 500 kids on the waiting list. 
>>Nick Spitzer: Oh man.
>>Derrick Tabb: I stopped counting at 503.  I have a kid that called me yesterday morning.  So I guess I have 504.  Everyday I get phone calls.  And I think it's because we - and by the way I haven't done any advertisement.  All this is word of mouth of the kids.  The kids love the program.  They ask why I don't have practice six days a week because they want to practice on Fridays.  I have to say that we started the program at Tipitina's in '08.  And we started the program with the expectations of 19 kids showing up to practice.  We knew 19 kids from the neighborhood was going to show up at a practice.  And we brought drumsticks and a couple of horn instruments for 19 kids.  And the first day of practice 42 kids showed up.  
>>Nick Spitzer: Yeah, it's been going that way.
>>Derrick Tabb: And the second week of practice we had 65 kids.  The third week of practice was over 100.  My partner Allison was like, 'Hold up, Derrick.  We don't have any funds for this.'  At the time we started the program, it was supposed to be a pilot program for, like I say 19 kids.  I was using a lot of my own money to support the program -- didn't know that it was going to blow you as fast as it did because just about a couple of months later we got featured in a newspaper.  Then MSNBC came down.  Then CNN came down.  I wound out getting nominated as being a CNN Hero.  And everything just blew up a lot faster than what we ever expected it to blow up.  And in the meantime a lot of people was thinking that the funds was just rolling in with all this exposure when funds weren't rolling in like this because everybody was sitting back saying, 'Well I know they're doing good because they're getting all this exposure.'  And everything that I was doing in the press made it just seem like a feel good program instead of a program that's in need of help financially.  But someway we just wound up making it.  And it really was that drive from the kids that helped everybody.  Because my staff went without pay.  Buses wasn't getting paid.  And it was just a real trying time.  It still is a trying time because a lot of ya'll know that nonprofits are constantly begging everyday.  But the kids love it.
>>Nick Spitzer: It's amazing how much work nonprofits have been doing in the recovery -- more than the government of the city or the state.  Though a little by little funds have been flowing form those sources.  But a lot of this has been about fundraising to keep things going that are really working.  The same thing is true with Sweet Home New Orleans.  It's effectively the New Orleans Housing Authority for resettling all the ritual arts music practitioners.  What's their favorite music?  What's their favorite tune?  What do they want to play?
>>Derrick Tabb: Right now we just did a Lenny Kravitz number called, 'It's Not Over Till It's Over.'  And right now I think that's probably their favorite number.  Right now the kids -- I believe the video that he caught was about  a year ago.  
>>Nick Spitzer: Do we have time to try a little video?  Can we make it work?  Or is it a little...let's see what we got here.  He's got a website thing.  Oh okay.  Okay.  We'll set that up.  Questions for Derrick?  This is obviously amazing what he's got going.  And we're lucky that he's here.  He's got a gig tonight at The Maple Leaf, right?
>>Derrick Tabb: Yeah.
>>Nick Spitzer: Yeah, every Tuesday night at the Maple Leaf Rebirth plays.  So he's got to get back to that.  But questions for Derrick while we got a moment to set up just one little short track.  
^M01:09:56
[Pause]
^M01:10:00
>>Nick Spitzer: Okay.
>>Are the kids' parents musicians?  Or do the kids come to this on their own?
>>Derrick Tabb: 100 percent of the kids were beginners, didn't have any musical knowledge whatsoever.  And when it comes down to the kids getting there, we had kids just walking up to the building, just catching our buses.  So I don't believe I ever had -- maybe one parent to really come and sign up their kid.  Maybe one that I can remember.  I can actually play -- this is actually the phone call from yesterday.  And this kid's calling himself.  This is not --
>>Nick Spitzer: You've got a great phone tree by the way on your answering machine.  You've got one person for marketing, one person to sign [inaudible], one person to book a Rebirth gig, and one person -- well you're the one to talk to you.  Put it on speaker. 
^M01:11:01
[ Voicemail ]
^M01:11:30
>>Nick Spitzer: Wow.
>>Derrick Tabb: That's everyday.  I get phone calls everyday from kids.  At some point you have to say no to some kids.  I'm actually working with a guy from -- Maurice, I can't think of his name right now.  Maurice is really working with me from the University of Virginia.  And he's trying to design a building and get other people to help me to raise money to get a building.  Right now I'm focusing on maintaining the program and getting funding to sustain the program.  We're actually going to start a campaign to sustain on the 18th of this month.  And ya'll can look out on the website and see what we have for that. 
>>Nick Spitzer: Do you think there's a future for the working musician in New Orleans?
>>Derrick Tabb: Yes and no.  I say there's a future.  They are going to have gigs in New Orleans.  But as far as being able to maintain a living in New Orleans, no.  We're going to always have to go outside of New Orleans to make a living.
>>Nick Spitzer: Well that balances off, having been there.  I'll tell you what.  Before we wrap here, do we have website or should we just -- we can just play Saints.  
>>[inaudible] 
>>Nick Spitzer: Oh, during the break, okay.  Well why don't we go out on Saints?  We've got Saints.
>>Derrick Tabb: Oh, yeah that's good.
>>Nick Spitzer: They sound awful good doing Saints.
>>Derrick Tabb: That was their number one song at the time.  They loved that number.
>>Nick Spitzer: And let's point out in New Orleans jazz history, pop music of all kinds has always been played.  So have hymns, so have blues, so have marches.  So whether it's Lenny Kravitz or the Rolling Stones or this.  Let's crank it up.  Give Derrick a round of applause.  Derrick Tabb from Rebirth and Roots of Music.
^M01:13:03
[ Applause ]
^M01:13:11
[ Music ]
^M01:13:19
>>Nancy Rogers: Good morning and welcome back.  Thanks very much for taking your seats.  We are now at Panel Four called Culture at Work: Art, Humanities, and the 21st Century Workforce.  My name is Nancy Rogers.  I'm representing the IMLS here.  And this is a subject very close to my heart, having had that heart spend 23 years at the National Endowment for the Humanities.  This morning we have four speakers.  Our first two speakers will talk about their research, give us a broad overview of this field, and kind of set the stage for us.  The second two will talk more about fieldwork and how things play out in the museum library cultural institutions field.  We're going to begin Jeffrey Groen.  Jeffrey comes to us from the Department of Labor, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  He's done some very interesting work on the experience of evacuees after Katrina and has done a major study on doctoral education in the humanities.  So we look forward to hearing him.  Jeffrey.
^M01:14:36
[ Applause ]
^M01:14:44
>>Jeffrey Groen: Thank you very much.  It's great to be here.  For those of you who can see the slides, I have some visuals over there.  The title of my talk is Humanities Scholars:  Doctoral Education and Careers.  And the standard disclaimer applies.  The views I'm going to express, if I do express any, are my own and now those of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Okay, it works.  Good.  Just to give you a sense of where I'm headed, I'm going to talk about my research on doctoral education in the humanities, specifically a large of foundation funded initiative called the Graduate Education Initiative.  And I'll speak more specifically about that and what it is.  I'm going to talk about some of the basic patterns in the data with respect to student experiences and their transitions form graduate schools into the job market.  I'm also going to talk about financial support and some changes to doctoral programs that were made as a result of this initiative.  And then in my closing remarks I'm going to talk a little bit about a particular trend in the scholarly workforce that is the academic labor market -- some changes that affect humanities workers as well as workers in other fields and that's the increasing use of part time and non-tenure-track faculty in United States universities.  So the research that I've done recently is on the Graduate Education Initiative, which is a large initiative that was launched by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation in 1991.  And it ran for ten years.  It was the largest effort to improve graduate education in the humanities in the United States.  And altogether the foundation committed about $85 million to support the initiative.  But the goals of the initiative were to improve graduate education through improving the structure and organization of PhD programs in the humanities and the related social sciences.  As indicators of these goals were the amount of attrition, that is students who start programs but then drop out before finishing.  The goal was to reduce that attrition and also to shorten the average amount of time that students spend working on the PhD.  The initiative was novel in that it shifted reform efforts from individual aid to students -- what economists call block grants -- to departments.  So the focus was on departments rather than high achieving students.  But students ended up being the recipient of most of the aid.  It was distributed in a different way to departments and then passed on to students.  But the focus of departments was that way in order to be more direct in terms of trying to get departments to change the culture and various aspects of what happens because that's really where things happen in graduate programs in the department.  The Mellon Foundation selected ten major research universities to participate in the GEI to receive the funding.  These universities were chosen because they had attracted the largest numbers of recipients of Mellon Foundation Fellowships in the humanities, which was a prior program of portable grant aid.  So students could receive the money and then they could choose which programs to go to.  So generally these were universities with the elite programs in the humanities and the related social sciences.  They were institutions like several Ivy League schools like Columbia, Cornell, Harvard and Princeton.  Some other private institutions like Stanford and Yale.  And then there were some top public universities, Berkley and the University of Michigan.  The fields that this covers -- once the universities were chosen, they could nominate four to six departments to participate in the initiative.  And they had to be willing to undergo examination by the foundation and then construct changes to their programs to be consistent with the goals.  The fields that were covered were sort of the usual suspects in the humanities such as English, art history, classics and then what we call related social sciences such as anthropology, history, and political science.  Like I said each department developed a plan to improve its doctoral program in a way that was consistent with the goals of the initiative.  Where I became involved was in the evaluation stage.  And even before I got involved there was a lot of data collected even from the beginning on the students that were passing through these programs.  So specifically there was an institutional data component which was -- the college or the universities that the students went to, they provided information on each student who began a PhD program in the participating departments, starting back in 1982.  So that was almost ten years before the initiative started, they went back and collected those data.  So we have information on what happened before and then up until 2006, so several years after the program ended.  So that's a key feature of the data in that we have information on all students who started these programs, not just those who finished their programs.  And the data were collected at the 54 participating departments and also a set of comparison departments, which we used in the evaluation.  The comparison departments are largely drawn from other humanities departments at these institutions, but they are also drawn from three other universities that didn't participate at all.  The second main component of the data used for evaluation was a survey that was sponsored by the foundation and conducted in 2002 and 2003.  And that was a follow up survey sent to all students who were in the 1982 to 1996 entering cohorts at these participating and comparison departments.  And the survey allowed us to obtain information about the transition from graduate school to work.  So we find out what the work experiences that people had after either finishing the PhD or not finishing the PhD.  So we were able to follow both of those groups.  We had information on their experiences during graduate school and also the work and things like publications before and after completion.  Let me talk about some specific findings and patterns in the data.  And these are taken from a book that I wrote with three coauthors.  And the book was published last year by Princeton University Press.  It's called Educating Scholars.  And I'd like to thank my coauthors Ron Ehrenberg of Cornell University, Harriet Zuckerman of the Mellon Foundations, and Sharon Brucker of the Foundation.  So to get a sense of the student data, these are information on all students who passed through these programs.  And prior to the initiative, about half of the students who began in these programs ended up completing the PhD.  And about half the students ended up leaving the program or dropping out before finishing.  So on the slide, for those who can see it, for the 1982 to 1985 cohorts -- so these are students who are largely unaffected by the initiative because they had passed through their programs by the time the initiative had started, some maybe towards the end -- the graduation rate was 53 percent.  Forty-five percent had left their program without finishing and 3 percent were still continuing as of 17 years after entering.  The average time to degree among the students who graduated was 8.2 years.  And the figures at the bottom show the timing of attrition and completion among those who either dropped out or graduated.  The figure on the left shows that most of the attrition in these programs is early on.  So roughly 75 percent is in the first four years and maybe around 50 percent is in the first 2 years.  So attrition happens relatively early.  But there is some late attrition.  And that's probably more of a concern for policy makers because students that make a lot of investment of time in these programs and then ended up dropping out.  So people are generally more concerned about later attrition than early attrition.  In terms of completion, the right figure shows that the most common years for graduating are years six, seven, and eight.  But there is a pretty significant right tail of the distribution.  There's still a significant number of students and percentage of graduates who finish in ten years or more.  It's probably 20 percent graduating in ten years or more.  So that's noteworthy for these fields.  In terms of financial support, well financial support offers -- it's a big recruiting tool.  Students who are able to choose among departments go to the department that offers them the best package of aid.  And one of the things that we observed over this time period is a large increase in the percentage of students who are awarded multiyear packages at the time of admission.  Now this is driven by two things, I think -- probably three things.  One is that more competition in the market for top students and that's one way that departments can attract the best students is to offer them multiyear packages.  By multiyear packages, I mean that when students come in, the department is guaranteeing them funding for a fixed number of years, say two or three, four or five years.  It might not always be fellowship, but they could mix in teaching and research assistant or something like that.  But it's more or less guaranteed at the beginning.  And another force in this direction is some of these programs deliberately became smaller over time in order to increase funding on average for the students that were there.  Now these trends in the figure shown is they begin in 1982, so well before the initiative.  But then when the initiative came in the early 90s, the trends kind of accelerated.  And a final reason is that the participating departments received a lot of money from the foundation and they were able to -- a lot of that went into student aid.  So they were able to commit.  And that's actually kind of a unintended consequence of the initiative is that it was associated with and increase in multiyear packages because it was kind of counter to the goals of foundation in that they wanted the aid to be more contingent on student performance.  So if you passed your exams then you would be able to qualify for a fellowship.  That's kind of the idea of setting up these various hurdles.  So that if students pass then, then they were rewarded with, say, a dissertation fellowship.  And so these multiyear packages were kind of unintended -- the rise in them were.  And we find some evidence that we report in the book that these packages are associated with a substitution of late attrition for early attrition.  So students get these packages.  They're able to persist while they have the packages, but when they run out then that's where the attrition ends up happening.  To give you a sense of how many students are getting aid, this shows by type of support.  So fellowships are most common early in programs.  These are data for the participating departments and the controlled departments combined.  Around 60 percent of students had fellowships in their first year.  And that percentage declined over a student's career with their year in the program.  Teaching responsibilities are relatively light in the first year.  Only about 20 percent of students have teaching assistantship or research assistantship.  But that rises up to around 60 percent by the third year and then declines.  Summer support is something that the initiative had an impact on -- that they tried to instead of having big gaps over the summer where students were not learning or not engaging in research or productive activities, these departments increased the expectations for the summer and also had funding to go with that.  So that's one thing that -- I'm going to skip this slide.  Some of the findings on financial support.  We found that financial support patterns were relatively similar for men and women.  In terms of racial differences, we found that compared to white students, Black students, Hispanic students, and Asian students had more aid -- a larger percentage with certain types of aid.  We found that, not surprisingly, those with higher GRE scores had more aid, but those differences by ability or test score differences, those were higher earlier on in the programs because that's kind of what they have to go on is the test scores.  But then if you look and say that they're in the fourth year, the differences were much smaller.  We found that more generous financial aid is associated with higher completion rates.  However, even the most generous aid packages are associated with substantial attrition.  So this suggests to us that solving the financial aid problem is not going to - that by itself is not going to eliminate dropouts from these programs.  In terms of program redesign, I've already alluded to this to some extent.  That we found that not surprisingly the GEI improved financial support in these programs.  It increased the expectations for summer work.  Increased the seminar requirements that students had to do.  It also increased the clarity of timetables.  So by that I mean, this is what students need to do at each stage.  And this is what is expected of them.  And another we found is that the GEI changed expectations about the speed of dissertation completion.  In the survey there were questions about what is your department's attitude about the dissertation.  And sort of one extreme was they want me to write the grade book.  They want this to be the best thing of my career.  And the other extreme was they just want it to be a good product that is a contribution to new knowledge.  And we found that the GEI had an impact of students were more likely to report that they were encouraged to complete in a more timely fashion rather than continuing to work on it forever.  So in the remainder of my time, I want to talk about the transition to the workforce.  And among those who left their programs -- that is they dropped out before completing their degree -- we found that for them, that dropping out is not a career ender.  And lot of them went on to earn PhDs at other institutions, some in the same fields, some in different fields.  About 12 percent went on to get a PhD.  Another 20 percent went on to earn professional degrees including law and business degrees.  And that we found that there is relatively high early career labor market mobility.  Even though we collected data on their job at six months after dropping out and at three years, while some of them were in clerical or administrative support occupations at six months, most of them had transitioned into professional positions by three years.  Job outcomes for those who completed a PhD, around 70 percent were employed in four-year institutions.  Most students have a goal of trying to obtain a tenure-track position.  Only about 33 percent at six months end up getting into a tenure-track position.  But there are those who are in other positions -- non-tenure-track positions -- at four-year institutions.  And what we find is that there is a substantial transition from non-tenure-track positions at the six month point into tenure-track positions at three years.  So for example, among those who started in a full-time non-tenure-track position, about 58 percent of them had transitioned to a tenure-track position at three years.  We observed that the percent of the graduates who are employed in tenure-track positions declined over a time in our data, which is consistent with trends in the overall academic labor market.  And these final couple of slides are for all US degree granting institutions.  So that this first slide is the percent of instructional faculty who are full time over all fields, not just the humanities, has fallen from around 78 percent in 1970 to around 50 percent in 2007.  And these are trends that are happening not just for the humanities but in all fields.  For instance, in business, which is a relatively high paying field, there's significant use of part time and non-tenure-track faculty because the professionals want to have one foot in the nonacademic world and one foot in the academic world.  Looking at tenure, the trends are similar.  Among full time faculty, the percent with tenure has been declining over time.  Our final slide is just to discuss the reasons for the increasing use of non-tenure-track faculty.  The number one reason that people think of is the obvious financial pressures on universities with declining state support and other financial pressures.  And the non-tenure-track faculty is much cheaper than the tenure-track faculty in terms of the base salary and also benefits.  But there are other reasons that are more subtle and not as publicized.  One is sort of a specialization that non-tenure-track faculty are hired to do the teaching and especially teaching the introductory undergraduate course.  Whereas tenure-track faculty are increasingly specializing in research and graduate instruction.  Another is a flexibility that non-tenure-track faculty afford universities in the face of enrollment uncertainties.  And a final one is something that I'm looking at in some of my current work.  And that is a response to slack in the job market of new PhDs.  So if new PhDs can't find work in sort of the tenure-track positions that they want, they might be willing to accept non-tenure-track positions for a time either at their own institution or at another institution.  So I think I'm going to close with that because my time is up.  But thank you for having me.  And I look forward to discussion.
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>>Nancy Rogers: Thank you Jeffrey.  We are next going to hear from Sunil Iyengar from the National Endowments for the Arts where he is the director of the research arm there and does major research on the reach and the impact of the arts in the United States, for example with major studies such as 'Artists in the Workplace'.  Welcome Sunil.
>>Sunil Iyengar: Thank you.  Thank you very much Nancy.  And I want to thank the meeting sponsors for inviting me here to speak in this gorgeous building.  It's always great to be here although I haven't been to this room, I have to say.  I really was taken by some of those last slides you saw from Jeff.  I think it pretty clearly paints a sort of sobering picture in terms of tenure-track and non-tenure-track positions in the humanities -- tenure-track positions.  As many of you know, workers in the arts have all kinds of other challenges.  Many of them are in academia.  But I'll be talking actually about artists kind of in aggregate -- as a whole what we see with the data.  And I don't have any slides for you.  I'm going to actually be working off primarily a report that was referenced, 'Artists in the Workforce', which we released a couple of years ago.  And I didn't bring copies here, but you call can actually download copies and we can certainly send you some if you got to Arts.gov.  And let me just before I get into the studies -- some of the interesting data -- I just wanted to kind of backtrack a bit.  And one of the foremost challenges, I think, facing artists is really one of public perception.  And when I say facing artists I mean primarily as workers here.  That is to say, there's less of a public recognition.  And there could be that artists are real workers, so to speak.  One of the things we noticed, certainly, was the run up to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  There were some really spirited dialogues going on about the contribution of artists to the economy and so forth.  And there is some data that are really quantifiable.  There' s more data that is speculative.  So we certainly try to steer on the right side and talk about what we know.  And I can tell that one of the things our relatively new chairman, Rocco Landesman, has really been stressing is a motto called Art Works.  Some of you have heard of this.  And he talks about the variety of ways in which art works.  And one of the chief ways is of course literally through works -- through occupations that these artists fill.  And I'm actually going to just -- just to let you know, many of you probably know the National Endowment for the Arts does not fund artists directly, except for a few categories.  We fund primarily nonprofit organizations on a project-specific basis.  But some of those categories where we directly support artists are through national heritage fellowships and of course art director for Folk and Traditional Arts, Barry Bergey is here.  As well as jazz masters, opera honors, which are opera writers and writers and translators through fellowships.  But we certainly do support a lot of the work being done by artists.  And they are a really important constituency for us.  Of course, not least because they are involved with the arts organizations we fund directly.  And finally just kind of philosophically why all of this attention to research on artists.  Well you've probably seen a lot of studies or read articles about the kind new growth models for the economy, particularly now in these bleak times.  And one of the things that's come up repeatedly and many states and localities have kind of on a case-by-case basis have issued studies and reports looking at the role of artists and cultural workers in their local economies.  Many of you are familiar, for example, with the work of Richard Florida.  And no matter what you might think of some of his modeling, certainly there are many other researchers who have looked at this in various dimensions.  One I want to mention -- and I'll occasionally cite some studies -- is Tim Wojan and the Department of Agriculture.  He's an economist.  He's actually looked at rural creative economies which often is overlooked and I think may be particularly interesting to some people in this audience.  And you can actually find that on the Department of Agriculture website where he talks about sort of places which are so called high amenity areas where there are lakes and parks and how oftentimes there are clusters of artists working there, often in the folk and traditional spheres and what the direct relationship is between those workers and the regional economies.  So there's a lot of great stuff out there, but I'm going to be talking to you now about some of the primary data sources we use to measure the artist contribution to the workforce.  Historically at the NEA we've developed a lot of these lists of artists through membership organizations.  We've often asked membership organizations to survey their members and get back to us.  And we oversee the surveys.  We did something like this for a study of choreographers several years ago.  And you can understand a lot of this is coming from the basic fact that these artists are hard to pin down.  We don't know where they are.  And a lot of times we don't have an ideal universe to survey.  We also have employed a method that has been used winningly by Joan Jeffri who is a researcher at Columbia University called snowball sampling which is essentially respondent driven samplings where we work through membership organizations and unions even to kind of take the survey, pass it and kind of see how it branches out is a simplistic way of putting it, but essentially kind of making the survey taker pass on the survey to others who are artists, for example.  And we did a really interesting study a few years back on jazz musicians this way.  It was called 'Changing the Beat' and it's actually available also on our websites, Arts.gov.  But our general kind of bread and butter way of getting at artists' occupations and getting data from them is really through the U.S. Census data.  Specifically in the past it was the decennial census data -- every ten years, so 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, getting richest data we could find and studying artists captured in those data sets.  But now more recently we've been moving towards using the American Community Survey, which is another census survey where we're actually going to be look at next the 2005 to 2010 data when that comes out probably at the beginning of next year or the end of this year.  And one of the things about that data, it's very rich.  And it's actually replacing, for us, the employment data that we would normally get through that decennial census method.  But one of the things about the data is it actually is now, for the first time -- and it might be interesting to you Jeff -- it's adding fields of concentration to the data.  So we will now be able to capture what did people major in when they were undergraduates, if they went to college, and how does this link up with what they ended up doing in terms of their occupation.  So that can be particularly useful -- within the arts it could be particularly useful for those of us who have written about the ways training in the arts can be manifest in many different types of occupations.  So that's some of the things we're doing.  And this study itself was based on both decennial census data from 2000 and the early versions of the ACS --the data that I mentioned -- the American Community Survey.  So it's actually covering about 15 years, right into the new century, from 1990 to 2005.  So what did we find?  Well since the mid-70s or so, the NEA has actually been tracking 11 distinct artist occupations.  And I'm just going to read them out to you, actors, announcers, architects, art directors, fine artists and animators -- that's within that category, dancers and choreographers, designers, entertainers and performers, musicians, photographers, producers and directors, and writers and authors.  And there is actually a very detailed description in the report about what those categories exclude.  We're not including for example technical writers, underwriters.  So you just to give you a sense -- and we're not including journalists for example.  So when you looked at the data since 1982, in our most recent iteration as I said, it was basically from the 2000 and 2005 data, we find that these artists as a whole have a combined median annual income of about $70 billion annually.  And when you do a pie chart of how they fit into the workforce, it's about two million artists altogether by this definition, with designers making up the largest single percentage, about 39 percent and fine artists, art directors and animators another 11 percent.  The remaining 50 percent is made up variously by architects, writers, authors, producers, directors, photographers and performing artists which includes some of those subcategories I mentioned.  Now it's important to note that to be counted as an artist, to fit into one of these professions, Americans need to have reported having worked the most number or hours in one of those occupations.  We estimate through separate Bureau of Labor Statistics data that there are another 300,000 artists who hold a primary job as nonartists.  Even among workers whose primary job is an artist occupation, they are less likely to have full year, full time work at artists.  It's about 55 percent versus 61 percent for the total US workforce.  And actually some researchers have actually looked at that fact -- the fact that there's so much part time employment going on, multiple job holdings going on among artists as really kind of an interesting strength when you look in aggregate.  I might now be the best thing for that particular artist, but when you look at artists as a whole, what you find artists doing is they're actually highly mobile.  Essentially what they're doing is there is a lot of crossover that goes over, cross fertilization in a sense.  Across industries, sectors, artists between the for-profit and the nonprofit sectors, between academic and government sectors, and they kind of move between these lines very rapidly and often in the course of a lifetime.  And even across and within communities.  Some of this research has been done by Ann Markusen who is a labor economist formerly of the University of Minnesota.  I invite you to take a look at her work.  So I talk about them being mobile.  Let's just think a moment about geography -- how would they be located.  So as many of you probably suspect, large urban centers really are magnets you see for a lot of artists.  More than 20 percent of all artists are located in these few cities -- LA, New York, Chicago, the DC area which is good news for us, and Boston.  But we do see that as a percentage of the labor force artists cluster in a broader variety of towns and cities.  So in other words, their concentration is actually surprisingly diverse, I think.  Just let me give you the big sort of sign post.  You do see the East and West coast -- if I showed a map you'd see a lot of clustering on the East and West coasts in places like San Francisco, Santa Fe -- that' snot quite the coast.  You know what I mean -- the west.  LA, New York, [inaudible] -- some of these things aren't the coast.  What I mean is think broadly.  Coast is a little inland.  Stanford, Connecticut, Boulder, Colorado, Santa Cruz  and Santa Barbara, California and Seattle.  So you actually do see some interesting concentrations in those particular cities.  But you really have to look at artists profession by profession.  Like, it's really much different for dancers than it is for say writers or for visual artists.  And we have documented all that.  Regionally, it turns out that the number or artists has grown more rapidly in the American West and South, Nevada, Utah, Florida, and Georgia.  And again, I just mentioned, though, it pays to look at different kinds of artists and where they concentrate.  Let me just give you some examples in terms of towns.  This was somewhat surprising but it makes sense when you look at it again.  You know Nashville was the number one music city in this sense.  It's the most concentrated per workforce per population for the size of the population, having the number of musicians they have.  And that was something that they immediately ran with.  Nashville, you can imagine it was on the headlines that they truly are the Music City according to the census.  But in fact, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Punta Gorda, Florida, anyone been there?  Those places are very highly concentrated with musicians for example.  And I'm just picking these two out of a top ten list for each of these places.  For actors, it happens to be Wilmington, North Carolina, Medford/Ashland, Oregon and some other cities.  For writers, actually there's some university towns here you see, Bloomington, Indiana, and Missoula, Montana.  And among states, Alaska and Nebraska are in the top ten states for the concentration of dancers and choreographers, Rhode Island and Michigan for designers.  It kind of makes sense.  You think of maybe the Rhode Island School of Design.  And Michigan I guess -- I was thinking of the auto industry, but I don't know if that really fits.  But Hawaii, Maine, Vermont, and Montana for fine artists.  So that's really interesting.  It's kind of fun to look at the way that we've constructed -- I hope it's fun -- the data to show where the concentration of these artists lie.  But I think the real basis for studying this, not only because we want to kind of point out -- this is such an area which the data are fairly scarce.  I have to before I even came to the Arts Endowment I didn't know that the stuff was being tracked.  And honestly if you didn't have an arts agency tracking this, it would be reported on the very top level through the census sources.  And fortunately now [inaudible] are in there really looking at this data too.  But let me just tell you that the benefit other than just kind of getting the data out is to really compare the data with those of other workers, right?  So to understand how we tracked with other kinds of workers.  So I referred earlier -- Rocco Landesman, our chairman, likes to say that artists are kind of like small business owners.  And it's true.  The entrepreneurial aspect of them really comes through the data.  Specifically artists are 3.5 times more likely than other workers to be self employed.  That's 35 percent of all artists versus 10 percent of the total labor force.  And yet they are generally more educated than the workforce as a whole.  Fifty five percent of them have a bachelor's degree or higher compared with 28 percent for the overall labor force.  This places them actually in the category of professional workers, which is a census category of occupations including other highly skilled workers.  So that's the good news.  But despite this high degree of contribution to what you might consider a creative and intellectual capital that artists bring to this nations and cities and towns and neighborhoods, artists generally earn less than workers with similar levels of education, about $6000.00 less annually or 20 percent lower than other professional workers.  Dancers, unfortunately, have the lowest median annual income.  And many performing artists also show very low performing incomes.  But for dancers it happens to be $15,000.00 on average annually.  And again, this is the most number of hours they work for any job is being in dance.  So those are some kind of sobering facts of our own.  But in terms of how this -- the last piece I just want to kind of bring to your attention is kind of where do we go from here and how does this data correspond not only with workforce data as a whole but really with our interests -- both as an arts agency and maybe what we can say a lot of the scholars are really interested in in labor economy looking at artists.  Well if you do a long term trend analysis, you find that actually from roughly 1980 to 1990 we saw the number of artists climb more rapidly in relation to the growth of the US workers as a whole.  So it actually grew at a faster clip than all workers as a whole.  Now they seem to track closely with the growth of the overall labor force.  So it actually has kind of plateaued after a really big spike in the 80s.  Like the workforce as a whole, they are also becoming more diverse racially and ethnically.  Though for most artist occupations women are still underrepresented.  So we wonder will that growth rate continue.  So we of course -- when the recession started and even shortly before -- we started releasing periodic research notes about the impact of the recession or anticipated an impact of the recession on artist workers.  And unfortunately I have to tell you the second year of the recession, as we reported, the unemployment rate of artists overtook that for civilian worker.  I can't tell you what it is to this day although we could run some numbers.  But it was, I think, at the nine percent level well before the general unemployment rate got there.  Architects in particular seem to have been affected adversely, no doubt because many jobs are tied to the struggling construction industry.  This is again -- we're right in the middle of it or we're told by other economists that we're out of the recession.  But it feels like one again has to kind of take a step back and look at the years running up to the recession when there were dips and maybe not this severe, but certainly there were dips in employment.  And it's possible to make projections.  And we actually are going to be releasing some data probably early next about sort of projections about careers that actually we got from the Department of Labor.  And we've kind of looked at the numbers and what this means all the way out to 2018 for artists.  But I'll tell you that some good news is one of the things -- again, you might know this Jeff -- but people seeking bachelors and associates and masters degrees in the arts, those degrees have actually been climbing at a higher rate than that of -- as a percentage of all degrees in recent years.  And I don't have the exact numbers with me but I can get those for you, where basically you're seeing a higher proportion of people graduating with degrees bachelors or associates or masters degrees in the arts -- arts subjects.  So we don't know if this will result in the employment of these soon to be workers as artists.  But it matches with a lot of the stuff we've uncovered through other study -- a lot of it qualitative, which is something I haven't talked about today.  Qualitative research -- case studies and some of the documentation type of studies were alluded to earlier where we know that there's essentially what economists call a high degree of psychic income.  It doesn't mean they know ESP.  It means that this is something they go toward.  And not to say that adverse affects won't make people drop out and unfortunately we know that artists dropping out of the workforce and not seeking work at very high rates in the last year or two.  But one hopes that some of the essential kind of inspirational motives for being an artist and the quality of life that many artist record through other studies and the qualitative research will allow many of them to persevere and those who have to, to persist, in being artists even in these adverse times.  So I'm just going to wrap it up.  One other thing I just wanted to let you know.  So I mentioned that we are going to be releasing data on projections about artists.  Another thing we did recently, actually about a year ago, is we held a forum at the NEA -- a cultural workforce forum.  And we invited a lot of our sister federal agencies as well as a lot of great researchers in various fields of the cultural workforce, so really broader than just artists.  And one of the things we saw everybody saying and this certainly resonates with our own experience is it's great to track these artist occupations and we should keep doing it.  But is there any way to get at arts and cultural workers as a whole?  And that's a really tough one because there's so many different units of that.  And how do you break it up?  But I would just say that especially in this time when there's a lot of talk anyway among policy makers about creativity and the creative professions and creative workers, is there some taxonomy we can create where we can lodge artists within a broader kind of canvas and talk about these various professions, how they relate to each other, and how they correspond with economic growth and the workforce as a whole.  So we certainly would like to pursue that.  I can't make any promises at this point.  But we certainly are avidly trying to see if we can work with other agencies and other partners in looking at maybe going to these other federal agencies and saying is there a way we can structure the coding a little differently or talk about the ways, at the survey level, to capture the workers who would fit into this creative/cultural unit and understand how they track as a whole.  So we're working on that.  And I know we'll be releasing results from that cultural workforce forum probably, again, early next year.  Thank you very much.
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>>Nancy Rogers: Thank you very much, Sunil.  I would just say very quickly that the Institute and Museum in Library Services also has a research arm that does really in depth studies of our universe of museums and libraries. Our next speaker is Mary Boone.  She is the state librarian in North Carolina and is involved in an absolutely wonderful project called Project Compass.  In thinking about libraries and their role in this economic climate, please remember that libraries are very much in the fabric of their communities sometimes the center of that community.  They are extremely trusted institutions.  I read in a monograph that Mary referenced that libraries are the North Star for people who are in trouble or in need, especially these days.  And I'm looking forward to her talking about Project Compass.
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>>Mary Boone: Thank you.  Thank you all very much.  I'm delighted to be here today to talk about Project Compass.  I want to start, however, by giving you a little context.  First of all we're going talk a little bit about the state of North Carolina and its economy.  And then we're going to talk about public libraries in general and the roles that they play.  We've heard a lot said in the last two days about places that people are leaving.  North Carolina is one of those places that people coming to.  Four years ago the US Census Bureau declared North Carolina the tenth most populous state in the nation, having just surpassed New Jersey.  They project that in the year 2030 North Carolina will be the seventh most populous state in the nation.  We are now at 9.2 million and we're projected to grow to 12.2 million.  But this growth is not the only thing that's changing in North Carolina.  This is a quote from the Raleigh News and Observer, 'North Carolina is evolving from a furniture workshop to a scientific workbench -- from a land of farmers to a land of bankers.'  Our state is transitioning from 20th century manufacturing work which was low wage work to 21st century knowledge work which requires 21st century skills.  In the 20th century the big three was always called in North Carolina textiles, furniture, and tobacco now only represents about 10 percent of our economy.  In North Carolina today, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, financial services, food processing, and vehicle parts are the major industries.  We heard a pretty awful story yesterday about food processing in North Carolina at the world's largest hog processing plant in Tarheel, NC.  We're also the second largest producers of turkeys which are illustrated here.  And I suspect that many of you had a turkey from North Carolina for you Thanksgiving Dinner.  Now about public libraries.  The thing to understand about public libraries -- what Nancy has just told us -- is that they are ubiquitous.  Libraries are with us everywhere.  There are 9,200 and some public library systems in the United States.  A system is usually operated on a county level, for example, with the main library in the county seat and branch libraries in the smaller communities in the counties.  This is a picture of the New York Public Library, probably the most famous public library building in America.  Now when you count up all these public library buildings, you get 16,671.  So you can see that there are a lot of places in America where there is a public library that there is no McDonalds.  We are literally everywhere.  There are those also who feel that because of the advent of the internet, there is no longer a need for public libraries, when actually exactly the opposite is true.  The blue line on the right is -- I know you can't read any of these little words, but you can see the blue line going straight up.  That's the per capita visitation in US public libraries for the last ten years.  And it ends in 2008 because that's the last year we have full statistics from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  Thank you very much.  Once we add 2009 and 2010, I think there'll be an even higher trajectory.  The one I particularly like is the one of the right, that almost vertical red line.  This is internet use at the Madison Wisconsin Public Libraries between 1999 and 2009, an increase of 1461 percent.  I think this demonstrates more than anything that I can say just how important public libraries are.  Nowadays we live in an online world and we are experiencing the first online recession.  And not everyone has access to the Internet.  We have our traditional roles that we play.  We're often really a community center in our communities with lots of activities and programs.  We are also womb to tomb organizations, something for everyone no matter what your age, no matter what your background, no matter what your profession.  Access to materials, to information, and to programs.  But what's happening nowadays is the demand for a lot of new services.  Because of this online recession, we are finding job seekers to be among our most important and demanding clients.  That goes hand in hand with e-government, with people who can't find a job wanting to start a small business, people wanting to learn to manage their personal finances, learn computer skills, information literacy, which is actually using the content on the Internet.  We even have libraries doing GED programs and other kinds of training programs to help people transition to the new economy.  What we find among our job seekers are great extremes.  I put this picture in of a mill worker because one of my favorite stories that I heard came from a small public library in North Carolina in which a woman named Annie walked into the library and looked around and was obviously a little bit uneasy.  And a library staff person asked if he could help her.  And she said, 'I have just lost my job of 33 years at Hanes Mills.'  You know, Hanes Mills, those nice white cotton t-shirts that Michael Jordan advertises -- Hanes Mill.  Annie was 60 years old.  She had a disabled child at home she was solely responsible for.  She wasn't old enough for social security or Medicare.  Annie needed another job.  It's a little hard for people like us and the professions that we are in to imagine this.  But Annie had never touched a computer in her life.  She did not know how to use a mouse, much less look for, find, apply for a job online.  This requires an enormous -- well what I want to say is there's an enormous demand for these kinds of services going on at public libraries all over America.  Then there's the opposite extreme.  We find in this recession more executives, managers, professionals looking for jobs -- out of work -- than we have normally traditionally seen.  And my colleagues at the Employment Security Commission verify this.  They see many, many people that are of a type they're not accustomed to seeing.  But what's really interesting that's happening with this group of people is that people like this gentleman get up in the morning, take their shower, get dressed, put their papers in their briefcase, get their laptop and go out the door...to the public library where they spend the day using the free Wi-Fi, looking for jobs, networking, attending programs, using resources, sometimes giving programs because these are very experienced and talented people.  They have created a whole new concept in the public library world that we call the library-as-office.  Now whether or not the public library is in the end going to get jobs for these people we can't really say.  But what we can say is that we play an enormously important role in the journey that they take.  The other thing that's happening with public libraries is that we are developing partnerships with organizations we have not partnered with before.  Just the very fact that I'm here today, I think demonstrates that.  This is very exciting for us.  IMLS has established a partnership at the national level with the US Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration.  From that, at the state level, we have worked with our Division of Workforce Development and our own Department of Labor and at the local level our public libraries are working with their local offices of the Employment Security Commission and the one-stop job centers.  These people are very, very happy about this partnership because there are a lot of things that we bring to the table.  One of the most important of which is longer hours.  Public libraries are open nights and weekends.  Most of these offices are 8 to 5 offices.  We bring training programs.  We bring activities for children like story hour which can keep children occupied or just let them loose in the children's room while the parent is there on the computer doing job applications.  We have something for the entire family.  And for that man that we just saw in that photograph, we bring a certain level of comfort.  This is not a person who is comfortable at a one-stop job center.  This is not someone who has any experience being unemployed but is very comfortable and familiar with the local public library.  So it's a place this person can feel at home.  So this leads us at last to Project Compass.  Project Compass came out of a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services which has we've spoken of here provides federal support to the nation's libraries and museums.  This grant was given to an organization called Web Junction.  Web Junction is an online learning community for public librarians.  It provides information resources on specific topics as well as online training.  Literally hundreds of courses that any library staff member can go online and do at his or her desk or at home in the evening.  When you want to learn about a new subject or if you want to gain competencies in certain areas.  You're a new children's library, but you have no experience with it.  So there's certain competencies so you can get a certificate at the end of a series of courses.  So Web Junction plays a very important role in the public library world.  It was originally funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  And we got involved in Project Compass because in North Carolina we came to understand very quickly at the beginning of last year how important the public libraries were in the job search process in this online recession.  People were literally waiting in line for the doors to open so they could come in and go to our computer labs.  Now every state has a state library agency.  We have in different states a lot of different purposes, but we are all the agency that is responsible for dissemination of federal funds from IMLS to libraries in our states.  We do that in North Carolina through a competitive grant program to all types of libraries -- academic libraries, school libraries, as well as public libraries.  One of the most important things we do in relation to this project is we do training in areas of work like Web Junction.  Only we do one-on-one training workshops.  We're responsible for continuing education of librarians and library staff members in our states.  This is one of the strongest and best programs that we have.  Because if you could imagine the changes in librarianship in the 30 years that I've been a librarian, it's astounding.  When I started there were no computers.  So now we largely live in an electronic universe.  And it's so technical one major academic librarian once said to me, 'I'm so glad I'm the director.  I couldn't possibly do any of those jobs anymore.'  I'm a little bit in that boat.  Nonetheless, we went ahead and did a training program in North Carolina, our job search workshops, in which we trained over 300 library staff in job search techniques, resources and partners.  We brought in people from the one-stop centers, from the Employment Security Commission, from local community colleges to meet with library staff, to talk about what the resources were, to show them how to help people.  Helping people find a job is a lot different than helping someone answer a reference question.  You get involved into personal information, even social security numbers show up on the screen.  A lot of library staff are not familiar with this and they're certainly not comfortable with it.  What we're trying to do is help them through this transition because we see that it's an important role for our libraries to play.  So in Project Compass One, which was our first year last year which has been completed, we basically brought state librarians together.  We did a survey.  We did some research.  Brought state libraries together so that we could talk about what we were doing.  And we had four summits in Atlanta, Portland, Providence, and Denver, which were attended by representatives from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.  The DC Public Library serves as the equivalent of the state library since there are a lot of DC pieces.  We're in DC, I will say that.  So you know the District of Columbia is equally represented.  Basically we started out and said 'This is what we did in North Carolina.  Now let's hear what you're doing.'  It was an information exchange because everyone is doing something.  And out of this came a lot of information sharing.  We learned from each other.  We copied from each other.  We took all this information back to our home states and were able to apply that.  So that we were all able to do it better.  Then Web Junction took all this information and created an online course.  So that people who were not able to come to these four workshops or four summits rather were able to learn what we learned online.  And a lot of these resources, state by state, are now listed on the Web Junction website which I'll just give you a little slide of here so you can get a sense of what it's like.  And you can go into this website and find anything about Web Junction including the final report that was created at the end of the year which is also listed in the bibliography of resources for this conference.  This was such a successful adventure that IMLS very graciously funded us again for a second year.  During this second year we're going to take it to a more local basis.  Instead of just state librarians talking with each other, we're not actually going to go out and do some in person training with librarians.  Web Junction is identifying areas in the United States which have the highest levels of unemployment where the greatest demand for these services are.  And we are going to do a national workshop where we'll do some train the trainer programs so that librarians can then go back and spread this out all over the country where it's needed.  We'll also present at state and regional library conferences to broaden the audience still more.  And again, it will be programming available online through Web Junction -- programming for the workshops as well as for resources.  But there's one aspect that we're going to take another step further than we've done in the past.  IMLS has -- you've seen this out on the handout on the table out there -- has created a booklet called, 'Museums, Libraries, and 21st Century Skills'.  We are incorporating that concept into this.  I think you probably can't see the cartoon, but there's a door that's really high up on the wall and it's called 'Critical Thinking 101' and this is the entrance exam.  Can you figure out how to get in the door?  It reminds me of Annie again.  How did she solve the problem of figuring out how she needed to get a new job?  What critical thinking went into her processes that brought her to the library and then brought her to computer classes and took her through these various steps?  She needed information and technology literacy.  She needed good communication skills.  She certainly needed flexibility and adaptability.  A lot of people come in wanting to start a small business.  They certainly need to know entrepreneurial literacy.  Social and cross cultural skills -- what is a job interview if it isn't something like that.  And then again, once you get on the job productivity and accountability.  These are not all the skills, but these are ones that I thought, 'Well you'd need that.  You'd need that.  You'd need that.'  So we've created a template that -- it mirrors one that you will find I this booklet.  This booklet has a self assessment tool.  And you will find copies of the booklet out on the table if you don't have one.  But what we've done is we've taken this format and we've transformed it specifically into our program.  So this first column, I know you can't read any of those tiny little words, but there's an early stage, and intermediate stage, and a 21st century stage.  So just the first column is job seeker resources and the early stages do you know how to use basic job seeker resources.  The intermediate stage is do you know how to use resources for US public workforce system?  Do you know how to use Employment Security Commission?  Do you know how to use Department of Labor resources?  And then the 21st century stage, do you have resources that can help your user improve critical thinking, problem solving, et cetera, et cetera.  Now what we're going to do is create pathfinders that will be both for the users themselves and for the librarians who are doing the teaching -- the teachers and the users.  So that we will have them in all these same types of areas that we talked about before -- job seeking, entrepreneurial, financial literacy, this sort of thing.  What's happening in public libraries today -- and I challenge you all to go home and go visit your local public library and find out what's going on there.  You'll find a lot of job help centers like this one at Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Library in North Carolina, which has a dedicated section of its library just for helping job seekers.  You'll find job classes, how to write a resume.  The lady in this picture is actually -- this is a picture I stole off the web -- of a woman who's actually teaching a course at the New York Public Library in resume writing and online job skills.  You will also find resources for people who are out of work and looking for jobs.  This is another one I found on the web for the King County Library System in Washington State.  As you see it's happening literally all over the country.  And then finally, in public libraries, we have to remember that we're employers too.  This was a wonderful story I found in the New York Times about a man named Anthony Morris who is unemployed and is a user of the Queens Borough Public Library.  Because he was unemployed he had ratcheted up some overdue fines that very difficult for him to pay.  So the library invited him to be a volunteer to work off his fines, which he did.  And apparently he did such a good job they invited him to apply for a part time job at the library.  So now he is at the library.  He is working.  It's only part time, but it's a stepping stone.  It's a lot easier to find a job when you have a job.  And he can say, 'I am an employee of the city of Queens.'  But while he's there he's learning new job skills that he's never had before.  And he's also learning about other ways of dealing with the workforce, serving the public, all kinds of things that he's never done in the past.  So we like to think that we are very much a part of the solution and in many more ways than most of us could ever possibly have imagined.  These information resources will tell you more.  And if you would like more information from me, I'm very happy to pass that along to you.  And I thank you all very much for this opportunity.
^M02:22:00
[Applause]
^M02:22:04
>>Nancy Rogers: And people actually talk about cutting hours and funding at public libraries.  It's something we really need to address.  We are going to hear now from Nick Spitzer from whom you've already heard.  I'd just like to say that he's the perfect person for this panel, having received funding from the NEH and the NEA on a regular basis.  And Nick is truly a scholar and a person who has his foot in the regular life of this country.  His program, American Roots, is truly a humanistic music program.  And I hope you all listen to it when you can.  Nick.
^M02:22:43
[ Applause ]
^M02:22:48
>>Nick Spitzer: Thank you Nancy.  I want to sort of paraphrase and say the views I express are mine.  Yes, they are mine.  But I believe that they are shared by many, many people.  They're just not always expressed.  And the first thing I want to express is my -- I'm not going to call it an oversight because we were trying to do a lot of things.  But the American Roots workforce includes about five people.  I refer to us as sort of a little like a basketball team at a small high school.  The one I went to only had 300 students.  And everybody plays 40 minutes.  There's not subbing.  And everybody had to both be able to shoot from the outside and rebound.  I love sports metaphors.  I apologize.  But let me just simply say that Maureen Loughran, our senior producer, is amazing.  And it says in the description that she's a senior producer.  No.  She's the senior producer.  And I want to give her a round of applause for working with me and thank her for making this happen today.  And the world of radio is such that one person is always seen and heard -- mostly heard because it's radio.  But the world of the producer is to quietly edit, to research, to give counsel, to help raise funds, to work with the staff, and without a producer there's no American Roots.  And I really appreciate her efforts in working with me.  And of course I loved Archie Green greatly.  And it's an honor to be a part of this and share that with Maureen.  I'm actually more like a player coach these days.  I'm not playing 40 minutes, but I'm trying to advise from the margins.  I wanted to say something about both Maureen and myself.  We are humanities scholars, but we are vernacular humanities scholars.  And we need to find out who's going into the vernacular humanities.  We need to find who's engaging with culture, community and creativity in this country.  And I think it's important to detail who in the workforce is doing that.  My experience on the frontline teaching undergraduates these days as well as graduate students is they really are looking for community and culture.  They really want to know what the future of the United States is.  They're not all satisfied with paid professional work in the old professionals but they're also not satisfied with the humanities has they have been limbed.  So I think it's very important to think about that and what are the vernacular humanities?  Well we may study them.  We may employ them.  We may include them.  But I would say that there are a number of things.  I could just give very simple examples.  You know a lot of them.  The cowboy poetry gathering, the vernacular arts and humanities, and the people that work with them are the artist and humanitarians that are the documentarians.  Jazz musicians -- Derrick Tabb is a vernacular humanist and an artist.  He's teaching.  He's arranging for the transmission of knowledge.  He's also a performer.  These people are the lifeblood at what makes America special to our citizenry and to the world.  And it's very, very important to focus on them.  Some years ago at the National Endowment for the Humanities there was a discussion with Sheldon Hackney about the inclusion of a gentleman from New Hampshire who was a specialist in the native pharmacopeia that is the use of the plants and animals of the woodlands.  This was an Anglo-American guy who would be called a Yankee.  Down in New Orleans I don't hear that term as much as I did in New England growing up.  But it's a sign of pride.  And when we discussed his thought, his knowledge, Mister Hackney, who I enjoy greatly said, 'We cannot fund his thought or his productions.  We can fund the study of his thoughts and his productions.'  And that's a problem because it separates the humanist at the community level from the academic humanist.  And you know as well as I do there is great academic humanists and there is not so great ones.  And there's great people who are humanists in communities and ones that just don't always quite make it work out.  Part of our job is to erase that barrier and begin to collaborate laterally in the humanities -- to deal with vernacular of the humanities at a serious level.  Oral history is a term we've used a lot here.  It's very, very important to understand that oral history is not just the filling in of real history by going to people that tell stories.  That oral history more and more is a way of understanding the nature of culture and building a public discourse in culture with people who have special knowledge that's not transmitted by the academy or other kinds of formalized institutions.  And so that when we did an oral history with building tradesmen in New Orleans, we were able to talk about what would the future of the cityscape look like in a world where families were employed in family businesses or there were new forms of apprentice relationships.  And many of them lobbied for an elementary school devoted to the trades where you would learn algebra and geometry in third, fourth, and fifth grade.  Post Katrina, we finally got the will to do that and we have Priestley Elementary, which then feeds into a high school that allows for the building trades.  And it's not portrayed as Vo-Tech for dummies, which for many, many years in American life that's how it was portrayed.  And this is a cityscape that is one of the most beautiful cityscapes in the world.  I am biased, yes.  But I think if you come to New Orleans you will agree with me.  And many of those same people that built and designed that cityscape and repair have interest in music.  That doesn't mean that we shouldn't focus on our academic institutions.  We should.  We should see teaching as a skill that involves the transmission of knowledge of all kinds.  That includes the informal types of knowledge that some people have historically and still call folklore.  I like to use the word vernacular because I think it's a little more all embracing and it doesn't run away from popular culture, which is one of our difficulties with our humanities and arts endowments historically and our academic worlds.  Is that we've tended to not recognize the power of the vernacular American creativity that produced the jazz that we give the jazz masteries in, that produces the kinds of things that Faulkner or Hemingway wrote about.  And I think it's very, very important for people to understand teaching as a form of transmission of knowledge and to help student become conversationalists about culture in the work that they do.  So we try and do fieldwork projects and have them report back on what's going on with social aid and pleasure club.  What's going on with the recovery vis-a-vis, the building trades and all those kinds of things.  I could go on about this stuff for a long time.  American Roots is designed to be a public discourse provoker through creativity.  I think the most important thing we can do in society right now is figure out how to be creative about the future of what we do and what we have defined as work.  Many, many of the people who are professional artists also have other jobs as mechanics, as waiters and waitresses, as designers that are not necessary on the charts in the aesthetic realm.  I did like the fact, though, that announcers was on the chart.  And I would like to know what announcers are viewed as artists by the NEA.  That kind of surprised me.  But I have to reflect that when I was working in Louisiana in Baton Rouge in '78 and Tabby Thomas, a great bluesman, was trying to open a little club to have a place where people could play again -- where a piano could be in tune.  And he said to me, 'Nick, I don't think we want to make grants writers out of every bluesman in this state.'  I said, 'No, man.  You don't need to be a 501c3.  We'll work on getting something done, work with you, find ways to work.'  That's the work.  We don't want to encumber people with all kinds of traditional bureaucracies that only the professionals can go to.  We have to create space in society where people can have these cultural continuities, where people can get together.  I think the library is a really good place for the cultural conversation.  And I've been seeing wonderful use of the libraries in New Orleans.  I love your charts.  I do think that probably more people are going still to McDonalds than the libraries.  But that's not your fault.  I think that the food for thought appetite is growing and the kinds of programs you've got in those buildings are very comforting to people at a very human level of the humanities.  And I truly applaud that.  But I think creating space for these cultural discourses, for discussing creativity, for trying to re-understand purpose in American society, those are the kinds of things that I think we need to be focused on.  And I would just simply close by saying that I think whether you're an artist or a humanist or an administrator of programs that works in the arts and humanities, however you are, wherever you are, we all need to take responsibility for the future of this country right now because it's sliding.  It's sliding away from the deep cultures and communities that we know and it's often these wonderful institutions that have been funded by Mellon, many of them are not addressing what's really going on in American culture and community life.  And what could go on and what many of the students want to engage in whether they do it professionally as a folklorist, a librarian, or a humanities scholar in the future.  This is, I think, what students want.  They're hungry for this sense of an authentic future.  And by that I mean one that is authored by community based cultures in relationship to our grand traditions of scholarship, thought and creativity.  And I think have to aid and abet that conversation.  And if we don't, I think we're going to be in really tough shape.  So I see this while it's a small gathering, I see this as really fundamental to what we're doing.  I thank you for the time.
^M02:31:41
[ Applause ]
^M02:31:49
>Nancy Rogers: Thank you, Nick.  And thank all of our panelists here.  I think they've given us a really much food for thought and not McDonald's food for thought.  So thank you to all four of them from all of you first.  Thank you.
^M02:32:05
[Applause]
^M02:32:08
>>Nancy Rogers: As I was sitting here I couldn't help thinking about SUNY Albany and the shutting down of so many humanities departments as far as majors are concerned.  Those in the languages except for Spanish and I believe Chinese have been eliminated.  And as a 21st century skill, certainly cross cultural understanding linguist are needed in that area.  And it's just one more example of where we're going I these time.  Now today we've heard on this panel, I think, some really important ideas and themes and trends.  And I just want to summarize them very quickly, the ones I saw.  The trend toward part time work and also the mobility of people who have to take more than one job is one of the trends that I saw.  The importance of census data, which we've heard before, and yet at the same time the scarcity of data in certain areas that are needed.  The role of women in the workforce, the regional situation where things are different in different parts of the country.  We're seeing an increase of people moving into North Carolina, people not moving into Detroit.  The new terminology that we heard today.  Now maybe you all know this terminology, but I'd never thought of the terminology 'psychic income'.  I'd never heard the term, 'this is our first online recession.'  And then the 'library as office'.  All of these ideas, I think, are just full of fruit for us to think about.  Now I had thought of questions for the panel.  I've been told we can have another 10 to 15 minutes.  I'm only going to pose one, and that is -- and you don't all of you have to answer because it may not be germane for you.  But I'm wondering what kind of changes have taken place in your own job?  What kinds of skills you've had to develop recently?  For myself, I've always given away money, given grants.  Now I find myself working in partnerships and collaborative activities and raising money and thinking about projects that cross boundaries and are not so focused on one facet of our work.  So for me those kinds of skills have been needed.  I'm wondering if any of our four panelists have anything to say on this question.
>>Nick Spitzer: I'm glad you're just not turning to robbing banks, Nancy.  I really admire you for sticking with the cause.   I tell my students that the idea of holding a job in many ways is a very outdated concept.  And probably in their lifetime they will never stop working.  They'll always be returning to some kind of information interaction at a computer or something like it.  And that they are going to have to have an array of differential identities.  But ideally they develop through arts and humanities study of all kinds and practice a core passion and a core worldview that allows them to sustain a whole variety of things they can create, express, and produce over a lifetime.  And to me that's the way it's going to go.  Myself, I did academia to some degree, but I've always really been first a public servant, and then I landed in academia that allowed me to do radio.  And I kind of went back to what I always did, which was radio which began for me when I was 11.  So I'm kind of doing what I did when I was 11, hopefully a little bit better.  And then trying to encourage other people to do follow that path in their own way.  I don't expect them all to do radio programs.  But I do expect them to be able to clearly articulate the issues surrounding the aesthetic and creative life and how it relates to the things they want to do and can put their passion to, to sustain a lifetime of work.
>>Nancy Rogers: That's also I think, with you, the whole issue of community and music related to community and a social conscience around music is the way I see it.  Mary do you have any...      
>>Mary Boone: Aside from the obvious that I alluded to earlier about the evolving technology in librarianship, I think very specifically right now, it sounds a little silly but I've come up with a whole lecture on the fact that you can't do more with less.  You can do less with less and it's very difficult.  That means you have to let people go.  You have to let programs go.  You have to truly focus on your core values.  Sometimes you can do different with less.  We've got a couple of examples of ways we've changed a program but hopefully the end user never knows that that background was changed.  And sometimes you can do better with less because what you're doing is focusing on what's really needed right now at the time.  It's not just all the baggage you brought with you up to this point.  And I work in a 200 year old library.  So you can imagine some of the things we still have on our shelves that we probably don't need anymore.  But nonetheless there are ways in which you can learn how to work in this environment and do better work, just like the kind of program we were talking about today through Project Compass.  That's a good example of that.
>>Nancy Rogers: Thank you.  And our researchers, have your jobs changed at all?
>>Sunil Iyengar: I think it has.  I would actually speak a little to what Nick was talking about in terms of the oral histories and understanding what might not be communicated through institutional data.  So from the research perspective, if you're lucky enough as fortunately we were to hire somebody who has experience in qualitative research, who can do case studies, can talk to people , interview and get sort of in a sense an oral history and feed that into other data we are collecting through standard more conventional ways in a statistical kinds of data.  And recognizing that each had its own kind of place and there's parity in terms of the types of information we use to characterize the trends we're seeing.  So there's a learning curve.  And we have to kind of find ways to -- and technology has expedited this.  Here's another term I didn't know until recently that there are online focus group.  And you can actually do an online focus group and get people from many different locations together to study them versus having to do site visits and so on.  So there are a lot of really interesting ways we can continue to grow as we build our research [inaudible].
>>Nancy Rogers: Thank you.  Jeff, any thought?
>>Jeffrey Groen: I would say reflecting on my own work and the changes over time, one thing is the rise of interdisciplinary work both with my research on the humanities and forums like this coming into contact with people who are trained in different disciplines.  And that's been interesting for me.  But also in my work within the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it's not just economists working with statisticians and research psychologists on various challenges to the bureau.  And a second way that I think my own work has changed is sort of the boundaries of the office have expanded over time.  And now I'm working from home occasionally and checking email at night.  That sort of flexibility has its benefits and its costs.
>>Sunil Iyengar: And its disadvantages.
>>Jeffrey Groen: Yeah.  So. 
>>Nancy Rogers: Yeah, well I think that brings up the whole issue of social networking and the use of social networking in the job market and the employment industry.  And also something that's always struck me in the country is the flexibility and mobility that we do have in this country from one discipline to the other, one type of the work to the other.  Whereas in so many countries, you are stuck in what you started with.  And I think that's one of the things we need to take advantage of in this country.  And now I'd like to take advantage of your thoughts.  Peggy.
>>I just had an observation after listening to everybody that it just struck me that everybody's talking about how any kind of solution that we're going to find is going to be at the local level, not the federal level.  We keep looking to the federal government when think of recession.  And we're thinking of what's Congress going to do and what's the Administration going to do.  And just listening to what's happening in New Orleans with those kids, that's a grassroots effort.  And I think you hit the nail on the head, Nick, when you said that the vernacular is really where the creativity is the most on the ground, the most flexible, and the most potent.  And so looking to the federal government for solutions, I think, is pretty problematic right now.  I think that all of us -- Mary you were talking about what's happening in North Carolina.  I think that's really astounding work that's going on in every community there.  And Sunil, Punta Gorda, Florida -- who would have thought that these artists are there.  What are they doing and how are they keeping their jobs?  How are they doing what needs to be done?  And I think that's where in some ways I'm thinking, well okay -- SUNY Albany by the way was my first alma mater.  I got my bachelor's degree there.  And I was just appalled when I heard about the languages being dropped.  But I'm thinking maybe the university is not where we should be learning languages.  Maybe there's other places that we can learn languages a lot better than sitting in a university classroom learning language.  Peace Corps has a system that's much better, I think, in terms of learning what's going.  And that's where we can really take advantage, I think, of the community scholars.  Take advantage of that.  There's people in this community in DC that speak probably every language in the world.  And yet we could put them to work teaching those languages.  They don't have to have a PhD.  They know the language.  So anyway, just some thoughts.
>>Nancy Rogers: So a new term, not just for vernacular scholars but community scholars.  Other thoughts, questions?  Over here.
>>This question is addressed to Sunil.  I appreciated your remarks on the distribution of artists.  The problem with using the census as your main information is that many artists will not self identify on the census.  They'll name their profession as the one that gives them the majority of their income.  How can we change the question on the census to help artists self identify?
>>Sunil Iyengar: Just to be clear, there's no question that asks them , 'Are you an artist or not?'  It's really the way they self identify is the most number of hours worked.  It's not even income, really.  And whatever that occupation is is then coded and thrown into a bucket in terms of is it one of these -- I named 11 occupations but of course the census tracks many, many, many more.  But we've managed to construct, many years ago, 11 distinct categories in which various sub-codes fit.  You know what I mean?  Like, we basically come up with these codes.  And so, to answer that question more fundamentally -- so it's not income.  But in terms of self identifying, one of the things that I think I can just say we kind of regret and wish could be captured somehow through census data is understanding teaching artists -- artists who teach.  Because clearly we can track that they happen to teach.  But for the purposes of aggregation, we'll put them into the artist categories and they might be lost in other categories.  So, some of this can resolved.  Most of it has to do with revisiting government codes for how you classify certain types of workers.  And we're actually looking into that.  As I've said, we're a really small piece of all this in terms of finding ways to capture what we are interested in creative professions.  Arts workers for example, we can't get good numbers on who are managers or even custodians or whatever they do within an arts organization, for example.  So those are things that kind of fall out of the scheme that we want to get to that.
>>Nancy Rogers: Thank you. Yes, here.
>>I was interested in the library discussion.  I know that in recessionary times, the practical use of libraries for employment, but I was just wondering, the library it's traditional scene for general knowledge and books.
>>Nancy Rogers: And your question is for...
>>[inaudible] libraries.
>>Nancy Rogers: The libraries.
>>Mary Boone: I beg your pardon.  We were talking.  
>>Nick Spitzer: Librarians, you know, we like to talk.
>>I understand in these recessionary times the importance of the library for employment and all that.  I'm just wondering what the future was for the more traditional things of books and general knowledge for the library.
>>Mary Boone: Well I think there are different opinions about that.  But mine is that books are here to stay.  I think that there is a lot of trend going on right now.  In fact, one of the things we're looking at mostly among ourselves -- among librarians -- is the role of electronic books and electronic readers and how to make these compatible with library purchased electronics books, this sort of thing.  So that there is a great deal of discussion about exactly that right now.  So unfortunately my crystal ball does not really have answer.  But I know that libraries, like the workplace, are in a great period of transition.  We however have always embraced the newest media.  We have still existed since the days of papyrus in Alexandria.  Libraries continue to exist.  And we continue to change with the medium.  And I would like to think that that will always been the case, in part, especially for public libraries, which is really what I'm talking about and not academic research libraries for example.  But that there will always be a role in the community for the library as a source of knowledge, as a source of reading, no matter what format it might happen to take.  I feel very optimistic about that, especially as I see in these times the use of libraries gaining such a wider audience than we've ever had before.  I don't think that I could really, really truly answer the question, but I remain optimistic.
>>Sunil Iyengar: I just wanted to note that actually when we were talking about libraries as a workplace, I remembered Ray Bradbury, as course as some of you know, used the library as his workplace to write Fahrenheit 451.  He's written really compellingly about that process.
>>Nancy Rogers: And while you have the mike, can you tell us what an announcer is as an artist?
>>Sunil Iyengar: Right.  So there's a more elaborate definition, but short handing it, it's basically radio -- so you would qualify Nick -- TV and actually public address for events -- public address systems for events.  A totally loose category you're lumped together with unfortunately.  And I have to say, this isn't reflecting your ability of course, but I looked at the projections data and it's not looking very good for announcers.
>>Nick Spitzer: Well public radio is struggling right now but there may be an opening at Ringling Brothers.  I like that guy that says, 'Ladies and gentlemen.'  
>>Sunil Iyengar: Yeah.
>>Nancy Rogers: The jazz people refer to talk as chin music.  So that's the aesthetic side.
>>Sunil Iyengar: Yeah.
>>Nancy Spitzer: Chin music.  Are there other questions?  Yes, here.
>>Peggy Yocom: Hi.  Thanks to all the panelists.  And I'd like to make a comment and ask a question.  It's especially for Jeffrey.  Yes.  My name is Peggy Yocom and I teach at George Mason University.  I'm in my 34th year as a folklore professor there.  I'm also the curator of the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum in Maine where I have a lifelong interest in public folklore.  And I speak today about my concern that you've been raising about community and of the community that can exist in universities.  I'm very concerned about the increase that you've charted well for us Jeffrey in part time faculty, the decrease in full time.  Because I do think that in addition to the things you mentioned, we lose a great deal at the university in terms of community.  We have wonderful par time faculty, but they are not required, of course, to serve on committees, to do advising of theses and the like.  And so as we lose full time faculty, we lose those and we also lose faculty's ability to serve on committees, to in fact help direct the way our universities look.  More and more decisions get made by the administration in universities when the number of full time faculty are decreased.  And this changes what our university can be.  And I've very concerned about that.  And I'm wondering if there are studies that are charting what's happened, say, in English departments where I work, for example with the decrease in full time faculty members who can advise and therefore I think serve a very large role in the retention of graduate students and help them on their to be PhD and hopefully new professors.  Thank you.
>>Jeffrey Groen: Yeah.  As far -- I think that's an excellent point that it gets back to kind of what's the role of tenure.  And a lot of people think about it as sort of in the employment relationship between the university and the professor, sort of job security.  But tenure is also important in sort of the administration of the university.  And like you pointed out that, at least in theory, to sort of the tenured professors making decisions about hiring, about serving on committees and that kind of thing.  But that kind of increasing presence of part time faculty, that is definitely a concern of people who want to preserve the tenure system.  As far as studies on the specific things that you talked about, I'm personally not aware of any, but I'm sure people have looked at it.  And maybe we can talk more afterward.
>>Nancy Rogers: All right.  And I think we are going to have to stop now although I think we can to on for a long time.
>>This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at LOC.gov.