The National Center uses new technology and media to connect people of all ages to scientists, scientific discovery, and scientific phenomena * in the laboratory, in the field, and even in outer space. The National Center will lead a Museum-wide effort to take the Museum's vast resources - collections of some 32 million specimens and artifacts, forty-three exhibition halls, a staff of more than 200 scientists, and 128 years of expertise in educational programming - directly to classrooms, libraries, community centers, and other locations, including homes, throughout the country. Key to this undertaking are partnerships with other science-rich organizations, such as NASA, and with others in the fields of education, publishing, and technology.

The National Center's integration of science, education, and technology to reach audiences nationwide represents an unprecedented broadening of the Museum's educational mission. Museum President Ellen V. Futter states, "Science touches all aspects of human society ¾ our environment, our health, and our understanding of where we fit in the larger scheme of things. It can no longer be 'for experts only.' With the establishment of the Museum's new National Center, the benefit of NASA's partnership, and this federal imprimatur, the American Museum of Natural History looks forward to playing a leadership role in a dramatic transformation in public education, and to being at the forefront of renewed efforts to enhance science literacy throughout this country.

"The enormity of the educational challenges facing us today, especially in science education, demands that we develop a broader vision of education than we have ever before conceived. While schools should and will remain at the center of this country's national education strategy, it is time to extend learning beyond classrooms and school-age years. With the benefit of new technologies, institutions such as ours can reach beyond their walls. The Museum is able to make its unparalleled resources ¾ its collections, scientific research, and educational expertise ¾ available to people of all ages, backgrounds, and geographic locations, in their schools, community centers, and homes. In no other field is the need for and potential educational reward from such an approach greater than in science."

NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin states, "The American Museum of Natural History is bringing real science to people around the globe in a substantive, strategic manner. The National Center for Science Literacy, Education, and Technology promises to enlighten people from all walks of life about what science and the scientific process really are. An education grant of this magnitude is a sign of our commitment to the goals and programs of the Museum's National Center. Together, the Museum and NASA will bring the frontiers of the cosmos, the workings of our planet, and the diversity of life on Earth to all the people of our nation."

Creation of the National Center

The National Center is the result of the Museum's longstanding concern for and commitment to science education. The Museum began developing the idea of strategically addressing science literacy on a national scale in 1993, when, in conjunction with Louis Harris and Associates, it conducted a nationwide survey of science literacy among adults. The results of the Science and Nature Survey, completed in 1994, revealed an alarming lack of basic scientific knowledge among the American people and led to the creation at the Museum of an Education Task Force composed of national educators, including the current director of the Museum's Department of Education, Myles Gordon; business and industry leaders; Museum trustees, including Lewis W. Bernard, who chaired the Task Force; and Ms. Futter. The work of the Task Force, which met for some eighteen months, included a systematic investigation of the Museum's resources, and of current education practices, trends, and needs. The Task Force also examined the educational activities of other museums, as well as trends and interests in the technology and media industries. The final Task Force report recommended that the Museum create a center for national science education ¾ the National Center for Science Literacy, Education, and Technology. Mr. Gordon was appointed director of the Department of Education in 1995, and Nancy Hechinger was named director of the Center in 1996.

Center Projects
National Center projects are developed by a team of scientific and educational experts from a wide range of disciplines. The projects make use of a broad array of media, both new and traditional, including the World Wide Web, television- - both standard and interactive - video, software, radio, and print materials of all types. A number of programs take advantage of live-feeds, enabling the public to learn about science first-hand from some of the most prominent scientists and researchers in the world. All programs and materials intended for classroom use include an integrated teacher-education element, and are consistent with the new national science curriculum standards.

NASA moneys will provide crucial funding for four of the National Center's major programs: the Black Smoker expedition and educational program, the "Educational Materials Laboratory," a "Digital Galaxy Mapping Project," and "Electronic Science-Bulletins."

· Black Smoker Expedition and Educational Program
In September 1997, in partnership with the University of Washington, the Museum launched the preliminary stage of a two-part deep-sea expedition and education program in which a team of scientists and educators - to include, in the second stage, public-school teachers - traveled to explore "black smokers," chimney-like sulfide structures that grow at hydrothermal vents in mid-ocean ridges. Unknown until their discovery twenty years ago, black smokers are an integral part of an ecosystem that supports a unique community of living things whose existence in this extreme environment sheds new insight into the origin of life on Earth and the possibility of life on other planets.

The National Center created a special content-rich, educational Web site based on the expedition and the science related to it. The site includes a resource section for science teachers, detailed information about black smokers, and a daily log posted by one of the expedition's leaders from the Museum, among many other features. The data and specimens collected on the expedition will be used in the creation of a range of materials, including curricula, teacher training, CD-ROMS, videos, and television broadcasts. The expedition and its discoveries will also be featured on PBS's NOVA series, the air date for which has yet to be scheduled.

· The Educational Materials Laboratory is creating a variety of materials and programs that bring science into classrooms, homes, and informal science-education settings. These include virtual field trips, using the Internet and interactive television; adaptations of successful classroom materials for use in museums, science centers, and other informal science-education settings; innovative curriculum-based Internet activities; teacher education programs; and publications. All materials and activities created by the Laboratory are learner-centered, focusing on engagement with and understanding of the real process of science. Teacher education programs not only provide a teacher's guide through materials, but include teachers as learners, engaging both them and their students in investigation and science.

· The Digital Galaxy Mapping Project will bring together data sets from many sources to create three-dimensional digital maps of our galaxy. The maps will be created by a team at the Museum, working closely with colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, and Ames Research Center, as well as at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and other institutions. The result of the "stitching" together of data sets currently in many separate places will be the foundation of a visual reference library of the universe. The digital galaxy will be used as a highly sophisticated teaching tool in a variety of public programs, including exhibitions, sky shows, courses, and special programs at the new Hayden Planetarium ¾ part of the Museum's Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space, which will open by the year 2000, as well as on the World Wide Web, among other places.

· Electronic Science-Bulletins, currently under development, are electronic displays of the latest scientific news and images from the laboratory, the observatory, and the field. Recent important scientific findings, status reports of ongoing national missions, and timely updates of natural phenomena will be presented and explained in context. When possible, live feeds from remote sites will bring the discovery directly to the public. The significance of the content of the bulletins will be communicated to audiences ranging from scientists to schoolchildren. Each of three new permanent exhibition halls at the Museum - the Hall of Biodiversity (opening spring 1998), the Hall of Planet Earth (opening 1999), and the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Hall of the Universe (opening by the year 2000) - will include a science bulletin related to the focus of the hall. In addition, the bulletins will be shared with other museums and science centers; they will be on the World Wide Web; and they will be used in a variety of materials created by the Educational Materials Laboratory.

Other initial Center projects are as follows:

· Live From Mars
Also last summer, the National Center collaborated with NASA grantee Passport to Knowledge, an organization that creates participatory science programming, on a series of interactive television broadcasts on the occasion of the landing of Pathfinder on Mars. In this special program, interactive telecasts linked Museum visitors and young people in New York City and across the United States directly to NASA experts managing the Pathfinder mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The interactive format of the event allowed participants to discuss the historic Pathfinder mission with scientists at JPL and the Museum, and to be among the first to hear the scientific analysis of the Pathfinder data. Using satellite uplinks, visitors, scientists, and educators at the Museum, as well as at science museums and planetaria across the country, participated in this live broadcast. Curriculum materials and a video based on this program are used by 1 - 2 million students nationwide.

· Biodiversity Counts: A Student Inventory Project
For this program, which is being pilot-tested in more than twenty schools nationwide this fall, middle-school students go into their backyards and schoolyards to inventory the plants and insects that live there. They observe species behavior and collect data, take measurements and make identifications and analyses, and then share their findings on a national student database on the World Wide Web. They will also share their observations and interests in an on-line field journal and in on-line discussion groups and will create exhibits. The main purpose of this program is to enable children to participate actively in the scientific process, teaching them to observe and identify the immediate world around them.

· "Pulse of the Planet"
The National Center is sponsoring and helping to create a full year of the award-winning daily radio program "Pulse of the Planet." These two-minute nationally syndicated radio spots feature the cyclical and seasonal events of the natural world, weaving together ambient sounds, the voices of people in cultures worldwide, and commentary by scientists and other experts - many of them from the American Museum of Natural History - to provide a sound portrait of Earth, connecting listeners with the cycles of our natural realm. Topics include such subjects as the ecology of Lake Victoria, the Perseid meteor shower, the Sunrise Dance of the Apache, and endangered sea lions. "Pulse of the Planet," produced by radio journalist Jim Metzner, is heard daily on 200 stations in 20 countries. It thus provides an effective conduit for the Museum to bring the experience, knowledge, and ongoing discoveries of its scientists to greater numbers of people than ever before.

· Gobi Desert Expedition On-Line
Last summer, the Museum teamed for the first time with Discovery Channel Online (DCOL) in a collaboration that brought the Museum's fossil-collecting expedition to the Gobi Desert directly to the World Wide Web. A correspondent and a photographer from DCOL sent daily dispatches and digital photos from the field to Internet users worldwide. In addition, DCOL and the Museum presented two live events at the Museum in which visitors, school children, and off-site Internet users were able to speak directly to members of the fossil-hunting team, thanks to DCOL's live feed. In 1998, the National Center will collaborate with DCOL on three more expeditions.

· Young Naturalist Awards
Launched this fall, this annual national contest for students in grades 7-12 honors excellence in biodiversity studies, Earth science, astronomy, and cultural studies. In order to develop presentations on specific topics, students will be required to conduct research and small "field expeditions," during which they make observations about the world around them. They will represent their observations in drawings and charts as well as in writing. The entries will be reviewed by a national team of jurors and, finally, by a team of senior Museum curators, and the winning essays will be published in a special catalog and on the Museum's Web site. Excerpts from selected entries will be published in Natural History magazine, a Museum publication with a circulation of 450,000. This year's topic is biodiversity.

The Need for Increased Science Education
The questioning, observation, and assessment that are inherent to science are essential skills for all people at a time when science has a broader and more direct impact on our lives than it ever has before. In order to protect the diversity of life on Earth, control disease, increase world productivity, and explore the universe, the fundamental science on which these efforts are based can and must be understood by the average citizen, whose actions at home, on the job, and in the community affect these and other critical issues.

Myles Gordon, director of the Museum's Department of Education, states, "By bringing people into contact with real science and real scientists - via interactive television, feeds to the Internet, E-mail, and other means - the National Center will make the practice of science, its adventure, uncertainty, and excitement, as well as its discoveries, vivid to the public at large, revealing science as an accessible and fundamentally human enterprise with great relevance to everyday life."

The American Museum of Natural History as Educator
Among the world's many institutions of scientific research and education, the American Museum of Natural History is an established leader in science education, to which it contributes resources of enormous range and depth. These include a staff of more than 200 scientists pursuing advanced research in dozens of fields of endeavor and conducting more than 100 field expeditions every year, and collections comprising 32 million artifacts and specimens. The Museum is home to numerous laboratories, in which much of the advanced scientific research conducted at the Museum occurs, and to one of the world's largest natural history libraries. Moreover, the Museum is training the next generation of scientists, with one of the oldest and largest doctoral and postdoctoral training programs of any scientific museum in the world, with collaborative programs with Yale University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and the City University of New York.

The Museum has over three million visitors a year, half of them children (roughly 500,000 of them in formal school programs), and annually provides hundreds of programs for adults, young people, and families.

In the field of public education, the Museum possesses vast expertise and experience, resulting from 128 years of distinguished programming directed at diverse audiences and more than a century of interpreting science for the public through exhibitions, many acknowledged to be among the finest in the world. Indeed, the Museum's collections, exhibitions, and educational programming have earned it the deep affection and trust of an extremely broad and loyal public.

Moreover, while the Museum itself has invaluable resources on which the Center can draw in the creation of programming and materials, its long and distinguished history of interpreting science for the public enables it to serve as a platform for work of the larger scientific community as well. For example, in the partnership with NASA, the Museum will join NASA's science data, images, and expertise to the Museum's own resources and expertise to create content-rich educational materials.

The availability of distance-learning technologies and new media provides the Museum, along with its partners, with enormous opportunities to take the Museum's resources beyond the walls of the institution to enhance science education globally. Nancy Hechinger, National Center director, states, "For more than a century, this Museum has offered its visitors a window onto the natural world and the scientific process, inspiring a lifelong love of science. Now, the National Center is using new technologies to open that window onto places they can't go on a Museum visit - taking them behind the scenes and into the field - communicating the passion for discovery and knowledge, and substantively increasing the public's knowledge about our world in innovative and educationally effective ways."

Partnerships
Partnerships with other institutions and organizations, like that with NASA, are crucial to the effectiveness of the National Center. In addition to a host of scientific organizations, the Center will collaborate with outside partners on the production and distribution of materials and programs. The Museum will act as provider and interpreter of content, designing and creating prototypes, and relying on partners for implementation and dissemination of the Center's materials and programs. In addition to NASA, current partners include Discovery Channel Online, the NOVA television series, and the "Pulse of the Planet" radio series.

Bipartisan Support for National Center
The Congressional appropriation for the National Center received broad, bipartisan support from Congress, including Hon. Newt Gingrich, Hon. Robert Livingston, Hon. Jerry Lewis, Hon. Christopher "Kit" S. Bond, Hon. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Hon. Alfonse M. D'Amato, Hon. Charles B. Rangel, Hon. Charles E. Schumer, Hon. Nita M. Lowey, Hon. Jerrold Nadler, and Hon. Carolyn Maloney. The nature of this support is evident in the following statements from public officials.

Congressmember Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House of Representatives: "As Speaker of the United States Congress, and on behalf of my colleagues, I offer my strong endorsement of the American Museum of Natural History's goals and programs. Both the National Center and NASA have at their core the belief that educating the public about science and its relevance to our lives is a critical endeavor. In strategically addressing the need for science education, the National Center is fulfilling a crucial role in American society."

Congressmember Jerry Lewis, chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees NASA: "Anything we can do to stimulate our young people to take an interest in science is going to benefit our entire society. Together, the National Center and NASA can develop any number of avenues to increase the interest in and understanding of science among all Americans."

Senator Christopher "Kit" S. Bond, chairman of the Senate appropriations committee that oversees NASA: "This Congressional designation represents a significant commitment on the part of the Senate to enhance science literacy throughout the country. The American Museum of Natural History is uniquely suited to play a nationwide role in bringing the latest scientific information to the public."

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "The National Center at the American Museum of Natural History is expanding the notion of education to reach beyond the confines of school buildings. It is bringing science education to Americans of all ages and backgrounds. In designating the National Center, the United States Congress is helping bring the best in science education to the broadest audience possible."

Congressmember Charles B. Rangel: "The launching of the National Center reminds us that the American Museum of Natural History is not only one of New York City's premier educational and cultural institutions, but one that has the capacity to reach Americans thousands of miles away. Young people and families from all regions deserve the best that New York has to offer."

Congressmember Charles E. Schumer: "The American Museum of Natural History has been educating children and adults in the New York area for 128 years. Now, with the establishment of the National Center for Science Literacy, Education, and Technology, and the agreement with NASA, the Museum will be able to bring its incomparable educational resources to millions more."

Congressmember Nita M. Lowey: "I am pleased that I was able to help secure an $8 million Congressional appropriation for this outstanding institution to launch the National Center for Science Literacy, Education, and Technology. This new, exciting partnership between the American Museum of Natural History and NASA will enable the Museum to broaden its educational mission and offer new types of learning experiences to people around the world."

 Congressmember Jerrold Nadler: "I believe the American Museum of Natural History's National Center for Science Literacy, Education, and Technology will be the standard by which other educational facilities will be measured. I am gratified to have played a role in obtaining funding for education programs and opportunities for America's children."

Congressmember Carolyn Maloney: "The $8 million Congress gained for the American Museum of Natural History will enable this unique center to share its immense scientific treasures with classrooms, libraries, and homes across the nation. This is the first time this has been done and it is not surprising that it is happening right here in New York City."