>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.



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>> Nancy Groce:  Good afternoon [background noise], if people could take their seats please.  [Background talking]  I'm Nancy Groce, I'm folklorist here at the American Folk life Center.  On behalf of the center, the Library of Congress and our co-sponsors, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, I'd like to welcome you all, either here or back again to Work and Transformation: Documenting Working Americans.  Yesterday was very interesting and there was wonderful panels this morning.  If you were here, I'm glad you're back and if you weren't here, you're in for a treat.  I'm going to introduce my colleagues, Dr. Stephen Winick, who'll introduce our first speaker.



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>> Stephen Winick:  Once again, welcome.  My name is Stephen Winick, I am a folklorist and I work as the writer and editor here, at the American Folk life Center at the Library of Congress.  And I'm here to introduce our next speaker who's Robert McCarl, who is one of our 2010 Archie Green Fellowship recipients.  Bob is a professor in the sociology department at Boise State University, he's published widely on work culture focusing on the variety of ways that internal diversity and external social and economic pressures result in change in the workforce.  His published work includes analysis of both urban and wild land firefighting, sheet metal work, hard rock mining, and a variety of other occupations.  In addition to studying the change in cultures of work, Bob has also examined the intersection of work and ethnicity, region and gender, particularly within Latino and Native American communities.  One thing to say about Bob McCarl, as a folklorist he not only talks the talk, he definitely walks the walk.  He did much of his early work on fire fighting and if you were to ask him, would you run into a burning building to preserve occupational folk life?  He could look you into the eye and say not only yes I would but I have done so [laughter].  Which is unusual in the folklore community.  Recently he's been doing field work in Idaho's Silver Valley, where he's interviewed miners, loggers, mill workers, the owners of bike shops, water engineers, environmentalists, and many other residents of the Valley about the conflicts and shared common challenges of living in one of the largest Superfund sites in the United States.  And that's what he'll be talking about today.  So everyone please welcome Robert McCarl.



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>> Robert McCarl:  Well, thank you Steve for that embarrassing introduction [laughter].  I'll try to live up to it.  I thought a place where I might start is by saying that I don't speak for Boise State University.  I've stolen many of these ideas from other academics and if there are any mistakes or misrepresentations, its Nick Spitzer's fault [laughter].  So take it up with Nick.  Okay, what I'm going to do is talk about -- sorry, talk about this field work that I've been doing in North Idaho, in the Silver Valley.  And starting with this slide here, this map sort of locates the Valley in space.  And as you'll see as time goes on as I go through this, what I'm trying to work out is kind of a new model or an expansion of a model of how we understand work.  You know, we -- a lot of historians, anthropologists, people from a variety of walks of life, talk about the world of work as if it is a, you know, a DVD or something that we can walk in and kind of capture.  And then we understand somebody else's work place and what I found in 30 odd years and they've been odd years -- no, what I've found in, you know, a professional lifetime of studying this, is like many things that we attempt to understand; you know the longer I've looked at it, the less clear the picture is.  So you're going to see really more questions here than answers, okay?  But I hope the questions are provocative and I hope it generates some discussion because I think the many of these issues have been raised, you know, by other speakers and they need to be raised.  Okay, so this is the Silver Valley, what you're looking at is a space -- if you look at the left hand corner, you'll see a insert map that shows Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana.  The silver Valley kind of straddles what's called the Panhandle of Idaho and the Valley itself, I'll show you just a picture of what, you know, the valley sort of looks like.  Is actually a tremendous drainage and it drains from not only the Bitter Root Mountains in Montana but, it drains from the mountain ranges throughout the northern part of -- including the Rockies and really the -- like Lookout Pass and other ridges, not really named mountain ranges.  Into Lake Coeur d'Alene which the large lake in the very center of the map.  And in turn into the Spokane River which drains into the Columbia River.  So the little box in this map, shows you what is called "The Box" and mining in Idaho began -- the first miners began to sort of push out the Coeur d'Alene Indians in the 1860's, true hard rock mining started in the area, 1870's, industrial mining started right around the turn of the century.  Ever since that time, and the Coeur d'Alene Mining District as it used to be called, now it's called the Silver Valley, has produced millions and millions of tons of silver.  It's also produced lead; it's also produced other mine products.  This is one of the richest reserves of silver ore in the world, okay?  And because of that, what has happened is that the vein that has been explored has only yielded, some geologist told me maybe an eighth of its potential yield.  And the only thing that's stopping more mining is, you know, at one time it was the price of silver, now that that's gone up, its technology.  So, after all of those years of mining, the way in which the ore was milled, the tailings that resulted from that ore have spread toxic waste, primarily lead, cadmium, zinc and mercury; not only in the original Box which is where the Bunker Hill smelter was located, in Smelterville [assumed spelling], in the middle of the valley.  But all of that green area is now a Superfund site, hundreds and hundreds of square miles of toxic waste.  Okay.  This is a topog showing the same area and what this really illustrates; again, it shows you the Box, in 1980 EPA started what they call a clean-up, what a lot of the people in the valley call an assault.  And they started in the Box, and the Box was where the smelter was located, the smelter plume extended out about 20 miles, anyone within the range of the plume was being exposed to some of the highest concentrates of lead ever recorded, in a human population.  Okay, the smelter closed down in the 1980's and that's when, after years of the Department of Environmental Quality of the State of Idaho saying there's no problems up here, they started doing measurements and found that indeed there was a problem and it was being hidden.  And so EPA came in and started work.  The other thing I'd point out in this map is the way in which the valley is organized, that we talk about the notion of community, right?  As if it's a homogeneous kind of settlement, these are mining villages,  right much like the kind of settlement pattern that you might see in West Virginia or Pennsylvania or other places where mining takes place.  Not only in the United States but around the world.  These mining villages are independent; many of them were associated with particular mines, okay.  And that history of that, the agency of independence, even from each other particularly in a time like now with unemployment in the valley being close to 20%, there are scarce resources.  So what happens when you have scarce resources?  Is people compete for them, right?  So, the settlement pattern gives you some indication of, you know, how the valley is organized, it also gives you a little bit a hint of the differences between communities and I'll explain that more in a minute.  Okay, so this is what the valley actually looks like; I'm standing in the middle of the valley just to the west of Kellogg, I'm looking toward Wallace, I'm looking toward Montana and Washington is to my back.  Okay?  As I said, this is a drainage so that the south fork of the Coeur d'Alene River is going right through the center of the valley on the other side of that big brown berm that you are looking at there.  That is what's called the Central Containment Unit that contains billions and billions of tons of toxic waste.  In the lexicon of EPA, that's cleaned up waste, okay?  From the point of view of many environmentalists, that's stabilized and thinly covered over waste, it's a partial solution.  So part of the problem here is also the use of language, right?  The notion of what an institution is saying and how people in the community are responding to that rhetoric.  What I was interested in doing or what I've been interested in doing is looking at the way in which work and the environment interact.  And I started off with a real sort of broad brush stroke here, a pattern of environmental experience that defines but is not articulated by residents.  Okay, the notion here is that a lot of what people do at work and here, I'm defining work in its broadest sense.  I don't care if you're an office worker in the valley, I don't care if you're a miner, is a defining moment for you in terms of your relationship not only to the biota [assumed spelling] that surrounds you, right?  The living organisms with which you interact on a daily basis whether, it's raking in your yard or going down in a mine, on the one hand that's a defining moment for you.  And for some people a source of tremendous satisfaction, some people a source of tremendous frustration.  But at the same time, it puts you in touch with wittingly or unwittingly, the natural forces that exist in that biota, in that environment.  And so part of what I've been trying to discover is how does work bring us in contact with or in a may be more interesting way, shield us from an awareness of our own environments.  Okay, hopefully, I've confused you tremendously by now but it'll hopefully, get more clear.  The place where I'm going to start with this is with mythology and as many of you know, that mythology is the deepest level of human knowing, it's the most compelling narrative that any people tell among themselves, that to a great extent defines their value system.  And I start with Lana Turner, and Lana Turner was born in Wallace in 1920, Judy Lana Turner, she changed her name when she got to Hollywood.  She was the daughter of a miner, her mother worked in a cleaning shop and her story is a popular manifestation of the rags to riches story.  Right, but sort of the Hollywood version of the rags to riches story, the idea that, you know, if you're attractive, you know, you can be sitting at Schwab's Drugstore or whatever in Hollywood.  She actually was discovered, she wasn't discovered at the drugstore, but that's part of the legend, she was located by a talent agent, because she was a very attractive 16 year old girl at Hollywood High.  She made her first movie when she was 17 and went on to become a, you know, a famous Hollywood star.  In one respect that's a definition of what I would consider a kind of popular mythology.  You take that rags to riches mythology and you lay it up against the fact that the people in the valley are sitting on one of the richest mining loads in the world, then the rags to riches mythology is also related to a little bit more vernacular, to use Nick's term, Mother load mythology.  Right?  And the Mother load mythology is a vernacular mythology because people in the valley trade stock all the time.  That this map that I'm showing shows the center line of the valley which is actually a geological fault that created the ore body in the first place, and all of the colors in the map are mine claims.  Okay?  And so the trading of stocks, stock futures in mining, penny capitalism goes on constantly.  The other thing that goes on constantly although since EPA has been in the valley, this has been curtailed quite a bit, is the family mine, the family claim.  Sid Jones, the guy in the corner, this is, you know, superb McCarl photography here but [laughter], Sid Jones is a miner, second generation miner in the valley, he was an electrician at Sunshine Mine all of his life, he's since passed away.  But this was his family mine and a lot of families have mines that either that are working or they did work or they have deeds to mines, that they think might pay off.  No one really knows where the ore body is going to appear.  Some people have struck it rich, right?  And the beauty of the mythology is that it's available to anybody.  The rituals, the sort of invented traditions in the community also support these ideologies, the mythology.  This is what's called "Gyro Days;" Gyro Days were invented by a fraternal organization called the Gyros during the Depression, a very interesting name to come up with, I thought at first it had something to do with the Space Program, but I don't think it does, anyway.  They wanted something, they wanted to create an event that they thought would attract people to the valley and so they came up with Gyro Days and what happens  at Gyro Days, it's been held every August, I think 14th or something like that, since the Depression.  Is they take this humungous leather ball and they take it up to the very top of the, what's called Lead Creek, that drains out of all the addits of the mines and they stick the ball at exactly 12:00 and blow a mine whistle, that the ball has been dropped.  And then people compete for chances, you buy a ticket and you write down the time that it's going to take that ball to clear the bridge where this young kid is jumping into Lead Creek.  Which when the picture was taken in 1960's is probably so full of lead, he could have bounced back and that's the contest.  And what do you win, if you win Gyro Days?  You could win a deed to a mine, you could win a -- what am I trying to think of?  You could win silver, a silver ingot, right?  And so again, the mythology is, you know, you can get rich quick through simply interacting with this environment.  There is of course a broader capitalistic framework for getting rich and we all know that as the Horatio Alger Myth.  What I didn't know is that the Horatio Alger Society is quite active and the gentlemen there in the middle with the glasses is a guy name Dwayne Hagadone, who owns about half of the northern part of the State of Idaho.  And he made his money as an entrepreneur, networking with other mine owners and consolidating his corporate holdings.  He does -- he fulfills the mythological promise, essentially as a capitalist, by creating capital which then other people, workers produce.  So his notion of supporting the mythological framework here is somewhat different.  Horatio Alger, of course, being the historical New York character, you know, the dime or nickel -- not really broadsides, I'm not sure what you call them, little booklets that were distributed all around about, you know, come to America and you start out as a boot black and, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and, you know, make it in the United States.  So, you know, we'll all sleep well tonight knowing that the Horatio Alger Society is looking, you know, over our shoulder.  They actually do, they support entrepreneurs in different parts of the country and, you know, I think that's a useful function, I shouldn't be so cynical, as my wife keeps telling me.  Okay, that leads us to the model of looking at work and I'm taking a lot of this from the writings of Gregory Bateson who had a tremendous influence on me when I was, you know, a graduate student and trying to figure out, you know, how I fit in to the world of folklore.  And what Bateson does is he talks about how skill and skill performances are a fundamental opportunity for people through work, whatever the agg-on [assumed spelling] might be to reach a kind of heightened awareness of human potentiality.  He called it grace which is kind of a nice term, right?  And, you know, that struck me as a graduate student that a lot of the people that I had worked with in the woods or in sheet metal shops or whatever, some of them had that and occasionally, I mentioned yesterday, teaching in other areas now, I recognize it in my own life.  But what I didn't recognize is how difficult it is to document that because as Bateson said, technique is an opportunity for self- fulfillment for grace, but it is almost impossible to translate it into words.  It is almost impossible to render it into the documents of academia or the documents of representation and so what I did is I shifted the paradigm a little bit by saying that I probably couldn't capture technique but I could capture what I called, and I still don't like the term, the cannon of work technique.  Simply meaning, the critical framework that surrounds the worker, other workers who look at you in your performance of knowledge and skill, okay?  And make judgments of your competency, right?  And so a lot of that does take place verbally and therefore, someone like me could come in and record those stories which is what I've basically been doing.  Okay but there's another dimension to Bateson's model, he goes on and says, you know, I think I was maybe sick that day we talked about this in grad school but, he goes on and says that there's another dimension to skill and that's what he calls secondary process.  Right?  The removal of the control of work from the hands of the worker and its manipulation by people from the outside.  He means, you know, if you put this in a capitalist or industrialist context then, you know, it fits directly into a sort of Marxist frame of reference.  Right?  But for my purposes, what it does is it provides me with a way of understanding some of the stories that I've been collecting, I'd better get going here.  This guy, Ryan Bailey is building -- he's a mason, he's building a memorial to the 1910 fire fighters who died in the valley a hundred years ago. And so if you look at all the green labeled activities, those are what Bateson calls primary process, they're skill performances or technique performances and then, secondary process is the actual memorial day, where the Forest Service came and all of its sort quasi-military, I don't know if you've ever seen a formal Forest Service uniform, I'll show you one I a minute and the Forest Service takes the firefighting work and re-contextualizes it for its own institutional needs.  Okay?  And it's true; I am insane, so we'll just keep going with this.  One of the people I talked to is Jenny Taylor and Jenny Taylor is a habitat biologist, she essentially is an ethologist, she lives with animals in order to study them, she doesn't study them individually, she studies them in aggregate in their habitats.  So what's the interaction between a specific biota and a lynx or a fisher or a humming bird or whatever.  And in the interests of speeding this up a little bit, I thought I could read Jenny's story and I think this pulls into perspective some of what I'm trying to talk about.  She says, "I asked her to tell me a story about how she sort of puts her information to use and she started telling me about toads.  And what she said is that the toad is an amphibian and cold blooded, so they need to warm up, they look for areas where the sun is shining and reaching ground where they can warm up and start their day.  And there aren't that many places where there are open areas because the forest is so dense, so they're attracted to roads where the sun is shining and they can go there and get warmed up.  So when they're on the road -- oops, sorry, so when they're on the road where the sun is shining, -- lets see, so when on the road they get run over.  [Background noise] We built into the contract of that timber sale that the logger would have to make sure that the road dust does not disturb the campers along the way.  And so there are a couple of different options, one would be to water the road with a water truck but, that would have to be done repeatedly and continuously during the summer, and the other option would be to put a salt compound on the road that would soak into the road, in the soil, bind the dirt together so it would not blow off as dust every time a vehicle passes by.  I was concerned about the toads not just because of their getting out on the road but also, because toads are very susceptible to picking up chemicals from the environment.  If the toad is sitting on a surface that had a salt application, it is quite likely that it could absorb that salt.  Okay?  So, what you have is Jenny Taylor using her skills to put herself in touch with other organisms and in essence, not in a Doctor Seuss way or anything but in essence speaking for the toads.  Okay?  That what she's doing is she's representing a portion of the biota that would otherwise go unnoticed and she's doing it as part of her work.  Okay, a lot of people in the valley, to look at the vernacular version of this, expressed the same kinds of sensitivities when they hunt, right?  Reading spore or tracking, you know, these are techniques that require concentration, they're also opportunities for the expression of, you know, we may be hard pressed to call it art, but certainly there is a creative opportunities in the practice of these particular types of skills.  Okay, this is Diane Shank, who's one of the women I interviewed, who used to live right next to the smelter; she had some pretty interesting stories.  Okay, so we'll let this gentleman speak for himself, the is Art Zack, who's a silviculturist.



>> You couldn't travel around the world and you can find lots of places that formally were forest land that have been converted to other uses.  You can find industrial forest lands that are managed for timber production, you can find parks of all sorts, be they national parks or wildlife reserves or other things like that where people have drawn a line around it and said we're going to preserve it and in a lot of cases the preservationists, pretty much hands off.  But national forest system, we've taken almost 9% of the land area of the lower 48 states and we've said okay, we're going to manage it to some degree, but relatively lightly and with the objective of maintaining the full diversity and complexity of these ecological systems.  And we're learning as we're going and the more we go on, the more complex we find out that task is and the more we find sometimes where we might of failed in the past.  But it's a wonderful experiment because we're trying to figure out how these systems really work at the same time as we're trying to manage them, at least to a degree in terms of human desires and human values and yet maintain the complexity of the system.  And of course you throw climate change in and that problem gets even more complex, so it's...



>> Okay, sorry to cut Art short.  What he's articulating there is, you know, an awareness of biological systems that he as a Silviculturist, comes in contact with on a daily basis.  And in the Forest Service itself and to a certain extent in the BLM, there's been a real seed change, in terms of conservation.  Right?  I mean, the forest Service used to always be a accused of simply, you know, being a kind of federal bureaucracy for the logging companies and kind of scheduling sales.  Right?  During the Clinton Administration, and spotted owl that Archie [assumed spelling] used to talk about all the time, that changed dramatically and part of the change is conservation.  You know, letting these systems work their way out, the introduction of fire and treating fire in a new way.  Steven Pines writing is real relevant here, anyway, an illustration of what Art Zack is talking about is you look at the left side of the image here, and those are old cedar stumps from the 1910 fire.  This is a contemporary photograph, so a hundred years ago that was a cedar forest, okay?  And that's as far as its come back since that time, a hundred years is quite a long time.  So what Art impressed upon me is that trees need each other, there are certain trees, homeowners know this right, when you plant certain trees, some trees are shade tolerant, other trees are shade intolerant.  So cedars need cottonwoods in order to survive and then the cottonwoods which have a much shorter life span, die out and that's where the cedars come up.  Right?  So that when we're talking about these biological systems, we're talking about systems that don't bounce back in a matter of generations, they take millennia.  Art said that, you know, the cedar groves that used to exist in the wetlands in this part of the country, probably three or four hundred years.  Okay, there's obviously other perspectives about work in the woods and this is the perspective of Bud Corkell who owns a saw mill.  So can we play that other...



>> And the people who seem to have the most influence on policy which is the quote, environmental lobby which is a misnomer if you ask me.  Because I'm more of an environmentalist, [background noise] than they are, because I make my living off it, you know, so for me to want to go out there and wantonly destroy the forest and ruin everything is just ridiculous.  You know, it's like a farmer who thinks he'll never replant his corn field because he's going to take care of it and so I don't -- when Clinton was in office, when he first got elected back in the early '90s shortly after that, the Forest Service effectively quit selling timber.  They quit putting up timber sales for guys like me.  You know, they'll put of salvage sales or little ridiculous stewardship sales or something like that but, they don't put up anything of any significance any more.  And it's a big mistake, it's a huge mistake and you'll witness that in the next few years because [inaudible] forest is probably one of the most intensely managed forests in the United States.  All right?  I mean, it's rooted , its managed, there was a lot of activity up there and since 1910, there has never been a significant fire in this forest.  And it's going to happen because they've quit logging, there's bug kill up there, the fuels are building up, it's going to happen, there's going to be a major fire up there.  And people talk about how -- well you can't have [inaudible], you can't have logging because it puts silt in the river and all that kind of stuff.  People come from all over the world to fish in that Coeur d'Alene River, all right?  And there's not one speck of truth to that, because that river's thriving -- right the biggest danger to that river is the inner tube and rafter people on the weekends, I mean, you should see it.  I mean, that's going to do more damage to that than any logging ever did.



>> Okay, I love this guy, he never stopped.  Okay, so one of the things that local businessman can do, you know, as Bud Corkell did is retool and what he did is he, you know, inherited a business, a mill that used to produce mine timbers which is the reason why, you know, the White Pine was all harvested in the first place which caused the 1910 fire because of the fuel buildup and slash.  It was actually started by a railroad engine.  And he morphed his business into cutting exposed beams for high-end builders, right.  The other skills, skills that existed in those families, the fallers and the buckers and the loggers and all those people, they still have those skills.  Right, the skills didn't go away and the mill workers still have their skills, right?  They simply have shifted to fit a new need.  So, you know, the idea here of tracking skill and technique as a mechanism of sort of a prism of seeing what's going on in the community, I think has some potential.  I obviously haven't worked out the bugs in all of this.  Okay, this is Rick Felario and I apologize that Rick's not here to speak for himself, I originally built this whole presentation around mining but I took a lot of it out because I thought, you know, rick was going to be here and I could sit here and, you know, joke with him or something but anyway he couldn't come.  And what he's doing, he's standing in the old Lucky Friday Drift, a drift is simply a horizontal tunnel that gives you access to a stope which is where the mine work goes on, its where the miners actually work.  And the old drifts are timbered drifts with rails down the middle, it's sort of your stereotypical mine shaft, most people call it.  The Lucky Friday actually has a new type of system called Luffle mining and I can't remember what the acronym stands for but, basically the Lucky Friday, instead of having a shaft that goes down and then drifts at right angles, the shaft that takes you to the work place, drops you off a mile underground and then you start corkscrewing around the vein.  Right?  In a little tiny cart, they call it rubber tire mining.  It is the next phase of mine industrialization; it allows them to go deeper with fewer people.  Right?  Miners still drill and blast and muck just like they always did, there's fewer of them, right?  And they are now being constrained by, hopefully, more stringent environmental regulations which I'll talk about in a minute.  Okay, we can play the next audio.  This Red Norman.



>> Get a new piece of equipment or an easier way, you know, of technology, you know is kind of catching up with us.  They don't want to use it and it's really stupidity but, you know, they're still out there doing that.  But what happened when we went, when we went to the rubber tire [inaudible] mining like this, we just started making more tons.  And so that -- you have to open up bigger drifts to get the equipment through, you try to keep the stokes down, I mean, a slusher bucket used to be -- you know, just a few feet wide at the most.  And you could not get much waste because this is a narrow mine, you know, a narrow vein so you don't have to -- you can stay right on a vein and it may open up to six, eight feet and may close down to a foot.  And you want to keep it right on that vein and keep as little a waste as possible, to keep your grade up, you know, keep your ounce.



>> Okay, the reason why the photographs are so dark has nothing to do with my bad photographic ability, it's -- when Rick took me down, he took me down on his shift and he said one of the things that pisses miners off more than anything else is some -- I guess I can't say that word -- some jerk, who comes down to visit the mine with a flash on their camera.  Because whatever happens -- what happens if you're in a dark space like this is, particularly if you're working, it blinds you for, you know, a lengthy period of time.  So, I shot all this stuff, you know, in ambient light and you can certainly tell.  But what that portion of the interview was designed to illustrate is the idea that technological change is constant and people of different generations respond to it in very different ways.  Some accept it, some don't accept it, some people actually quit mining at certain periods of time because their involvement in say, stope mining and, you know, changed so dramatically they no longer felt as though they were in control of the techniques.  Okay, let me skip this one and we'll go on to the big finish here.  Bateson says that part of the problem when the institutions or people from the outside begin to use the techniques of workers or try and represent the techniques of workers, is that often the result is not a true representation; it's what he calls allegory.  Right?  That the people who are being depicted are not being depicted as real people with concrete skills and knowledge, they're depicted as members of a representative class.  Right?  They're allegorically, so that you've got, oh mine owner, miner, environmentalist, folklorist, whatever, okay?  And that allegory is false myth, right?  Because it does not allow us in discourse to get at the real political and economic issues and I think he's right there.  This is just images of the Superfund site; these are all quote, cleaned sites.  They actually have about 6 to 12 inches of soil over toxic waste.  As I said, this entire biota is a wetland, its constantly draining, the image on the left is right next door to the new east mission flats toxic waste dump and the state of Idaho claims that this area floods on a semi-annual basis.  That if there is a flood that the actual dump will float with all of the toxic waste which is something I'd very much like to see.  Where do the voices of opposition come in?  They come in, in the perspectives of people like Barbara Miller who's an environmentalist, who's been doing this work for 30 years, trying to get EPA accountable, trying to get the mine owners accountable, for what pollution really exists.  And just one quick audio clip of Barb Miller.



>> The whole focus of 1,500 square miles of Superfund site that runs from Montana-Idaho border across three states, at this moment in time, [inaudible] is focusing all of its energy and effort to say, they are wanting input from people in the Superfund site.  And it is the people in the vulnerable, isolated areas with such limited resources that they're concentrating on, and at the same time, both people are speaking out, and they're deliberately being ignored by Region 10.  I mean, talk about a boy, to put it kindly, you still have recent study, June, John Hopkins University, six generations of families who are not being helped, kids are not being tested here, there's a reason for that.  Conflict of interest, it is not being addressed.  The whole focus of 1,500 square miles of Superfund site that runs from Montana-Idaho border.



>> Okay, you know, people like Barb Miller and there are a few up in the valley, are constantly attempting to represent these different systems.  And on the one hand they, you know, they often find themselves lapsing into allegory themselves, you know, finger pointing at EPA or whatever and not addressing some of these deeper systematic, environmental and biological issues.  And I think what needs to happen is that there needs to be some sort of mechanism to coalesce all of this and I'm not exactly sure what that's going to look like.  I was going to talk a little bit about the unemployed; I think the unemployed are extremely important for us to understand in terms of skill and technique.  Because they are the repositories of all of these skills and skills don't remain active forever.  Yeah.  The other element of this is what I mentioned earlier, the idea of the colonization of north Idaho, that almost on a 25 years basis since 1892, which is the picture on the left; the federal government has occupied and declared martial law or sent in FBI agents or state police to raid different things in the valley.  And put the valley back in order.  In 1892, it was labor, right?  They were fighting over industrialization and the lowering of wages.  In 1983 they sent in FBI agents to every bar in north Idaho in the valley that still had punch cards and gaming in the bars; they didn't do anything in southern Idaho, just northern Idaho.  And so the presence of the federal government, the presence of Federal troops and EPA is viewed as an occupation by a lot of people in the valley.  This is the Honor Guard for the 1910 fire fighter's memorial that I mentioned earlier.  The Forest Service Dress uni -- you can't see it too well, it's the woman in the middle there, there's actually a dress cape which I thought was really cool but, again, the symbolism is very similar to the symbolism of northern Ireland, right?  Its heraldry, its military, it's we want you to know that we're here to protect not you, we don't care that much about you or the toads or any of that, we're here to protect the silver.  And there's nothing you should do to threaten that.  So, to finish this up, Bateson talks about the difference between what we feel in a sensual way through technique, conatra [assumed spelling] right, to know via your senses.  As opposed to what we know, savoia [assumed spelling], right?  What is in our brain?  And the study of work is the study of the senses, to a certain extent but our task or challenge is to render those senses, to render that awareness into verbal or photographic documentation.  And I think part of the reason we haven't been real successful in some of this, from the point of view of workers is that we haven't reached that level that requires trust, it requires political alliances, it requires a lot of things.  So, final quote, the first one's from Lynn Austrum, who talks about what she calls the resource common and basically, what she's saying here is that, you can't organize a resource common from the top down.  It has to come from the bottom up which other people in this conference have talked about.  The second quote is from Bateson himself, and I'll just read this and that's the end.  What he says is that unaided consciousness must always tend toward hate, not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that seeing only arcs of circuits, the individually --  the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when his hard headed policies return to plague the inventor.  Okay, thanks.



^M00:46:39



[ Applause ]



^M00:46:47



>> I think I have time for just a couple of questions.



>> Sorry about that.



>> I have a couple of questions about the federal involvement.  Where is the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act in the remediation under EPA and the various forest service activities out there, because it seems to me, what you've described in capsule form is a vast traditional, cultural property centered on the mining landscape.



>> Yeah, one would think.  It is -- EPA just issued what they call a R.O.D. and the R.O.D. is a Research -- what is it -- Objective Design,,  I can't remember what exactly...



>> Record of Decision.  



>> Record of Decision, sorry, yeah, thanks.  And in the R.O.D. what they're outlining is a 100 years of additional clean-up.  From their perspective, and I think they're right about this, you know, it is a highly toxic environment that probably should've been abandoned, in terms of human habitation.  But the way in which they've gone about dealing with the people is to simply go about their work, they do have periodic public meetings but the same people turn out, they're not communicating with anyone in the valley.  They don't even have a resident EPA person in the valley; they drive over from Coeur d'Alene or fly in from Spokane.  But to answer your question, the State of Idaho and EPA have created a Superfund; it was an experiment that began during the Bush Administration where they created a thing called the Basin Commission which represents all the governments involved.  And the idea that Bush Administration was pushing and maybe will come back to it now, was to get rid of the EPA and put all of this clean-up money in the hands of local municipalities and counties and states.  Which I think would be a disaster.  The other answer to your question is the involvement of the tribe and I didn't go into that.  But the tribe and that developer, Dwayne Hagadone who owns a huge resort in Coeur d'Alene managed to get late Coeur d'Alene removed from the Superfund site.  So figure that one out, I don't know how they did that.



>> I wasn't necessarily referring the Native American involvement; you can have traditional cultural properties with...



>> Right.



>> Non-Native American populations and, you know, it's a shame that you don't have some section 106 involvement beyond Native American consultation to insure that the people involved in this community have some means of preserving their work culture, their natural environment and how the two interact with one another.



>> Right, yeah, I agree with you completely.  There's never been -- EPA has a section called Environmental Justice, E.J. and there's never been an E.J. Grant, to the valley.  They've been there 30 years. 



^M00:49:50



[ Inaudible audience response ]



^M00:49:58



>> One of the clips that you played for us from the Miller, I believe her name is, one of the environmental activists for the valley.



>> Yes.



>> Made a reference to John's Hopkins, and presumably they're have been studies on lead levels in children's?  How many studies have been done on lead levels in children?  In the [inaudible] valley...









>>  Yeah, okay.  Good question.  Actually Sue Moody, the woman that did that study from John's Hopkins was here yesterday, but she couldn't stay.  There've been a number of studies, most of them by epidemiologists and lead specialists, lead health specialists from New York and Johns Hopkins.  Part of the issue in the valley is documentation and what Sue Moody found, she interviewed 90 families, 90 people in different families who have been exposed to lead, everybody up there has been exposed to lead.  But at dangerous levels and what she found is that there's a stigma in the community, about getting tested and that if you got a leaded kid and, you know, leading can lead to horrible, you know, forms of retardation and other things, there's a stigma attached to that.  And so people want it to go away, the strategy of a lot of people in the valley including the chamber and the mine owners and are august governor is to simply kick EPA out of Idaho.  As if somehow, by doing that, all of these undocumented issues will disappear and, you know, there a lot of people -- you go into a bar and start talking about these issues and it's like, you know, that damn EPA, if they would just leave us alone we could go back to the way things used to be before they showed up.  



[ Inaudible audience response ]



>> Okay, thanks.  [Applause]



>>Let me just get a sense of the audience.  How many of you are not from Washington D.C.?  If you're not from Washington D.C., raise your hand.  How many of you are with the Library or Museum?  Or educational institution, raise your hand?  How many of you are in some way associated with the Library here or the Congress?  Raise your hand, okay great.  [Background noise] It's great to be, well since most of you aren't here from Washington, I do have to explain the weather since I'm a local and I'm not born and raised here, but I've been here 28 years now.  And as many of you may have heard, for a long time since the election, the prediction has been made that bipartisanship would happen will Hell froze over [laughter] and that pretty much explains two things [laughter], it explains the weather that you've encountered outside today and it gives you some sense of the geographical location you may be at right now [laughter].  It is good to be here at the Library, our Library and I say that in a couple of senses.  One is that I'm with the Hitachi Foundation and the Hitachi, Washington D.C. office is headed by a man named Tok Odai [assumed spelling].  Tok Odai is on the Board of Directors for the Asian division of the Library of Congress, he's been there for a number of years and this last March, he was elected to be the Chair of that Board.  So we've had a long association with the Library of Congress through Tok's association.  I would also say that I used to work for a congress person who is now also gone into philanthropy, he has a little different job, he's the President of the council on Foundations, so we ended up a little bit differently.  So this was our Library in the sense that I worked for the Congress, and last but not least, I have to say that I'm not a librarian and I don't play one on TV but I kind of married a librarian [laughter].  My wife and I both are from working class families and her highest ambition was to have a book mobile [laughter] to bring.  [Applause] It didn't quite work out that way; she's a professor of English and director of Women's and Gender Studies at Georgetown University.  But we do bring a lot of books around to a lot of different people.  So we have a little bit of territory to cover with this panel, its only looking back, looking forward and the future of work and we have about 90 minutes.  [Background talking] So I'm not going to spend a lot of time in the introduction, a fabulous panel and in discussion for setting up the panel, I thought I would ask each of them to just -- before they do their presentations to say just a couple of sentences about their work.  And since this is a meeting about work, I thought I'd challenge them to sort of reveal something about themselves, an insight.  And tells what was the most interesting or different kind of job that they've had.  So why don't we start at this end and work our way down.



>> Okay, I probably have the strangest job so between high school and college I was a -- I worked at -- do I admit this?  Collections at a newspaper for the classifieds, and so this is not my kind of job because I'm really introverted and so I had to copy [inaudible] usually they didn't pay the penalty because there was a problem with the bill.  But there was this one guy who was a clown for parties for children and he got on the phone and he was swearing up a storm.  And I was like, I'm glad [laughter] you know, [inaudible] [laughter].  So anyways that was a very strange job and not very pleasant.  So I went to college [laughter].



>> Jennifer Cordera:  Hi everybody, my name is Jennifer Cordera [assumed spelling] and I work at the New York Hall of Science, it's a hands-on science museum located in Corona, Queens which is one of the most diverse communities in the U.S.  And there we have a science career ladder program where we hire high school and college students to work on the museum floor, interacting with our visitors.  And so one of the strangest jobs I had, well I started in the program about 12 years ago as a high school student, and the strangest thing I've done there is I've dissected a cows eye. [background noise] And so it's kind of gross but it's really cool when you're dissecting a cow's eye and you're talking about the parts and you're getting the kids excited about it and excited about why the eye works.  So, that's it.



>> The eye's looking back at you while you're dissecting it?  [Laughter].



>> So I guess the strangest job was one summer when I was living in Philadelphia, me and my brother and my cousins, I don't know how it happened that we all seemed to have landed the jobs working in the freezer of an ice cream factory.  And, you know, moving crates of cherry vanilla, piling them up, and what we discovered was that the bosses never went inside the freezer.  So the longer you could take it inside the -- you know, you go to work in the middle of summer wearing an overcoat and all of your, you know, super layers.  And my cousin perfected the art of sleeping in the freezer [laughter].  You know, because he knew that the bosses never came into the freezers.  [Laughter]



>>  Now that's an advance skill.  [Laughter]  I actually am old enough, and will fess up to it, that my strangest job was when I was in junior high.  I would set pins in a bowling alley on league night, because they needed to use all the lanes, and two of the lanes were not automated.  And those are the ones that I operated, and I think it really prepared me working for politicians and in public policies. [Laughter]  So why don't we go ahead -- because you really had to stay out of the ways of both the pins and the bowling balls and you had to be able to distinguish which one you were sending back.  Why don't we begin with the presentations.  Donna you're up first, if you want to step up. 



>> Donna Rothstein:  Okay, so I'm Donna Rothstein.  I work for the National Longitudinal Surveys at the BLS and I've been there 15 years now.  Okay.  So what is a longitudinal survey?  We basically -- it's the same sample surveyed over time.  Sometimes it's referred to as panel data and it can consist of individual's households, establishments and for us we do individuals, interview them.  So the National Longitudinal Survey's gather detailed information about labor market experiences and all sorts stuff of six groups of men and women.  Each of our surveys has over 5,000 original members and each cohort is basically selected to be a representative of all people living in the U.S. at that time.  Our -- we call it the four early cohorts that are now discontinued, the original cohorts and they began in the '60s and I'm going to talk today mostly about the youth cohorts, which is the National Longitudinal Survey of '79 and '97.  And part of '79 is actually the children of the '79 where we interview the children of female respondents.  So the '97 cohort, which is our newest cohort and someday hopefully we'll get another one, where we basically interview [inaudible] kids who were born in the years '80 to '84.  [Laughter] And they were first interviewed in '97 and we basically interview them every year.  The '79, they were kids in '79, we first interviewed them when they were 14 to 21 and they are still being interviewed today.  Data topics, we basically get complete histories, which is really nice, if you want to do research problems about transitions of different things, like from school to work and things like that.  So we get histories of education, every job they ever held, training, marriage, fertility, program participation, income to assets, health.  We get their high school transcripts, cognitive test scores.  And so we have these great, you know, data sets of all this information.  Each respondent receives a computer assisted personal interview in ninety -- for the 97 cohort.  They are annual and in person and we contract out to the National Opinion Research Center, who sends interviewers out to go to these home basically, and conduct an hour long interview.  The 79 interviews are now biennial.  They started going every other year in 94, and they're mostly via phone, at this point.  We have all our data is basically free online.  You can extract it and download it to your computer.  We have extensive documentation and our bibliography shows that we're 6,500 articles basically based on analyst data.  And if you open the Journals Labor Economics chances are -- or some other journal, chances are you're going to find at least one article using one of the analyst data sets.  So who uses analyst data?  Mostly it's academic researchers, policy makers, think tanks and the media and sometimes you see some articles in the paper using our data.  I was asked to focus on training and employment, so I thought I'd briefly talk about the training and the two surveys.  The 79, it's mostly formal training that we ask but we get a complete history, so we know basically every training program they ever took.  We have special supplements in some years about skill transferability, informal training.  In the 97 we mostly focus on formal training, and again we get every spell.  As far as I know no research has been done using the 97 training data at this point, but I think now that the kids, they're not kids any more right, they're in their mid to late 20's, we're going to really start seeing more research doing that.  These are just some examples of early research using the 79 Lisa Lynch looked at just whether training was general or for a specific, my colleagues Mark and Jim Speltzer used -- looked at the informal training supplement in the 79.  Employment.  The employment data are basically the strength of our surveys.  I mean there's a lot of strengths, but these, you know, were the BLS so we want good employment data.  And it's kind of amazing if you think about it.  We've got every job that people have ever held.  We have information about -- we get that in event history format, so we get the start and stop date, we know the gaps; we know what they're doing in the gaps if they're looking for work or whatever, so we get the complete work history of a respondents.  And of course we get the wages, their hours, industry, occupation, promotions, sometimes we have special supplements about, you know, we have questions about supervision, job hierarchy, and it's just probably anything you -- or a lot of the things you could think of are in there, at least at some point.  Researchers are just starting to really use the employment data in the 97 and I'm going to discuss one paper that's relevant to this presentation in a few slides, but the 79s are just a few examples.  Hank Farber and Derrick Neal used -- looked at job mobility patterns of young workers.  And again, you can see every job they ever held so you could really look at that.  And Farber and Gibbons and Light and McGarry looked at early career wage determination and you can imagine one could start doing that with the 97.  Research on youth, and I don't know why I feel like I should apologize, but I do like half my job is working with the data and writing academic type papers, so I put my research on youth, but there's other papers out there.  So one thing, like I used the -- we have transcript data from the high schools and I looked at the effect of working while in high school on grade point average, just this other paper I just compared the 97 and the 79 surveys and looked at who was working during school.  David Neumark who's our Prof at University of California Irvine and I did some papers on school to career programs, and a woman who -- that's one of my dissertation advisor students.  He asked me to write a paper with her, so we looked at -- we basically had a section on college choice in our survey where we asked the people which colleges they applied to.  So we were looking at factors affecting, you know, their likelihood of applying to a selective college and if poor kids were less likely to apply and, you know, kind of where the hurdles were.  One thing that's useful with having two similar surveys is being able to compare the progress of the 97's cohort, compared to how the 79 cohort did.  And again, the 79 cohort is birth date '57 to '64 and I guess those are the young baby boomers.  The 97 is birth dates '80 to '84 I think.  Part of Gen Y and maybe, maybe not quite.  And this is just something I quickly calculated.  Just looking at the educational attainment in the two cohorts and this is the -- the 2008 survey is our latest 97 survey, so that's the oldest I can get at this stage.  I mean that's publicly available.  The 2009 will be available in June and the 2010, you know, is going on now.  And what you can see is just a shift in the bachelor's degree -- degree attainment between the 79 and the 97 cohort.  It's much higher.  And you probably see in the papers about women gaining on men and here if you look you see that a lot of the -- basically the increase in bachelor's attainment is among women and so I thought that was kind of interesting.  This is just another example is that you have your -- their work histories for the 79.  What we do is we put out press releases of, you know, some interesting things with the 79.  We look at the work history and you can see, you know, a number of jobs held over these particular ages and as they go on you can see you'll be able to look at basically their whole -- a cohort's whole career.  And for the 97 cohort we can just start doing that.  A few years ago, a Joe Altanji came to the BLS and presented this paper that I thought was pretty relevant to this panel today, Changes in the Characteristics of American Youth:  Implications for Adult Outcomes, and he's using the 79 to the 97 as looking at the distribution of skills in the two cohorts and what the implications would be for wages and employment.  So as you saw with the education slide before it he's finding that 97 cohort is more advantaged, in terms of education and cognitive skills and he's also finding the skill distribution is widened for the 97 cohort compared to the 79.  He's finding that the skill gap between white males and other demographic groups have declined, and predicts that if the wage process faced by the 79 cohort predicts -- persists you'd expect women to gain relative to men, and we hope.  Further research basically the 97 youth are turning 24 to 28 in 2008.  That's the latest available public use data, but every year we'll get another round and we're going to see a lot more research examining the educational attainment, early labor market outcomes, transitions from school to work, starting families and so on.  Its co-author David Neumark and I are going to look at the gender gap in educational attainment in the 97, what the labor market consequences are and see if we can explain why this differential is occurring and compare it to the 79.  And that's the story.  Thanks. 



>> Great.  Thank you, Donna. 



^M01:08:07



[ Applause ] 



^M01:08:11



>> We're going to hold questions until after the panel is presented.  But Donna, I really enjoy analysis papers and I think I could wander along a long time with the data that you put together.  Donna has kind of with this data set looked forward and looked back a bit.  I now have a new category of describing my generation.  It's no longer just that I've gotten an AARP card.  It's they've dropped interviewing my cohort [laughter] on top of everything else.  But Jennifer is actually going to talk about the really more looking forward to the next generation, so Jennifer?  Thank you. 



>> Jennifer Correa:  Thank you.  Hello everybody.  My name is Jennifer Correa like I mentioned earlier and I work at the New York Hall of Science.  We are a hands on science museum located in Corona Queens.  In our community they speak over 109 different languages, come from a lot of different countries and cultures throughout the world.  And it was built originally in 1964 at the -- during the World's Fair and it reopened in 1986 as a science center.  Since then we've served over five million visitors, and we have about 450 hands-on exhibits.  But one of the signature programs of the Science Career Ladder is -- I mean of the New York Hall of Science is our Science Career Ladder, which is a program for high school and college students in the community, where they learn a lot of essential job skills and they're able to interact with the visitors that come into the museum.  So there's a few goals of the program.  Originally it was developed just for as a basic need to have floor staff interact with our visitors, so one of the major goals is to get our visitors excited about science, and so that you have them become more science literate.  Another goal is to increase participation in STEM careers, science technology, engineering and math, and also in education careers.  And so a lot of our students when they leave the program they do go on into those careers.  And our last goal is to provide role models for the visitors that come into the museum.  So they see somebody that looks just like them that probably speaks their language.  Our Explainers speak about 22 different languages and they are very representative of the people in the community.  So we currently have about 150 students in the program and they range in age from about 14 to 24 and this is the model.  This is what our model kind of looks like.  So for our high school students they start off as volunteers in the program.  They learn essential skills like how to communicate, they interact with our youngest visitors, our pre-school age visitors, and they do basic science concepts and they also learn about the world of work, how to dress to an interview, what types of questions are going to be asked and how to answer them, how to create a resume, things like that, so that they are learning skills that will help them in the museum, but also in their future careers as well.  Once doing that for a while they get promoted to becoming Explainer interns where they start getting paid and also start learning a lot more science concepts and how to engage visitors in learning about science.  After doing that for a while they can become Explainers where they are on the exhibit floor interacting with the visitors at the different exhibits.  But if they're a college student they can just go ahead and apply to become an Explainer from any college in New York City.  So at any given time we have about 100 Explainers.  They are interacting with our visitors at the exhibits.  They are doing science demonstrations, so like I mentioned earlier the cow's eye dissection.  It's about a 15 to 20 minute presentation, so they're really learning a lot about presentation skills, how to communicate with other people, and how to teach science.  So once -- after doing that for a little while if they become an expert in the exhibits and they learn a lot of these demonstrations they can move on into the program Explainer role, which is more like role models for the newer Explainers, they are supervisors for the museum, so we're trying to teach them skills on how to become supervisors, how to become managers and how to run a program themselves.  From there the museum has a lot of part time and full time positions in the education department where these Explainers can apply to if they've reached that level.  Currently we have about 28 educator positions in our education department at the museum, and of the 28, 18 of them, 18 of the part time and full time positions are being filled by Science Career Ladder participants, so former Explainers.  I myself, as I mentioned earlier, was a former Explainer and I've been in the program for about 12 years now.  So there are a lot of benefits of the Career Ladder Program, not only to the individuals, but to the institution and to the community.  So some of the benefits that the individuals have stated based on some of the research that we've done with them, and also research conducted by the Institute for Learning Innovation is that this program really helps them improve their public speaking skills, they have a greater self-confidence, they understand science, they understand better about the world of science and what types of jobs are available to them and they have improved leadership skills and how to problem solve.  So we're really preparing them for the world of work, but also for the Institution it really gives a face for the museum.  It's -- you could say it's cheap labor, but at the same time it's really a face for the museum and also, something that the museum can brag about.  And the New York Hall of Science has replicated our Science Career Ladder Program in six different institutions around the world.  So we're really excited about that that there are other museums that are interested in doing these types of things.  And for the community we are offering jobs to students that would be working probably at McDonald's or something else, but that they're actually getting a great working experience out of it.  So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you a little video about our Career Ladder Program so you can hear about the benefits to the Explainers themselves from their own words.  So it's -- you'll probably see some familiar faces in the video, as well.  



^M01:14:29



[ Video playing ] 



[ Music and Sounds ] 



^M01:14:40 



>> Ursula Burns:  [Video] Think about how amazing it would be if you could actually get potable water to everybody who needed it.  Think about how amazing it would be if you could deliver health care to everyone who needed it.  Feed everyone who wanted to be fed.  



>> We have enormous challenges in public education in the inner city.  



>> Like the global warming and all these issues with pollution.  I'm pretty sure science is the answer to it. 



>> None of these problems are problems that can be solved by a banker.  They can't be solved by lawyers. 



>> Margaret Honey, Ph.D.:  It's absolutely the case that in order for us to tackle some of the big daunting global challenges that we're facing, the answers to those problems are going to come from a combination of the STEM disciplines. 



>> I'm passionate about science, technology, engineering and math.  We call it STEM.  



>> Joel Klein:  Science, technology, engineering math.  I think these are going to be the drivers of the twenty first century. 



>> Pamela Fraser-Abder, Ph.D.:  I see science education as providing the population with critical thinkers. 



>> Simone Hartley:  If you don't understand science at least, you know, I think you're missing [background music] a big piece of what life has to offer. 



>> Joel Klein:  What's a challenge?  How do we get young people in America to think differently about the STEM subjects, right, get more kids into science, technology, engineering and math.  



^M01:15:56



[ Background Video Playing ] 



^M01:16:05



>> One of the really unique things about the Hall of Science is the fact that we have the Explainer program, that we run the Science Career Ladder Program and we have these young people who when you visit the museum they're all over the floor.  You spot them, they're wearing the red aprons, and they really are in so many respects the face of the Hall of Science. 



>> Preeti Gupta, Ph.D.:  So the program is a youth development program.  It's a career development program.  It's a workforce development program.  



>> Jennifer Correa:  And an employment opportunity for high school and college students in New York City, to allow them to explore careers in science, to interact with the visitors that come to the museum every day, and to learn about twenty first century skills and to develop their personal and professional career goals.  



>> I'm Jess Spinova and I'm a program Explainer here at the Hall of Science. 



>> I'm Victor Marquez.  I'm a program Explainer at the New York Hall of Science. 



>> My name is Chris.  I'm a program Explainer at the Hall of Science. 



>> I'm Simon Lee.  I'm one of the Explainers here in the New York Hall of Science. 



>> My name is Harmony Batember and I work at the Hall of Science as an Explainer.  



>> Preeti Gupta, Ph.D.:  When visitors come to the science center what we notice is that, they are excited to have young people as floor facilitators and so as the family is interacting with an exhibit, the Exlainer comes up and really is engaging them in a conversation.  So it's about conversations about science on the museum floor.  



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>> And what's great about being an Explainer is the kind of feedback you get from all the visitors, especially little kids.  They -- when they actually understand the things that you are trying to teach them, or talk to them about, it's a very rewarding experience.  



^M01:17:49



[ Background Video Playing ] 



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>> My favorite thing about being an Explainer is actually explaining.  
^M01:17:59
I just really like it.  Teaching somebody something and seeing that maybe the surprise or interest in their face, like I actually taught them something new, that they can go and share with somebody else, and I was a part of that.  


^M01:18:11
>> What really sparks a great interaction is that I not only give them knowledge, but I also give them the participation in science, and I think that's the key that really keeps me interested as well. 


^M01:18:24
>> Being able to go up to people and interact with them, teach them, that's pretty much my favorite part.  I always like the demonstrations. 


^M01:18:32
>> I really love doing demonstrations because I'm educating them, on a topic they probably never even heard about. 



>> The interaction part is probably my favorite, like I love it when I see someone's face like when they learn something for the first time. 


^M01:18:43
>> There's always that gap that you can like science in the classroom is so hard to learn, but once you cross that bridge over to the Hall, you're like wow, this is science. 


^M01:18:52
>> You know, the Explainers are a remarkable group of young people.  When they're at their best what I like to think they're doing is kind of playing the role of pied piper.  


^M01:19:02
>> I wish I could have a job called, what is your job?  I'm the Explainer. [Inaudible] it's like a powerful, it's like I'm the teacher.  I'm the Explainer. 



>> Explainers are the heart of the Hall of Science.  The heart, the soul, the guts. 


^M01:19:14
>> When you go to all the different holes for the mini golf, you're able to experience many of the different circumstances that people have to go through when they go to space. 



>> Make a glass [inaudible] which is pretty cool. 



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>> So you take the filter.  You hold it up to one eye and then, notice what direction the airplanes are spinning in. 



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>> They're drawing kids to be Explainers and there's nothing like empowering kids who are both learning about, and explaining science, and so you create a culture in which the kids are excited about the learning and then, also get involved in the teaching.  



>> When the visitors come in regardless of whether or not we are scientists they see us in that way.  They see us cutting a cow's eye and say wow, that person must be a scientist.  They see us playing with liquid nitrogen or talking about how astronauts live in space and all these things make them think that we are scientists.  They think maybe in the future I can be a scientist too. 



>> Preeti Gupta, Ph.D.:  Students enter the program having different strengths and different weaknesses.  And what the program does is that it supports students to harness their strengths and leverage it and then, support them in improving their weaknesses. 



>> Jennifer Correa:  So not only are they getting the skills that they need to become successful professionals in the future, they're learning about science.  They're getting that first time job opportunity [background music]. 



>> It actually made me more curious about science [laugh]. 



>> Being here and a part of the Career Ladder it's really like brought me out of my shell.  Like I'm able to get in front of a crowd of 40, 50, even 100 people and talk to them as if it was a one-on-one conversation. 



>> I never thought that I would consider teaching as like an option, but after working here and seeing the look on these kids' faces when they get something like, it gives me that satisfaction that I want more of it, so I'm actually thinking about teaching, so that's one way in which the Hall of Science has changed my outlook on things. 



>> And so for me now I see how helping the Explainers grow helps all of our visitors grow as well, so I feel like I'm reaching out to a lot of people being here. 



>> The Science Career Ladder is not only a program that's powerful in terms of helping young people acquire a whole host of what we might call twenty first century skills, effective communication skills, effective problem solving skills, effective collaboration skills, but we know it's a powerful program for introducing students to careers in STEM fields.  And it's also an incredibly powerful program for training the next generation of urban science educators. 



>> Well, if you just look at me for example, when I started off here, I had no idea that I wanted to do education.  I had no idea that I wanted to focus on science.  I had no idea about who I was as a person.  When you work at the Hall of Science especially for as long as I have you just become a totally different person.  So I'm studying biology education at Queens College.  I am studying to be a secondary education teacher, like high school teacher.  And I kind of want to start teaching right away, I just really want to get in the game.  


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>> Right now I'm aspiring to being the research scientist.  I am an intern at the United States Geological Survey in Long Island. 



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>> I've been working on my master's thesis for the past year. 



>> I don't think I would have gotten as far as I am in life right now 
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if it wasn't for my experience with the Hall. 


^M01:22:57
>> It's given me a lot of -- a lot of like life skills, but a lot of interacting and engaging and speaking.  I just transferred from Laguardia to Queens College.  My major is physics and my minor is secondary education.  I want to teach junior high science and then I want to become a high school teacher. 


^M01:23:15
>> I went from a 15 year old with braces who knew nothing about science to a person that's going for a career in biology education. Who just loves teaching.  


^M01:23:26
>> It was really, really important to my life.  It defined my life in many ways.  


^M01:23:33
>> I guess pretty much, you know, what my dad has always told me, you know, it's like you shouldn't be scared to try things out and just go and just jump for it.  I like to see the look on the kids' face and when they learn something, especially when I show them something on the museum floor, so I'd like to see that again in a classroom.  My own classroom. 


^M01:23:52
>> I would definitely bring my kids here and my classroom here.  


^M01:23:55
>> I think every science teacher should give their child that experience of coming to the Hall and if they don't they're robbing them of a great experience and a great learning experience.  





^M01:24:06
>> It does make science come alive.  There's nothing like watching youngsters trying to talk to other people and share their excitement, for making this really infectious.  


^M01:24:18
>> You start people and you plant seeds, and all of them should grow to something.  Some of them grow really, really tall. 


^M01:24:23
>> Things like that keep it real for the kids and my kids in New York trust me.  They want it to be kept real.  



^E01:24:30

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^M01:24:34
>> Jennifer Correa:  [Laugh] About 60% of our alumni that we've reached out to in surveys have said that they have moved on into careers in science, technology, engineering  math or education, so that was really exciting for us to hear about that.  And that's it.  Thank you everybody. 



^M01:24:49



[ Applause ] 



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>> Jennifer lives in such an exciting place.  You know, I've worked with people in a company that all the top executives are not MBAs or business backgrounds, they're all engineer backgrounds, and they see this as an issue in the United States.  It's also a huge issue in Japan, in Western Europe.  There's almost no place other than maybe China, and they need to develop their system to develop the supply of STEM experts.  So I know where I'll go next time I'm in New York.  Stephen?  So we've talked about the future and we have some reason for optimism.  Steve's going to talk about -- Stephen's going to talk about sort of the current time and the recent past.  



>> Stephen Winick:  Oh, okay.  And I thought I'd start out with two other digressions.  The first one being a fortune that I happened to get at lunch eating at the Hunan Dynasty around the corner, which was You are soon going to change your present line of work.  



^M01:25:50

[ Laughter ]  



^M01:25:56



>> Stephen Winick:  Hopefully not, but [chuckles] I also wanted to just mention that City Lore actually in New York, the organization that I direct on the New York's lower east side, is working with the Hall of Science on a project that is not so -- just to give you a sense of how we can find ways to collaborate across disciplines.  The New York Hall of Science has been working with a youth digital learning team that got a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.  And what they were doing is that at the Hall of Science, which is at the old World's Fairgrounds, it's at the grounds of the old World's Fair, they were running a summer program for kids where they had worked with scientists at Pace University develop these various probes, to get kids to go out and be able to measure air quality and noise quality and other pollution related factors on a variety of contemporary little gizmos that they would give the kids.  And City Lore was contracted in order to supply the cultural background so that what we -- they were looking at the area around Flushing Meadow Park and we were giving them information on the Mohawk Steel workers that had built the unisphere and worked on some of the structures and their stories, and some of the local poets who had written about the baseball players in and around Shay Stadium and tried to -- and all of this was uploaded onto Google Map, so that you had a kind of a combination of the environmental information and also the cultural information that accompanied it.  And we're working on some follow up projects where we go into neighborhoods and try to look at the environmental issues, and then look at the cultural issues, that created those environmental issues and their history.  So I thought that was interesting, so I was very happy to get another glimpse into the world of the New York Hall of Science.  I also wanted to thank the Library for having me here and for making me one of the Archie Green Fellows.  To me just increasingly when I look at Twitter or when I look at the apps, when I look at kids racing between 15 million little tasks and tiny short messages I'm always struck by how the library resources -- that a few generations of folklorists have contributed to the library are such a testament to kind of in depth communities experience and I kind of feel like they will always be there for people to go back to try to look at a different type of chronicling of human experiences than, you oftentimes get in some of the very short-term electronic new media.  And I feel like it's really a tribute to the Library that they have accepted so many of these collections and kind of retained that role.  And I think it's going to just play an increasing part in the American experience as these new technologies unfold in ever unpredictable ways.  I've had the -- one of the programs that you saw me talk about yesterday was working on the Eerie canal project.  And as I mentioned to you, part of that is to chronicle not only the Eerie canal and the great eras of industrialization that that came out of, but the whole world of deindustrialization that exists all along the route of the -- of what was the Eerie canal, or still is the Eerie canal, and Steve Wonder was wonderful here trying to bring that canal to life for you.  And I just wanted to play you because this has actually been kind of late in my Archie Green Fellowship.  I just came back last week from a field trip with Jens Lund  and Dan Ward and Academy Award winning film maker, Paul Wagner, trying to document -- documenting the grain scoopers and the mill workers and the steel workers up in the Buffalo area to get their experiences set down.  And some of that is too recent for me to be able to show you video of, but Jens had gone back a little earlier this year and interviewed Doris McKinney Craig, who was a steel worker, and I thought I'd show you a little bit of the video of that first.  Let's see if we can get that to play.  Jens did a whole series of interviews, and for the first time we were actually having folklorists do the interviews on a small high definition camera, so that he actually set it up and got people to turn off their refrigerators and try to make sure that we could get a decent lighting in order to be able to do that film.  So this is just Doris talking a little bit about -- she was actually documented by Milton Rogovin, the well-known photographer some 30 years back as a steel worker, and then again, about 10 years ago with Mike Frisch, the oral historian, as well.  But we went back and interviewed her now and this is her talking about her -- the last days of her steel working experience. 



^M01:30:41



[ Silence ] 



^M01:30:46



>> Doris: [Video] You kind of felt like something was going on because they had started to stockpile, you know, they had lots and lots of steel all around the plant and they just kept, you know how you just -- they kept making it and piling it higher and higher and higher, you know, all around the plant.  So you kind of knew something was wrong.  It wasn't being shipped out as fast as we were doing it before, so you knew something was wrong.  But I got to tell you too like in the box cars, you know, like when the cars -- when the box cars come in and it's winter time they had snow in them.  So you had to dig, you know, you shoveled the snow out and then put the steel, you know -- what four by fours down for the steel to be placed on them, and then a lot of times you were working in the cold and steel can get very, very cold.  So you was dressed in layers and layers of clothes, you know, so that's one of the things too, so it wasn't a pretty job.  [Laughs].  So now when I tell my kids and they say,  oh, I work so hard.  I say, "I don't even want to hear it, because you ain't doing nothing."  [Laughs].  Yeah.  It was pretty rough, pretty rough. 



>> Get laid off all at once or did you get laid off and called back a number... 



>> Laid off and called back.  Laid off and called back.  Laid off and called back.  You was laid off and you might be off for a week and they'll call you back.  Lay you off.  You might be off for two weeks, three weeks and they'll call you back.  And then they don't call you no more and then you see in the paper, you know, closing down.  Well, you know that's the end, so then a lot of people got -- you know, a lot of people kind of scattered, you know, people that you were so used to seeing every day and stuff, you know, it you stopped seeing them.  Then you had to start thinking about what you were going to do when that unemployment ran out because there was no -- how was it says?  Indefinite.  That was the terminology that was used for when you got laid off and, you know, the possibility of return was indefinite, so indefinite meant never [laughs] for Republic Steel.  



>> Stephen Winick:  So what one of the -- I mean just the new stuff is too recent to be able to show you the video, but I'll show you a few of the still images.  But one of the things that a lot of the workers talked about was a kind of nostalgia for the working day and you talk about what people enjoying work that was one of the themes that came up again and again.  And these are the -- this was the -- our interview with a group of grain scoopers beside an old grain factory -- an abandoned grain factory.  The grain factories -- the grain scoopers had their last day in 2003 unloading the ships from the [inaudible] -- from the Great Lakes, and actually George Steinbrenner who owned the Yankees owned that shipping company.  That's where the money for the Yankees came from, so he'd always get advice on -- from the grain scoopers, as well.  And the second from the right here was a gentleman named Freddy Brill who ran the union.  And the third person there who you can kind of tell is the guy who doesn't look like a grain scooper was the management from the company.  And of course they actually became friends because of such long term negotiations and a lot of them agreed that the union had kept that business going for another 10 years after it would have died out sooner had it not been for the union.  And some of the things that struck me about that Freddy Brill -- been mentioned to me was that one of the things you have when you start deindustrializing, especially in a job where you were actually scooping grain and actually quite a lot of hard manual labor is that you're not replacing the older workers, so you constantly, you know, you're not as people -- just because there's so much attrition because of downsizing, so your staff, your workforce becomes aging.  And so you have a lot of older men doing tasks that they really shouldn't be doing, but they can't afford to bring young people in because they want to give preference to the older people, so you actually had a lot of injuries on the job just at work as a result of that.  And he, you know, they talked about -- he talked about it to me he said, you know, the younger generation, these kids that are growing up now they don't -- they barely know what a union is and they're going to work till the day they die.  You know, they'll never have a pension.  They're going to -- there's no way they're ever going to be able to retire on social security alone, and they will work until the day they die.  This is just a shot of the factory.  And these were taken by Jens Lund during our -- while we were doing the filming.  That's our film crew out there going through the different elements of the -- the actual old canal is behind the factory, so the grain used to be loaded on to canal boats, but then you can also see right here in front is a train track, and the trains would be unloaded there, as well, and the trains eventually replaced them.  And we've been working a lot with a folklorist that many of you know, Bruce Jackson, who's here.  He's actually doing a photography project documenting these abandoned grain silos.  They're not called silos, grain elevators that are left all over Buffalo and he calls his project American Chartra, which is -- we had a chance to talk to some of the preservationists in Buffalo trying to save a lot of these grain, beautiful grain elevators, and they -- he talked about the fact that, you know, I mean Buffalo did have its hay day in the days of steel in the 1950's and going back to the turn of the century, but he said look at all these cities in Europe, you know, a lot of those cities had their hay day in the year 800 and they're still around.  So we're going to be around for a long time, whether it's our hay day or not.  And a lot of people talked about -- you know, talked about the fact that the biggest export from upstate New York is the children.  The biggest export is the kids that are leaving and that's had a lot of impact on the area, as well.  A lot of the people -- the one growing industry is health care because with all the young people leaving there's nothing but old people there, and a lot of the old people with -- I asked them what keeps them there when there are no more jobs.  And a lot of them said family.  They're all from families and the families oftentimes kids want to stay together.  They want to stay where their folks are and so on.  So that was one set of the interviews.  We also spent a lot of time -- oh, this is Ed Adamstack was a -- was an automobile worker.  A lot of the automobile parts are made in and around Buffalo.  And he talked about when he got a job back in the 1950's.  Being an auto worker you were a hot number.  You know, you were right out of high school, you were working on an assembly line.  You're making really good money and everybody wanted to go out with.  He says, you know, in this day and age when you say you're an auto worker everybody says well, have you been laid off?  So he talked about it in that sense, as well.  We also went to Seneca Falls where there's a textile mill that was right on the Eerie Canal, and this is Fran Barbeery  over here, who has worked in the mill as well as now runs the historical society.  And this is just an abandoned mill.  In some ways it -- and Lucy Dodson, this is the 92 year old woman who worked at the mill until the mill closed, and Fran's sister who also, worked in the mill for many years and apparently was a very wild woman, talked about, you know the smoking porch that was on the mill, that that's where they had all their fun was when all the girls used to go out and smoke and -- Steve Wonder talked about the fact that the girls would kind of press themselves up to the windows when the canal boats were passing by.  But the mill it's -- you know, it tells an American story.  The mill made all the socks for the Civil War.  In fact, it's often been said that the Eerie Canal when the first spade of dirt was dug on the Eerie Canal the North won the Civil War because of the transportation advantage that that -- and later the railroads gave them along the same pathways.  And the mill went on to make the socks for all the NBA players.  Made the socks which the astronauts went to the moon and just in 2003 it was sold to the -- you know, to a factory owner in the south and later it went to Mexico after that.  So it really tells the story.  And interestingly enough I'm kind of struck by the kind of latter day story, as well, which is where people are trying to find new uses for things.  So this building is supposed to be the site and it's been bought by the Women's Hall of Fame. Because Elizabeth Katy Stanton and was in Seneca Falls and so -- and the Declaration of Sentiments, the beginning of the women's rights movements in 1848 took place in Seneca Falls.  And one of the things that they talk about a lot is just how the deindustrialization has affected the town and they're making an ingenious and desperate effort to -- they have five museums, several on the Canal, several on the women's rights movement trying to build tourism up in Seneca Falls and one of the really interesting stories from a folklorist point of view to me, is that they've come up with this idea that "It's a Wonderful Life," which was filmed in a mythical Bedford Falls, was actually based on Seneca Falls.  And they've made the case that Frank Capra once was known several times to get his hair cut in Seneca Falls [laughter] and that the owner of the pump factory, which was the biggest industry in Seneca Falls, drove around in an automobile that has his initials on it which, was an idea used in the film.  And so now Gould's Hotel, which was named after the man who owned the pump factory is now named the Clarence after the angel in "It's a Wonderful Life."  And they have an annual event and Zuzu, who was the little girl, comes up every year.  They pay her a fortune to come up [laughter] and run the It's a Wonder -- you know, as an effort to create this -- because even more powerful than the Eerie Canal or the women's rights movement is the idea that "It's a Wonderful Life" might have been filmed in this town.  Now, and Fran mentioned of course that the writer who wrote "It's a Wonderful Life" claims that he had no influence whatsoever [laughter] for Seneca Falls.  However, you know, she says we want it to be true.  It is our myth and this is something that we believe in, and that we feel can be used to bring people back to this area.  So I thought that was an ingenious notion to go on, now especially from a folklore point of view.  These are some of the other images of the three ladies.  We took them all out to eat at Abigail's afterwards, which won -- recently won a national competition for the best chicken wings in the United States by the way, which were very good.  And we also then went to Lackawanna, where we interviewed a number of steel workers.  This is Fred Plandowski.  Every once in a while sort of from a folklorist point of view you -- you know, people have different takes on their occupation and Fred had the kind of folklorist mentality.  The day after -- he talked about being the last person shutting off the last lights at Bethlehem Steel when it closed in the 19 -- when the big plant closed in the 1980's and he also, said that he snuck back in there at night to steal souvenirs.  You know, very folkloric idea to take souvenirs from there.  And this is them in front of Cup of Joe's.  Walter Winchell once said that he -- he said I'd rather be the mayor of Lackawanna than, the President of the United States.  That's how big and powerful he felt that the mayor of Lackawanna was actually more powerful than, the President of the United States back in its day.  And we had a chance to go out with Fred to the old plant which is now abandoned.  He just talked about how you couldn't even tell where buildings used to be, because there's so -- they've been so run down and there's so few of it -- little of it left that he couldn't even tell where he used to work just visiting it again.  Some of the other things that were amazing to me was that we interviewed Anthony Benson who was an African American steel worker, and he talked about the fact that how awe and many -- all of them talked about how awesome that job is.  That how at night when they threw the slag into the lake it would light up the sky.  So the sky was kind of lit up over Lackawanna, you know, not for the best of reasons but that hot slag hitting the pond lit up the sky and gave it an orange glow.  They talked about -- Anthony Benson talked about being so in the awe of watching steel run like water.  And he described it as like a red hot rolling rainbow.  I asked him what color it was and he said it was like a red hot rolling rainbow.  And just the awesomeness of seeing the steel running like that.  You also got a sense of the unbelievable amount of discrimination that was part of the -- and it was totally clear that if it hadn't been for the federal government stepping in, it would have -- they would have probably not hired African Americans in that job.  Not only that, but Anthony Benson worked in the furnace and we were told, and he said that the African Americans were given the hottest jobs with the idea that they were more capable of working in the heat, than the whites, and that was actually borne out by one of the other steel workers who told me that when he went to apply as an 18 year old for the job that they told him that -- they said where do you want to work?  He said I want to work in the blast furnace, which is where every kid wants to go, of course.  And they said no, that only the blacks work in the blast furnace.  And they gave him a different job.  So discrimination was rampant.  And they all talked about the fact that the federal government stepped in and made -- and eventually forced them to integrate that.  And one of the other sides of this was, you know, it's -- and folklorists oftentimes are very drawn to the idea that many of these occupations are very family oriented, that, you know, people's families work in them for generations.  And, you know, the other side of that of course and we realize is oftentimes that's part of what is the built in discrimination in a lot of the occupations.  The fact that it is so family oriented.  In fact, one of the steel workers says at one point he went in to get his -- he was working in the offices and somebody came in to bring their brother in to work at the plant and he said to the guy he said, you know, we don't really want you -- this is your brother.  Why are you -- isn't this nepotism?  And the guy looked at him and says, for God sakes this is not nepotism.  This is my brother!  [Laughter].  They also talked about the fact that at the beginning of the year at Bethlehem Steel they said they would bring the workers together and say we have a goal this year.  We're going to try to keep it no more than three deaths.  They wouldn't say no deaths.  They would say no more than three deaths and then, they would [chuckles] try -- and the steel workers are saying, they said I never understood why they didn't aim for no deaths.  No, they aimed for no more than three deaths was the announcement that would come over.  And some of the other ideas -- this is later that night we also -- one of the other scenes of the plant.  And this is back in Buffalo at one of the taverns owned by a former steel worker.  One of the things that we were really interested to know is the complicated relationship between -- in a place like Lackawanna how the industry was part of the community.  And you're really struck by the fact that all -- there were dozens and dozens of taverns.  The factories work three shifts, so the taverns were busy at all hours of the day.  People would after work would go and drink, and in fact, the taverns would cash their paychecks.  The taverns cashed the paychecks of the workers so the workers could drink up as much of it as possible and all the taverns did that.  We were also struck by the fact that when the plant closed, you know, we -- how that filtered in to so many other jobs and they talked about the statistics that losing the 10,000 workers, created a loss of 50,000 jobs in the area.  And we were struck by the fact that the bowling alley eventually closed.  They described the fact -- in fact a number of them had worked on setting up the pins before the mechanized bowling alleys and they talked about at the Lucky Strike bowling alley in Lackawanna and how eventually the leagues got smaller and smaller until eventually the bowling alley itself closed as well, which gave me a good sense of the kind of interrelationship between industry and community.  And I was also struck by one of the comments that Dan made because when you talk to the workers there's also a good documentary that was made by WNED, which is Buffalo Public Television called Voices of Steel.  And they talk about how they were able to make a good living.  You know, how they all sent their kids to college, how they were able to buy their houses, in fact, a lot of them are not in as bad shape today as you would think because they all did make enough money to be able to set up and have a pension from the union that helped to carry them over.  In some ways we were just speculating and in some ways they might have been a kind of unique generation.  Almost like a unique generation.  Almost in the history of the world where people could do manual labor and have a strong sense of -- and make a middle class life.  To be able to buy into the American dream doing manual labor and it's something that that generation knew and that for all sorts of reasons which they talk about at great length, incompetence of management, incompetence of unions, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, all of whom contributed to their scenario.  But it was a certain moment in history when workers could buy into the American dream and have a great life for themselves and their kids.  And we hope to show you the video someday, but right now it's just a little premature for that, but I really appreciate your having me here and making me an Archie Green Fellow.  Thank you very much. 



^M01:50:23



[ Applause ] 



^M01:50:29



>> Mark Popovich:  Stephen, thank you.  I'm just going to say a couple of words about our work at the Hitachi Foundation, and I think how it relates to what we've heard from some of the other panelists.  We are a small independent foundation that was established 25 years ago.  It's our 25th anniversary by the Hitachi Company, which is it's their 100th anniversary.  And we've been focusing for a number of years on the intersection of the role of business in society.  Some people might call it corporate social responsibility or corporate citizenship.  And creating or expanding opportunities or creating new opportunities for poor people in poor places.  And one of the places in our strategic planning, we don't have enough money to do -- we have to be very planful because of the level of money that we have, is we see the overlap really in employment.  There's other places of an overlap, but certainly that's a strong overlap and you can't talk about workers and work without talking about employers, and we've been focusing a lot in trying to understand employers.  Now I come from a union background.  I come from a union household.  I have my withdrawal card from the Machinists and Aerospace Workers as my brother does, my sister's a Teamster, and I just -- I want to recommend a book I just finished about power in the union by Phillip Drake, The History of Unions in the United States.  Interesting piece, but what I want to talk to you about today is just a couple of things about what do we expect looking back and looking forward from employers?  I mean we all know that pretty much gone is the lifetime commitment to employment.  But that's actually gone on both sides.  I just saw an article in the New York Times about a Google employer -- employee who is leaving because it's viewed as shameful to stay at the same employer for a long time.  That it's like you are one of the -- if you weren't one of the -- if you were in the early stages and you stay that's a bad thing.  That's a black mark against you.  You've sort of lost your mojo.  So it doesn't exist at some levels on either sides, and certainly we've seen the increase in the contingent workforce and the temporary workforce and people aren't even staying in the same occupations.  They're changing occupations over time and we're seeing that.  We're seeing as declining some sort of key fundamentalers or pullers of economic security and benefits.  It's the contingent workforce again, the reduced level of unionization, particularly in private employers, you know, insure and health insurance is changed, pensions are no longer defined benefits, they're defined contribution.  That makes a huge difference in your life in your older years.  And even in our -- in terms of looking at our fraying social safety net.  The percentage of workers of the population that's covered even by unemployment insurance is declining so, one of our fundamental aspects of public social safety net has been fraying and has to be looked at again.  And then, in sort of a mix what I see is the opportunities for career advancement, skills and training, a lot of employers are still offering that, some have cut back.  But I look at my own father, Emil Popovich, he completed high school, he went to the Navy and when he came back from the Navy in World War II he was the seventh employee hired by a company and he was a welder.  They were building those steel tanks that are on a thing -- for fuel on a farm, and -- but he was interested -- the guy who founded the company taught him to read blueprints, then draw blueprints, by the end he was the Director of Estimating, Director of Engineering, he has a couple of patents to his name for some things that he invented for the space program in NASA.  Those kinds of opportunities still exist, but there's really a mixed record of those things now.  So at this point I sort of feel like the wisdom of Woody Allen has come upon me.  Mankind faces a crossroads, one path leads to despair in utter hopelessness.  The other to total extinction.  Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.  [Laughter].  But let me leave it on a word of optimism and that is we're studying pioneer employers.  We've been intrigued by the concept of the positive deviant, the Sternins, who did this were the Sternins who've done this work, he's died.  Monique Sternin still exists and is doing this work at the Institute for Positive Deviance.  And it comes out of international public health that there are people who find solutions within the constraints that exist that all of us face, and we're trying to apply it in some ways to understand particular sectors of employers.  And we're finding some that get really extraordinary results, both in terms of business bottom line results, it's a comparative advantage for them, and really accelerate at earnings for the people who work for them and career advancement, and skill development.  And we think ultimately that's the sustainable model, or a sustainable model, and our modest objective is to lift up and understand and characterize those examples and lift them up as models to other employers, not everybody, not everybody's going to do this, but the next couple of percentage of employers who are motivated to do this because of values and value that's created in the marketplace.  So I'll leave it that I'm optimistic that there are a lot of those.  We're looking right now in health and health care, and in manufacturing and a couple of sectors in manufacturing.  I'm going to leave on the back table some resource materials and references and websites related to our work and others' work that's related, but I didn't want to take any more time because I know we're trying to get caught back up and open it to questions from the audience. 



^M01:56:08



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^M01:56:21



>> Audience:  Where's the answer to positive deviance [inaudible]? 



>> Tufts University in Boston, but if you Google Monique Sternin, she's a -- she has this wonderful French accent by the way, you have to go and meet her.  She did the original work with him in Vietnam.  They were coming to the country and they needed to address underweight births, and do it very quickly, or they were going to be thrown out of the country and they invented this on the fly.  Now it's a technique.  So it's good to be a positive deviant by the way.  



>> And so can you describe it in a little more depth? 



>> It's applied -- it's an approach to applied research and it's an approach to change and it is that for example in the case of Vietnam there were the local villagers, there were some villagers who had infants who -- and young children who got really gained weight and they were a good weight.  And they looked at the behaviors and patterns of that family -- those families.  They told other families what they did.  In fact, there were some things that they did about more frequent feedings.  There were some things that they did about using food that other people wouldn't normally do with their infants or young children.  There were things that they got from the rice patties.  But it was from finding out folks what they did that worked.  And then, that was conveyed by the people who did it and that was viewed as rather than an expert dropping down and telling you what the answer was the way that people found credibility in a solution.  They said we could have brought all the public health experts and nutrition experts in the world, but it wouldn't have convinced the villagers to change.  



^M01:58:05



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^M01:58:12



>> Nothing else?  



^M01:58:13



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^M01:58:16



>> Okay.  All right.  We'll wrap it up.  Thank you very much for your time today. 



^M01:58:20



[ Applause ] 



^M01:58:26



>> Christina Barr:  I want to gather us all together until we get started on our next session.  My name is Christina Barr and I was very inspired by Mark's questions of the panelists earlier and that set me to thinking about well, what was my sort of, you know, wayward past in employment and I've been an oyster shucker and a shoe repair person and I think my worst job, it was definitely as a secretary to golf ball salesmen at Spaulding Sports Worldwide in Chicopee, Massachusetts, but thankfully I am no longer on that tract and now I direct our State Humanities Council in Nevada.  Nevada Humanities.  We're a non-profit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanity.  So it's a pleasure to no longer be selling or facilitating the sales of golf balls although I'm sure people do that quite well.  But it's a pleasure to be here today, and to have you all here and I'm joined -- well, this is our last panel of the day and so our job here is to -- we're going to keep you -- arouse you all with dynamic and stimulating conversation, excite you, and we hope you'll participate in this.  We would like this -- the structure's going to be a little bit different.  We're going to do a roundtable conversation and we'll be feverently interrupting each other and pointing and we hope you'll join in if you have questions and things to say and contributions to this and questions to ask of our panelists.  Please feel free to do so.  I know we've got microphones circulating around as well, and we're a small group and I'm sure you can shout out.  But we're joined today by -- first at the far end there we have Kurt Dewhurst whose the Director of Arts and Cultural Initiatives, the Senior Fellow of University Outreach on Engagement, the Curator of Folk life and Cultural Heritage at Michigan State Museums, University Museums, and a professor of English all at Michigan State University.  It sounds like he's extremely busy [laughs].  And also the Chair of the American Folk Life Center, Board of Trustees.  Our host today along with the IMLS, and I'd also like to introduce Michael Taft who is the head of the archive of the American Folk life Center here at the Library of Congress.  And I'd like to introduce Mary Chute, who is the deputy director for the Libraries at the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  

So thank you, guys, all, for joining us today.   And we've had an incredible opportunity to hear so many voices and perspectives over the past day and a half, and I'm just really excited about a lot of the threads and conversations that have come up.  I know a lot of them continued over dinner last night and then again over breakfast and lunch today, and we're going to talk a little bit right now about documentation and the power of documentation as well to help facilitate and inform policy, and what we can do as documentarians and stewards of that knowledge and information to help facilitate those things, and I'm curious for each of you, and maybe we'll start with Kurt a little bit.  Drawing from your own projects and experience, how can we best document the contemporary American workplace and follow its transformation in the future and I'm particularly curious about what does an ethnography of work look like today?  I think we've been talking about this shifting landscape and, Kurt, you've been working on a project, in particular, that addresses this issue.  

>> Kurt Dewhurst:  Well, that's quite a question.  But [laughter] -- and... 

>> Just load it right up there.  

>> Kurt Dewhurst:  I feel like I've been working on a number of projects struggling with that issue.  I guess one of the things that came to mind as I was sitting here the last two days, and I was aware of it before, but it really came through quite powerfully in our -- the mixture of presentation and the way in  which we all come to think about work, and one of the framing things that stays -- that's been very much on my mind when we think about documentation is that I like to ask myself often the question, "Thirty years from now, what will -- what kinds of collections should we be building right now that are going to tell the story of what this particular moment in time is about."  Because I do think we're in a historical moment where the intensification of shifts in the nature of work, the way we work, the values of work, the rewards for work are all being rethought and renegotiated, and renegotiated in very dramatic ways.  

And there are, yes, losers, but there are also people who are demonstrating resilience, and to do that, and the project I think, Christiana, you're asking me particularly to say a few words about is that    there's -- I'm also involved in the American Folk life Center is -- the American Folk life Center here at the Library of Congress is involved as is IMLS, is a grant that was given to Michigan State University along with the Library of Congress, American Folk life Center, Smithsonian, The American Folklorist Society, Oral History Association, and other partners to basically look at oral history in the digital age.  One of the things we've been struggling with and thinking about and we're seeing it evidenced here, is the idea of when we think about doing oral history, it's not just me sitting here with Michael and doing that interview with the tape recorder the way I came up doing documentation.  One of the things that this grant has afforded us is the opportunity to bring together some of the best thinkers and workers in this arena, both folklorists and oral historians, as well, as the technology specialists to think about what do we -- how is documentation changing?  And what kind of tools?  And let me just give you a couple of examples because for me it's been very powerful to think about.

Fifteen - 20 years ago, that taped interview I might be doing with Michael was the choice for all of us in this world, for the most part, maybe not Nick Spitzer [phonetic], but in the same way.  But is that we, for the most part, we were relying on that tool alone, partly because of cost, and partly for archival reasons.  You could -- you did that taped recording.  You could make sure it could get into an archive and it could be preserved.  What's happened in that period of time, is if you look at documentation as it's taking place today, and I'm speaking even if you think more broadly about YouTube than all these other resources that are out there and how they're being used, is the visual documentation is equal to oral documentation right now, and when you bring together scholars who are doing work, it's now financially also achievable and doable.  And the kinds of things we're recording are not just that one-on-one interview; we're recording context in much more dramatic ways.  

And so, that presents all kinds of challenges and I'll just be brief by saying, so as we're developing this oral history in a digital age project, we're realizing that we have to think very differently, not only during how we collect, how we curate, or shape those collections so you can find the resources again, but also how we're going to disseminate them in different ways which means access.  And let alone, the intellectual property issues get really complicated and they're getting very complicated very quickly.  So even if you looked at the kinds of things we were looking at the last couple of days or hearing, all of those questions are coming up and one of the things I think will be nice that will come out of, again, a partnership between IMLS and both the fields of folklore and oral history, each of which come at our work a little differently, is that I think we're going to start seeing some, I won't say standards, but a sense of resources that are available so that we make sure what we record is going to be here for  -- in 30 years for people to look at and use and make sure it's more accessible.  Maybe I'll stop right there, but we can look back to see them.

>> Yeah, yeah.  We'll come back to that.  Yeah, Michael.

>> Michael Taft:  Oh, just to I think, Kurt, you're quite right about the technology and that, you know, as I -- earlier today when I played the wax cylinder.  We can see how the ability to document has grown exponentially, you know, from you've got four minutes on a rickety cylinder to record culture to what we can do now, and what we can do in the future in terms of anybody documenting, you know, gigabytes or petabytes worth of information with the flick of a switch and, of course, it's up to the archivist, but it still doesn't solve the problem.  What I see as one of the essential frustrations of being a folklorist or ethnographer in documentation in that take something like work and with work it's especially a difficult thing because it's pervasive.  You know, we all work.  We all have experience with work.  It's not as though you're focused on one particular thing like collecting, you know, what was...  You know, what did you do in the Second World War?  Something like that.  We all have the experience of work.  To document work the way we experience it, all the time, is for everyone to do everyone else all the time.  [Laughter]  Right?  If we really want to document it and, you know, talk about an archivist nightmare.  Well, that's obviously not what we're going to be doing, any of us.  The technology allows us to document much more, but no matter how much more we document, it's still this tiny sliver, tiny sliver of the big, of the entire picture.  And we can't get past that.  That what we're doing is sampling.  What we're doing is taking bits and pieces to represent what we think is the totality of the culture of work, in this case.  And we have to guard against the -- our natural inclination to idealize or romanticize or stylize which, I think, folklorists are certainly guilty of in the past, you know, because part of -- we come out of kind of -- yeah, well, we come out of kind of romantic tradition, and somehow we have to get past that, or at least check ourselves when we start to go down that road [laughter] because it doesn't help.  It doesn't really help anybody.  It's entertaining and much of what we have collected in the past is entertaining and I wouldn't want to throw any of it out. 

I mean, we have some great art in this archive that's based on a romantic idealized version of work, of collecting the great singing and songs of Pearl Nye, the riverboat captain.  I wouldn't want anybody to think that and Steve can, Steve Winick can correct me on this.  Do you all sing all the time [laughter] in these great [laughter] [inaudible]?  I guess maybe you do.  I mean, that's -- I don't know how you get any work done because you're singing so much.  But, you know, there's more to working on a canal than, singing these great songs and being a great singer as Pearl Nye was.  We got Pearl Nye's repertoire.  We don't have what he did every day on that canal.  How he made a living?  Who he interacted with?  So even in terms of him, we've got just a sliver of what he does -- did, and within that, he's a very special case that does not represent work on the canal in any larger sense, so as much as I value that collection and it's an important collection as an example of folk art in the larger sense of folklore, it's hardly a documentation of work.  It's hardly representative, but I said how   did he get past that?  It's very difficult so that's a struggle we have all the time as folklorists, as archivists of what is collected.

>> Christina Barr:  Yeah.  I think one of the things that strikes me about new media and bringing all this together.  There's an expectation now with the kinds of media that we have at our disposable for interaction, that you're going to present information that people will be able to respond to it, manipulate it, use it in some way and it -- I mean, libraries are at the front line of this.  [Laugh]  This is where people and information connect directly and often.  And Mary, I'm curious if you see any ramifications for this.  Like how would this play out?

>> Mary Chute:  Oh, absolutely.  I mean, even for this first question I'm sitting here just, well, I feel like I think it was Robert said earlier today.  The longer I look at it, the less clear it becomes.  And that's the way this day and a half has played out for me.  [Laughter]  Every issue that's come forward is an incredible opportunity, but then there's the closet librarian in me going, but what's the structure?  How are we going to provide access to this?  We have exponential growth in types of media, types of format.  We can migrate from one to the next, but they're growing faster than we can keep up with them, and then we're going to add to that the exponential development of types of careers and the different jobs that are going to spill forward.  And how are we ever...  How are we ever going to catalogue all this?  [Laughter]  You know, it's that organization of knowledge in the library.  How are we ever going to not only document, determine the fields that we need to track in order to document, but then, how do we create that structure so that people can find the information?  And I don't have any answers.  I mean, it is literally the longer I look at it, the more little crevices there are that create more opportunities, but, you know, more obstacles and problems.

>> Christina Barr:  Yeah, and that access and then response, I think, creates this whole other layer of access and then response.  I mean, it's just -- it's this kind of round body.  And, Michael, I'm curious about your assignment.  When you were talking earlier and presenting some of the content of the collections, it got me to thinking about the deep roots that this kind of documentation has and how do we set out priorities now?  I mean, how do we know where to go from here?  What do we look at to make those decisions?

>> Michael Taft:  Well, I think that we have to -- and we, I guess, as documentarians whether at the archive and or out in the field try to do a better job of seeing the larger picture, and I guess one way is simply -- when I look at -- when I was thinking of how I was going to talk about what we have in the archive, and I could see this progression from looking at a rather small group of occupations to a larger, to a larger, I guess we have to continually expand out into our own idea of what work is and how we respond to collecting.  That certainly, you know, work that in the digital age is very important.   

Going back to the oral history in the digital age, work in the digital age, how we have not documented that in the archive here to a great extent.  I mean, the whole areas of work that we simply haven't looked at probably because we can't look at everything, and partly because we're at the  -- as an archive, we're at the mercy of now mostly outsiders who are doing work, who give us their collections, and what are they looking  at?  And there's still a lot more being done in some areas, industrial areas, let us say, than in the office, the service industries, the new technological industries, the unemployed.  How do you interview the unemployed?  You know, that's a tough thing.  Or this whole idea that we've been discussing of how most of those of a younger generation will experience many different workplaces and different kinds of work who don't have that same sense of workplace community.  We're not capturing the atomizing of the workplace as much as we used to capture or have captured the idea of the workplace family, which is kind of as atomizing.  

So it's a matter of, I guess, broadening our own horizon and trying to figure out how can we get access to these groups of workers that have been ignored by ethnographers in the past and how do we fashion questions or explorations of what they do that will make sense?  How do you -- you know, you can -- I remember a few years ago in Utah, when we were running a field school at Brigham Young University.  David Taylor and myself and other staff from here; we went out there and we were looking at orchards.  Orchards, small family orchard growers and it was easy enough to step out into the orchard and have the orchard grower explain what this kind of apple is and what they're doing here and how they have to do this and do that, and we can go out there with our recorders and video machines, etc., and do a good documentation of that, but how do you do that with people whose work is entirely mental or at home, and they're sitting there at a computer?  You know, what are you getting when you simply train a video camera at someone who is clacking away at a computer?  You know, and can't stop to explain or the explanation is not full.  

In other words, I'm saying that we've picked kind of the easier occupations, in some sense, to document.  I guess we have to think about the really tough ways of documenting the way people work, or the more inaccessible areas of our work culture.  And I don't have a good answer for that either.  We have a lot more questions than we have answers, I think.  [Laughter]

>> Mary Chute:  Well, and if I can just chime in.  I think that's a major piece of what our question is, but I would also say that as we're entering into what IMLS says we're looking ahead to another program, we've been talking about is this participatory culture that we're in.  We're not necessarily the ones doing the documenting or even saying what the horizon is.  There's so many other players that it's unfathomable how we're ever going to get our arms around that size universe, and I think we have to do the pieces that we do have control over, that you can zero in on.  Ask the questions where you can and hope that incrementally it will grow.  

>> Kurt Dewhurst:  You know, I did want to say that just flashing back for a moment to when we started this symposium.  Peggy Bolger made a few comments about this initiative we're calling America Works.  And we haven't talked too much about it during the symposium, but just a few words about it are relevant here, because you're all here, in many ways, to help us think about how we should frame America Works.  And as Mary said, the closer we get, the more complicated this looks.  But we're in a really -- we've been given an opportunity.  

There's interest at the national level, at the -- certainly, at the congressional level, and they've asked the American Folk life Center at the Library of Congress, actually, to come back by about June and IMLS in partnership, to come back with essentially a vision for how we might go forward on a documentation effort, looking at this again.  This moment in time in history and what that means is that as Michael said, it means we have to be thoughtful about what we choose to document.  What would be  -- if we have, rather than being on the receiving end, just to what comes in, maybe it would be timely for us to think about, you know, we're always struck by how heavily used the WPA collections are here at the American Folk life Center.  So if you had your chance and you all do now, have a chance to help us think about what we should be documenting at this period of time, we can -- we have to start thinking about how might we do that.  Is it sampling?  Is it geographical?  Is it by occupations?  Is it by particular fields that have never been considered?  Issues that may not have been considered?  

Michael made an interesting observation at a conversation we had a few weeks ago about, we were talking about the StoryCorp and one of the nice things in terms of a tool.  There's now these wonderful new search tools that you can go back through recordings and can pull up essentially key words so we can -- Michael could say we've got X number of recordings today that have to do with work.  Well, that's a good technology tool, but he said something that stayed with me is in -- of course, I think we all know this, but it's a good reminder that sometimes what we collect today with the particular idea how it might be used in the future for the most part, we find, people find other uses for what's collected.  And he used the example of StoryCorp, which we're finding out and you may want to say a word more about this, but simply that one of the greatest users, the groups of users are psychologists and psychiatrists are looking at it.  And when StoryCorp started, no one thought about that as the user group that would have the greatest interest in that data, but it just shows you in 30 years' time using my scenario, what would we want to have collected today, that we would look back and how might it be used?  

And those are tricky questions, particularly living in this age of participatory design and thinking about even  -- we don't even know yet what's really out there and who's collecting because much like  -- and Tim Lloyd [phonetic] may want to say a word about this at some point.  But the Civil Rights History Project, oral history project, at the American Folk life Center is doing with the new Smithsonian Museum devoted to African American History and Culture, that particular project, one of the things before setting out to document and do interviews with Civil Rights figures and people involved in the movement, is we had to know what's already been -- what's in collections.  We should probably be spending some time thinking about what's in the Reuther archives and at Wayne State University or what's at the Smithsonian's Working Americans Collection or, I mean, there are doctoral dissertations being written.  We have one at Michigan State.  

I have a graduate student who's looking in anthropology looking at the two-tier work system in an General Motors plant and what the life -- sitting literally going to work every day experiencing and hearing the discussion about somebody who is making three times the wage of the person who is getting the new competitive wage and the impact of the seniority system that makes the worker -- the older worker there is really the older worker there.  And the nature of what's happening at this moment in time.  There are studies like that being done.  Great documentation, but where are those collections going to go and do we want them, Michael?  [Laughter]  I don't know.  

>> I imagine a portal.  Some kind of clearinghouse.

>> Michael Taft:  We want them, but we often don't know what we have.  And I don't mean just in terms of access, but, Kurt, what you were saying about the intent of StoryCorps is not how it's used now and I would say that the sign of a good collection is one that goes beyond or escapes its collector or its donor or its producer.  StoryCorps is one.  You could say a lot of bad things about StoryCorp, but it is this great body of conversation between people who know each other intimately, and we don't have an awful lot of that.  And there's all sorts of artificiality and all that, but for the most part, it is a body of work, and we don't yet know how valuable it is in the way that -- I usually bring up, when we have this discussion, the American Dialect Society recordings we have from the early 1930s that linguists were doing in order to collect New England dialect, and that's what they were interested in.  Nobody cares as much about that anymore as they do about the fact that these folks were talking about being veterans of the Civil War or housework in the 19th century or work in the whaling boats or any other number of other topics, first-hand, that we would not have had otherwise.  So I think it's important that whatever we collect, that it escape from us into larger questions that we could never have envisioned.  

>> I like that idea of information escape and we have a question from Bob.

 >> Robert McCarl:  Okay.  One of the things I wanted to point out and, Kurt, you were saying how to conceptualize America Works and I agree.  I think it's a -- you know, a fascinating, but also a very difficult question, and, you know, one aspect of the question has to do with context.  You know, and the context of American society particularly with regard to work is not a -- it's not a benign context.  Right?  I mean, we live in a world where a type of management, a type of work controlled.  It began, you know, with Fordism and went into the human relations school and all of that, has triumphed to a great extent.  And part of that triumph is the control by a burgeoning well-paid managerial cadre in our society.  I mean, you know, Max Weber would be jumping up and down for joy.  Right?  But these people are controlling flow above and below them, and so to get to Michael's question, you know, someone sitting in an office...  Laura Nadar said in the 60s, we need to "study up."  Well, how many ethnographies, how many folklore collections do we have of the CEOs that got us into the mortgage crisis?  Right?  They're not going to let you hang out with them for good reason.  Right?  

So part of the romance is access.  Right?  And in some cases, we brokered that access through the very corporations that are -- I mean, I've done it, you know, that are exploiting the workers that I'm romantically studying, you know, which is kind of an ironic thing.  I -- the suggestion I have and I just throw it out as a question is that -- and I was kind of trying to stumble toward this in the things I was saying earlier, is that maybe we need to rethink the whole notion of space and time.  I mean, not in, you know...  [Laughter]  

>> This is going to be amazing.

>> We'll need another day.

>> [Inaudible] when you need him.  Right?

>> No, but what I mean is that Vine Deloria said that Anglos, Anglo Europeans see the world in terms of time.  Particularly, you know, the birth of Christ forward.  Right?  Native Americans see the world in terms of space, and because of that they have a stewardship relationship with their environments and are in many cases -- and again, that's been romanticized.  But in many cases, it's all concerned with this chunk of real estate and how I protect it and how it engenders me.  So maybe a framework would be, you know, and I was thinking as Steve Zeitlin was talking. Right?  And the other Steve too, right?  Here's this incredible industrial artifact the Erie Canal, which before that was, I don't know, a creek or something.  I don't know what it was, but it's a biota, a living environment.  We imposed change on that environment and people interacted based on different types of attachment to it.  Right?  That we call work, and now it's morphing into something else.  

So one of the books I read when I had the fellowship and the fellowship was a great opportunity for me was Reading the Rocks by Marcia -- it's Bjornerud, I think.  And her perspective is that the earth has systems for organizing itself.  Right?  If you go to Yellowstone right now -- I mean not Yellowstone.  Mount St. Helens.   And the whole environmental landscape has changed, but it's a living landscape.  It looks very different.  And the earth has mechanisms for sifting and changing and, you know, erosion and all of that.  Anyway, my question is, would space act as both destabilizing us from focusing just on time and the romance that goes with that.  Not that that's necessarily bad, but...  And if so, what might those projects look like?  I don't know.

>> You know, what was going through my mind initially, Bob.  That was quite a journey you took us on there so...  [Laughter]  But I -- coming back to it, but I -- no, I appreciate it because you got me thinking about it.  I mean, I was struck by the when Steve was showing us the photograph for Bruce Jackson's large photographs of the mills and the landscape and the space, you know.  And also, the two Steves bringing to life the Erie Canal over these two days has been very enriching, I would say.  And actually, a story of resilience and the kind of stories you want to see, but the point about space and I know you and I over the years or some of our interests have crossed and one of those things is who controls the work knowledge and I think about the Verlinden plant in Lansing, Michigan, the GM plant that closed two years ago.  And it was announced pretty quickly it was going to close and the workers, interestingly enough, unlike what some people might think.  I mean, aside from the sense of betrayal that we kind of got a sense of in some other situations were described, the workers got together at the end and they were fearful that the building where they spent their lives and their kids or their parents spent their lives was going to disappear from their experience.  So they contacted -- we have a project called Our Daily Work, Our Daily Lives, that focuses on work at Michigan State and they wanted to know how could we help.  They wanted to be able -- they wanted to know if they, if somebody could go in and photograph the plant where they had worked before it closed.  And we came back and said -- and we contacted the local UAW chapter and the UAW chapter bought cameras for all of them to go out and film and said, "Why don't you document it and you label the photos and you get copies and we'll take copies too."  And that was a sense of ownership of a space and the place.  

And there was a piece in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about the new GM and the old GM.  The fact that General Motors is, some people would think, the phoenix rising.  But there's the old GM which is the landscape and the space and the connection to space.  And I think that we have to be -- I think it would be interesting to think about.  This may not be the way you're thinking of space, but for me it's an interesting way of doing it and I worry about also the -- Michael's caution about the misuse of images or, you know, in Detroit everyone is quite sensitive about the -- you've probably all seen this photograph many times and you may not have thought about it, but there's the famous rail station in Detroit that's been sitting derelict for a long time.  And it's been used in every story about Detroit.  It's the iconic image of the rustbelt image right now.  And yet, there's so much activity going on all around it of the kind of grass roots stuff that Nick was showing.  I want to show Nick's photographs right next to that image and yet, it still keeps coming up.  It's an image that we're fighting against and the people there are unhappy when they see that, you know.  So, but space is something also where that's contested here at this point in time.  

>> I think space is always contested.  I think that's -- and, you know, I think that using space or place as a focus is an excellent idea.  I guess we've done it to some extent in various ways if only to look at a particular community like, you know, Patterson, let us say, but still is very people centered.  But the idea of, you know, the iconic railroad station or grain elevator or whatever it is and to look at culture from that point of view and not just as a workplace, but as something symbolic and symbolic on several levels, both as something positive and something negative to the workers.  That factory was their place, you know.  It has this strong emotional tug.  To the CEO who wants to knock it down, it doesn't and, in fact, it's a threat to his interests.  I know this.  

I did a project on a movie theater in a small city, interviewing the workers who used to work there and it was going to be torn down.  I also interviewed the CEO, by the way, and actually, was a very interesting interview to get his perspective and his rationale, and before anybody could take decent pictures, he knocked a hole in it to make sure that it would go and there would be no way of saving it.  But, and here was a real contested space and meaning very different things to different segments of the population.  Once again, if we're going to look at that space, let's look at it in this holistic way.  Not just as, you know, from the positive sense of an icon for one population.  Is it a threat to another population?  You know, how is that space really at work in the culture in society.

>> Yeah.  And I think also pulling it together to a place that people inhabit and making that connection through the cultural context that happens in that.  I think that's really interesting.  Nick, you had a question.

>> Nick:  Well, it's the comment of -- with all these comments flying around, I think this is great to have the discussion opened up this way and just a few notes here.  I think, actually, I don't think it's an overwhelming thing to do, but let me come back to that.  First of all, I don't think we want to throw out the esthetic.  Yes, we don't necessarily need to always look for the performer anymore, though we are never going to ignore them.  We're never going to ignore personal experience narratives at this level.  I mean, this man is amazing and we need to keep looking for people like Stevie Wonder, here.  [Laughter]  I was in Detroit for a little while so, you know, I like them both.  But I think the esthetics of work is something that a lot of folklorists are trained to address and those are not always -- use the word emick [phonetic].  It's not always in the genres that are understood as art within the community.  And part of our job is to tease some of that our -- in the work we do in dialogue with the workers, and also find the people that can turn it into narrative.  

I think just thinking, also, a little bit about the question of how do you interview the unemployed which Bob raised.  I think you put a fee on coming into the library to do your interview about your work life history and you make it a gig for the day, to talk about your life history and work and work and culture and your suggestions for the future of the country, along those lines so, it becomes a day job for one day at least and you get a great narrative, hopefully, out of it.  

We haven't talked much about domestic work which isn't on the professional pay charts or any of the Bureau of Labor statistic stuff.  And we're talking about childrearing and gardening and we're talking about fishing and foraging and collecting firewood in New England to heat homes.  All kinds of ways that people, I think, need to understand how value is created and how families and lives are sustained and a lot of that will address women who work at home, not only, but certainly, that's been a primary domestic sphere.  As far as all these people out doing this documenting, I think it's the best thing that's happened.  I think the media arts are the extensions of the oral traditions.  It's unmediated by having to go through the printed page.  It may end up as a transcript.  It may up in a scholarly text or a magazine in print, but in the end, those are people's scrapbooks.  

So then, the question becomes, what do you do?  My sense is what you do is you create a series of model projects from the top.  Yes, I think there's room for the top here to come up with things that are based on ethnicity, region, occupation, and a whole variety of ways of understanding work from domestic to professional to the intellectual work which I think you can talk to people who work on computers away from them focusing on the screen.  It's a little easier to walk through an orchard.  You're right, but it's also possible to interview people away from the jobsite or turn off the computer for a moment, but I think what you do is you create model projects and you build the public discourse based on the model projects, so that them that have all these video cameras and iPhones, that are now recording video and every other imaginable device that's coming along, will have some sense of the inclusiveness of an ethnographic perspective.  Ethnography is not just for ethnographers, just like history is not just for historians and music ain't just for musicians.  And I think we can do that and that's the way we do it, but we're not going to cover the whole phonebook of the United States, and even in the WPA, we weren't able to do that.  The stuff that stands up are the signal things and I think the signal model things will continue to stand up, and it's a question of what those will be to then influence, you know, the grand public interest in work and reshaping our lives.  

Christina Barr:  It strikes me that Peggy asked a question yesterday about the tension between identity and livelihood in work and I think that comes back to this question of, do we do it because it's a calling? It's our life.  It's our lively...  You know, it's who we are as people.  It's our place.  It's tied to landscape.  All these different pieces.  Or do we do it because we earn money and can feed our families and do all those things?  It's a very interesting question.  I think those are some great points.  

I want to move on a little bit and talk a little bit about policy because I think one of the things -- I think, Bob McCarl; you threw down the gauntlet yesterday.  You threw the glove to the mat and challenged us all.  As documentarians, can we create something that has utility to people in a community?  I'm making that connection and driving that home.  So how do we as documentarians do that?  How do we facilitate?  Is it because we work with -- we try to not -- it's an unmediated voice?  Is the voices of people that we collaborate with.  How do we do that?  How do we shape policy?  How do we get those voices out to the people who are actually deciding policy?

>> Christina, I don't -- I -- this is one strand of what I would think of as an answer and I'll let others fill in the others, and one of the things that's been very encouraging for me as we've had dialogue about America Works as an idea with colleagues and friends, is and I was taken by and moved with examples that we were able to weave in these last couple of days of what's happening in libraries and museums.  And I think part of the policy issue is trying to connect and in new ways.  You know, the best libraries and the best museums are really community cultural centers.  They are places that people -- they are safe places.  They're places you can come together as community.  They're gathering places.  They're neutral places.  They're places that accept difference and they're places for dialogue and conversation.  And I think that we, I mean, it's great to -- I mean Maria Rosario Jackson, I remember, a few years ago was writing about museums and she challenged museums to not be in the periphery of communities.  To come to the center of community life and to start to understand what your community is thinking about every day and struggling with every day and be part of that dialogue, be a place for that dialogue.  And it's just great to see at this moment in history, the way libraries, I think, with the Compass Initiative are a great example of doing that.  I think there are museums that are doing that.  I think the Maine Memory Project that we heard about that Richard shared, examples of thinking and new strategies maybe not all at the same levels of sophistication or organization, but they're responding to that vernacular humanities that Nick was talking about, I think.  The sense of authenticity of what the people are feeling.  

So policy has to line up and I think what's happening is that it hasn't lined up yet.  Policy is not lining up and that's kind of the challenge of a project like this.  How do we create policy that really responds to those heartfelt experiences out there that are -- it's a tough moment in history for us and there's no, there's no glossing it over.  I mean, come to Michigan.  

>> Yeah.  And I think Peggy also said, maybe it was earlier today, that she had this reflection that all -- a solution to this could be local.  That we're looking at the local and I'm curious to hear from you, Mary.  A little bit about what the role of the library might be and there's the role of museums.  How does this come together?

>> Mary Chute:  Well, I think my perspective on it is, a little, you know, little snippets here and there.  Every little bit of knowledge that I have over this is coming from individual projects and individual libraries, because we're not the policymaker at IMLS.  We're that federal agency that's putting funding out there in response to needs.  The project Compass type of project that, hopefully, we are managing to give legs to it so, that it's going from one state library to 50 state libraries, and going from training library staff at the state library to the train-the-trainer models.  It's getting out there and trying to solve a particular problem that we're looking at or a series of problems in terms of under and unemployment, the crisis in many communities.  But when I look at the whole palate of the type of things that we're funding, I mean, the New York Hall of Science Project, I mean, that's one that really tugged on my heartstrings.  I've been part of the WebJunction Project Compass so I'm closer to that.  The New York Hall of Science is coming to me from the museum side of our house, but here's something that's really looking at that career ladder and developing careers across time, across the time in an individual's life as they go from being an intern to becoming the Explainer, to becoming the senior Explainer, but there are all sorts of projects out there in our science centers, our children's museums that are trying to do that introduction to STEM.  That introduction to things that we think will be the work of the future is the work of today.  

Every public library, every museum is going to find its own little niche, and I think for us, what we're seeing on our end, and certainly in my comments later, I'm going to talk a little more about the 21st century skills and how we're seeing our constituent agencies position themselves more strategically in each community's conversation, but that's the answer.  It's that you need to be integrated into your own community.  It's that listening on the local level and then finding the appropriate way to use your own resources, your own mission to do the appropriate response, and it's not about creating success for our library or our museum, it's about trying to create success for the community and the individuals in it.  It's about trying to be that instrument of change, that agency that helps people overcome the odds if that's what it is that we're looking at in terms of local crisis.  Now as a good reference librarian, did I answer your question at all?  [Laughter]

>> Christina Barr:  I think you did.  

>> Mary Chute:  Or did I just talk where my mind wanted to go?

>> Christina Barr:  No, it was great.  It makes me think of all -- oh, Michael.  You have something to say?

>> Michael Taft:  Well, I just on the policy end of I spoke kind of against the iconic.  I didn't really mean to, but I did.  I'd like to now speak for it.  [Laughter]  I think getting away from pure documentation of culture and into the policy and how do you, how do you apply what you've collected, what you've documented?  Here, I think, the iconic becomes quite important at any level.  Here, at the level of libraries and librarians collecting the stories of people who work in their area is an excellent thing and I hope that does come to pass the way we want it to.  

But giving the librarians, also, the skill to pick out those stories that are representational in a way, that can be used to tell the larger picture because you can't collect the entire -- the entirety, so you -- but if you can pick those icons that can be used in policy, can be used in front of a city council or in front of the Senate, and I'm not sure we've been always very good at this, and other people have been better than this and in a way that I don't particularly approve of.  You know, Joe the plumber is an icon.  Right?  A work icon who's apparently he was neither Joe nor a plumber, but that's beside the point.  [Laughter]  Seems to me that those who were arguing for another position did not have the same ability to create an icon to counter Joe the plumber.  Why not?  Is it something that we can help in terms of documenting culture and then, how do we use what we document?  

So, yeah, we do need the esthetic because the esthetic helps to tell in a very visceral way, the story, and we do need the icons.  So on one hand we should be collecting an entirety from the point of view of documentation.  On the other hand, from the point of view of policy, we should be able to find that kernel of story, the way a journalist, the way Mr. Greenhouse did -- does, and we should be able to do that.  

>> Mary Chute:  Well, and if I can just chime in.  I think for libraries, particularly for public libraries in small communities.  We're great at doing that anecdotal collection.  We're really good at coming up with, oh well, so and so down the street, and they'll spread the word for policy decisions on the local level with regards to continuing to fund the resource.  The piece we've always been a little less adept at is the statistical piece and that's what impressed me here over the last several days is looking at the power of the number and the data that we can collect.  This is an area in which IMLS is growing with our statistical research arm, and I'd like to see some power there in those numbers.  

One other thing I just want to slip in since StoryCorps has been wound through here.  At IMLS we do a national medal for library service and a medal for national medal for museum services, and for the last two years we've had an alliance with StoryCorp so, one of the things that these 10 winning institutions will get is a three-day visit from StoryCorps where people will come in and do the interviews and, of course, we want to hear these interviews include many anecdotal stories about the power of the library, not just about the individuals and their lives.  But I know that it's a blend of both and the stories that we're getting are good.  They'll be going to the Library of Congress, but they'll also be coming to IMLS for our use in -- now I can't say lobbying.  I guess I could say advocating for the power of libraries and museums in their community.  So, hopefully, that's one of those good things you can say about StoryCorp.  

>> And I'm curious to know a little bit more about the 21st century skills initiative that you've been doing.  

>> Mary Chute:  Well, you're going to get a lot more in my closing remarks.

>> Go for it.  Things are at that point.  Yes.  

>> Mary Chute:  Can I just go right ahead and slip right into it?  But I don't want to shut down the rest of the conversation because I think we got such great minds in the audience, so let me just ramble a little, things that I intended to put in my closing remarks and we'll see if it brings us where we're supposed to go.  If that works.  And you guys have to be guinea pigs for part of this.  I guess, I just -- I want to kind of reflect back.  I'm here because Marcia isn't.  I mean, that's a good piece of it.  Not only is Marcia our museum deputy in her day job when she's not doing acting director and strategic partnerships, and I'm the library deputy, but Marcia is right now in Miami doing a workshop on 21st century skills.  And the 21st Century Skills Initiative which Mary Boone  gave such a lovely plug to earlier today is something that we took on and hopefully, everybody who wanted a copy got a copy.  If not, it is online or please contact Nancy Rogers or myself.  I think we're the only two IMLS folks still here.  We can see that you get a nice glossy hard copy for when you want to do those policy visits.

The area of 21st century, the whole 21st century speaking of that time place that we Anglos tend to put ourselves, is a conversation that IMLS has been having for quite a while.  I think we snagged it well back in the 20th century.  Started looking at what the 21st century learner would be needing, looking at collaboration, looking at those networks in communities.  We did initiatives that brought libraries and museums and public broadcasting, both radio and television together around that 21st century conversation, that partnership for the 21st century learner.  That conversation I started even before I worked at IMLS.  I started being a player in that as a state librarian who attended a conference.  Then I came to interview for my first job at IMLS, come in as the deputy.  The day after Laura Bush had made her comments on the 21st century librarian and the need for a program that would support the recruitment and the education of librarians.  

So we started nibbling around the edges in terms of what our cultural heritage professionals needed to know in order to really be those information navigators, both on the museum side and the library side.  So we have grant programs on both sides of our house that do that.  And then, we homed in on the individual, that 21st century member of society -- am I not coming through here?  You need me closer?

>> Yes.

>> Mary Chute:  I'm sorry.  That's the curse of my -- if I stood up and -- it still wouldn't.  [Laughter]  Still wouldn't work.  Thank you, Betsy.  The 21st Century Skills Initiative is, again, about helping our constituent institutions.  We do very little that delivers service directly to individuals at IMLS, but we try to empower our libraries and museums to be able to help at the local level, and it's about positioning our libraries, our museums in that dialogue, in that policy conversation at home.  So that as we started this, we said, "Well, we don't even know what it looks like."  In the end it has several components.  It has the report.  It has that self-assessment tool that Mary showed you.  It's the fancy foldout in the middle and I can hardly wait to get my hands on how she had adapted it to use for the workplace skills, but it looks across the leadership.  It looks across the assets of your institution, which will be your collections as well as your building.  You should hear the living history people get real anxious about that.  They're afraid that they're going to fail if they don't have all the high-definition equipment when they want to be authentic.  

So you need to look at what that balance is.  It has to do with your ability to partner and collaborate.  Are you a good partner?  Do you play well with others?  As we did this, we did not sit in our offices and just plain create it.  We brought in an expert committee; people who were working in the field, in the many, many fields because for us museums go from botanical gardens to zoos and everything in between, and of course, we all know the myriad of libraries out there whether we talking about academic or medical or legal or special or children's rooms and those services or business libraries.  So that we're looking across quite a broad-spectrum on both sides of our house, and then we also try to embrace those historical societies and the archives in the middle even though they're not in our title specifically.  And as we came out of this we realized that there was a need for web resources.  There was a need for workshops.  There was a need for training.  But it's all about trying to put people where they are positioned more effectively to be part of a conversation.

But we're working with a moving target here.  How do we look ahead to what learning is going to look like, how we equip tomorrow's citizens as truly engaged civic participants?  We can't even guess what the technology is going to look like.  Our conversation started with 21st century skills.  It started with IT literacy.  It started with financial literacy, fiscal awareness.  It started with civic literacy.  All of those pieces, but 21st century skills, when you first mention it, it takes me to the mind of Mary's friend, Annie.  Her colleague, Annie, there, who had never moved a mouse, you know.  It goes back to those mousercized trainings in the public library.  It's everything from that level to designing software.  That's not really 21st century skills.  We can't train that now.  We cannot anticipate what's going to be there.  It's more about things that I would maintain just as work has become more universal to me over the last day and a half, are more universal skills.  It's communication.  It's collaboration.  It's critical thinking.  It's problem solving.  It's curiosity.  It's what made people successful in the 20th century, the 19th century, the 18th century.  But how do we frame that and how do we create in today's almost over-deviced society, atmospheres that will bring about that kind of learning?  And I told Christina that I would be using them as guinea pigs up here.  

In our training, that we've been going around and doing for libraries, for museums, and now in Baltimore, Columbia, South Carolina, San Francisco, Miami.  I don't know where the next one or two are, but we have a couple others in our future.  We're going into communities and we're working with library museum professionals, but not alone.  Not just talking to each other.  Not talking to themselves.  Bringing in people from the education community.  Bringing in people from the rotary club, the community foundations to start a broader conversation about what the learning system is, what that big learning infrastructure is in their community, and showing the value of libraries and museums centered as part of that structure, as opposed to being peripheral around the outside.  

There's a book called, The 21st Century Skills:  Learning for Life in Our Times, by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, I think is the gentleman's last name.  Well, Bernie did a session for school librarians that Marcia and my colleague, Laurie Brooks, [phonetic] and I were present for.  He used a four-question exercise which he's very generously allowed us to take and adapt for our purposes.  And this is how we try to get people centered around the best guess we can make as to what learning is going to look like as we move further into the 21st century.  So we've made these slightly different, than Bernie's questions which were more focused on formal education, but I'll start.  Who wants the first one?  Maybe I'll go to Michael first.

>> Michael Taft:  All right.

>> Mary Chute:  First question, first question of the three.  Now, there are four questions.  Am I right?  I've got three up here.  One is really going to be -- I'm going to have everybody engage in.  Too, ask you to do that with all of them.  So what we want to do, Michael, is we want to think about today's kindergartener and we want to try to anticipate what the workplace is going to look like in 20 years when that five-year-old is out there looking for a job.  Maybe just give me a couple of things that come to mind and I have a few others here if we want to add to them, but I'd ask everybody to think along with Michael, and what would you say?  What do you think it's going to look like?

>> Michael Taft:  Well, I will first assume this person is going to be successful and actually have a job or some...

>> Mary Chute:  Yeah, well let's be optimistic.

>> Michael Taft:  ...employment.  

>> Mary Chute:  Let's not do the Woody Allen pitch on this one.  [Laughter]

>> Michael Taft:  Yeah.  Right.  I would assume that there is no longer a really identifiable workplace and perhaps, no longer a identifiable cohort of colleagues, as such.  That whatever the work is it's going to be more diffuse physically in that way and, therefore, the kindergartener is going to have to learn other ways of maintaining contact in society.  Which was the best answer,  but as well as, something we have to have now is this kind of flexibility to not narrow your scope so much that you can't jump to another quite different line of work.  So in other words, that kind of idea of keeping agile.  So this is kind of advice or...

>> Mary Chute:  You're covering almost every...

>> Michael Taft:  Am I?

>> Mary Chute:  Yeah.  You're doing very well.

>> Michael Taft:  I better stop before it gets [inaudible].

>> Mary Chute:  The other things I have jotted down here from the past is highly technical, teleworking, people will work offsite.  They'll have many jobs.  Fluidity of skill sets.  International, global.  That's one piece we really haven't talked a lot about, but that kind of permeable nature of our boundaries and that the good aspects of globalization, that everything will probably be somewhat collaborative.  They're going to have to work well with others.  That playing well with others is going to be a universal and that creativity will be rewarded.  I think that's the one thing I didn't hear come out of there, but other than that I think you nailed them all, and then some.  All right.  So now, we'll go to Kurt.  This just drills down a little bit on the same thing because we've started to paint the picture what that looks like.  So what skills are going to be needed for them to be successful and employed in the world that we're imagining 20 years from now?  What skills do we want to see them start to learn now at the ripe old age of five?

>> Kurt Dewhurst:  You know I'm going to come at this a little different way, but I'm going to answer that question and I was had the good fortune of being at a conference on Intangible Cultural Heritage in China in September, and during the time I was there, I was watching a television program in the morning and they had a week-long programming focus on the fact that, in China, the greatest fear is that they were saying, "We've figured out science, technology, and math, but we -- and engineering, but we have a crisis of creativity in China."  And they wanted to know what -- how they can be more like the West and nurture creativity.  And I'm reminded, to me, that's something that came through in our presentations here today, that we have to not lose sight of that.  I'm reminded of if James Billington was here, our librarian of Congress at our -- one of our recent board meetings, he put his fist down on the desk like that and he said, "We don't need STEM, we need steam.  We got to bring the arts back into that word.  We can't -- we're going to divide our country if we lose sight of the humanities and we're doing it too fast."  And he could do it with much more power, more influence.  But I thought that was interesting to hear and I would hope that next generation that we nurture that creativity and we think about and I would even say, you know, as I think about training that next generation of documentarians that are going to be in kindergarten today, that they're going to need some different skills.  And I think we have to think differently about, you know digital media.  Work is going to change and is changing radically.  I think curators are going to become facilitators.  They're going to be community workers is what they're going to be and they're going to be, I think you're going to see a whole shift of culture workers with different sets of skills and needs.  And I hope we see that generation coming up from those kids.

 >> Mary Chute:  Great.  Very good.  That's just, again, very much the kinds of things that we've heard as we've had that conversation.  

>> It's [inaudible].

>> Mary Chute:  It's all of that.  It's that facilitation piece.  It's that creativity piece.  Absolutely.  Okay.  You're going to get my favorite question and I would indeed put this out there to everybody because this, to me, is the key of getting this to work when you're having a discussion with a group because it's asking for that bit of introspection.  So, Christina.  What were the conditions and you need to think for a second.

>> Christina Barr:  Okay.

>> Mary Chute:  What were the conditions that made your most powerful learning experiences so strong, when you think back?

>> Christina Barr:  I can answer that right away.  

>> Mary Chute:  Okay.

>> Christina Barr:  I can -- this I'll just blurt out that I think that they were experiential.  I think they were something that I was able to dive into and have a hands-on learning experience and relationship with.  

>> Mary Chute:  I like that.  I think that's a good one.  For me, the first time somebody posed this to me and I probably should have helped you set the stage.  You know, think back to what those most powerful things were and then stop and analyze it.  It was the privilege of being part of a very collaborative team where there were no right answers that were superior to things that would be considered wrong answers.  There was support from above, below; everybody owned it, but nobody owned it.  And it was just that thrill of doing work for the pleasure of it and for the desired result, and it was that creativity, but it was that experiential piece too.  Absolutely.  

At that point, we usually feel like we have people hooked in pretty well and then, I'm not going to make you all answer the next question, but I think you can see where we're going at this point we're having this conversation, and the question for them after they've done a little bit of this, oh, it's experiential, is how might we shape our institutions?  What might we want to see happen in our museums and libraries to support this kind of high-powered learning so, that we are becoming more and more critical pieces of the learning infrastructure that's going on in our individual communities?  

I think the children's museums, the science centers, science museums tend to have the easiest piece here because I think, projects like the Hall of Science, that experiential learning that the five-year-old will have at the children's museum, I mean, it's dead on.  For libraries, for art museums, maybe even for a historical society; however, I have to tell you that when we go out we have our great examples that we've got right behind us to bring up and we have the WebJunction Project.  We have the Maine Memory Network that is usually the first one I'm bringing up.  There's a great project at the Philadelphia Art Museum that works with visual literacy and creative problem solving.  

So I think we are really positioned very well, but I think it's going to take a proactive stance.  Our libraries, in particular, tend to -- I probably shouldn't say this, but I've been in many libraries that tend to think of themselves as being, you know, mom, apple pie, we're an inherent good.  Nobody would want to cut our budget.  Now we find that we're positioned to be replacing one-stop centers in Michigan where the one-stop centers aren't funded.  In communities that are drawing in this new customer base that's coming in expecting training and skills of finding jobs and interviewing and resume writing.  And at the same time, the local library's budget is being cut.  So that's where Mary comes to her, we can't do more with less.  She's, you know -- but maybe we can do it better.  Maybe we can do it m more effectively.  Maybe we can do it better by collaborating with somebody else and joining forces.  That's probably my number one 21st century skill is that collaboration piece.  

>> Christina Barr:  That's a good one.  

>> Mary Chute:  Does that leave you at a good point?

>> Christina Barr:  It leaves me at a great point.  I think I'm distilling all these thoughts and thinking that I love that you called for civic participation in the full life of the people in our communities.  I think that, you know, is really linked to voice and that first-person voice that we're able to provide or facilitate with documentation that's so key and have an opportunity impact on policies we were speaking about and pull all of these things together.  It just seems very strong.  It's been a pleasure to be up here and have a conversation with all of you, so I want to thank Kurt Dewhurst, Michael Taft, and Mary Chute.  Thank you so much for being here this afternoon and Kurt has one thing he wants to mention, actually.

>> Kurt Dewhurst:  I just wanted to thank you all for joining us here for the last couple of days.  Those of you who have been able to be with us and really invite you to help us think about America Works as we go forward and this gathering focusing on work and transformation, documenting working Americans and hearing from our Archie Green fellows and our IMLS partner.  It's been so terrific to work with in identifying some exemplary kind of work that's going on out there and I think it makes us all, I hope, as we go away today, thinking about the challenge that we're facing.  

We want to hear from you so don't hesitate to email me or Peggy Bulger, or Mary, or Nancy.  I think Nancy is still here somewhere.  There she is.  Well, Nancy Rogers at IMLS.  If you have ideas, essentially, I mean, putting it most succinctly, for me, you know, it's what should we be collecting, how should we collect it and document it, and how can we make these collections as more accessible as resources for the future so, we'll understand this moment in history and time for future generations.  There are lots of stories to be captured and ways of doing it, I think.  The opportunities are growing in extraordinary ways right now and it's important not just for some kind of historical record.  It's important to the people who are living this experience today to be able to share their knowledge and experience and people like Steve Wonder who've come here and, yeah, we have another Stevie Wonder with us and he's really, he really was born in Lansing, not Detroit.  I just want that to be known so anyway, we want to thank you all for coming and welcome your thoughts.  We want to hear from you and I'm just going to turn it over to Nancy, who's going to, I think, say a few more final closing remarks or logistics or anything else we need to know.

>> Nancy:  [Inaudible]  Thank you all so much for coming on behalf of the American Folk life Center at the Library of Congress and our co-sponsors, the Institute of Museum Library Services.  We really enjoyed having you here today.

>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at loc.gov.