Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 5, 1994 TAG: 9407080001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By WENDI GIBSON RICHERT STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Today, its weather map and video monitor - while conceptually right - are antiquated and two generations behind technology. They, along with most of the other exhibits in the museum's permanent fourth-floor galleries, have gone from hot to history.
It doesn't take long for a cutting-edge science exhibit to be relegated to the museum's archives room. In fact, the life span of an exhibit generally is only about five years, explains Ken Schutz, the museum's executive director.
So the museum has drawn up plans to overhaul the entire floor's galleries, which have remained virtually untouched since 1983. That, though, costs money - $1.5 million to be precise - the kind of funds the museum hasn't seen in more than a decade.
Until now.
For the past decade, the museum has received only operating support from the Virginia General Assembly - from a high of $179,978 in 1992-93 to no funds in the two years before that. But in its 1994-96 budget, the state appropriated $250,000 for operations in addition to $625,000 in capital support. The capital support funds must be matched by local funds by July 1996.
``I think any grant award roughly correlates to need and worthiness,'' Schutz says. ``Our need is extreme.''
Schutz attributes the state's increase in funding to two things: need and the ability to manage money. Since the 1983 move from Tinker Creek Elementary School to Center in the Square, the museum's goal was not to remain technologically current, but to keep its services available to the region while asking for as little money as possible. In that decade, the museum's exhibits and equipment fell woefully behind the times.
Still, ``over the past 11 years, we developed a service record in spite of the funding,'' Schutz says. ``We've made good use of little money.''
By the time Schutz was hired in the spring of 1993, ``the museum was stabilized, poised to start growing.'' That growth began with a benchmark committee whose members traveled to bigger science museums in search of the latest exhibit ideas.
Then came a $100,000 grant from the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco. The grant, called a Science Exhibit Starter Set, was awarded to 12 of 60 applying museums either just opening, 1- to 5 years old, or rethinking their exhibit space. The grant enabled the Roanoke staff to travel to Exploratorium and learn how to design exhibits. They returned with a commitment from Exploratorium to design an exhibit for the Roanoke museum.
They also returned invigorated. ``Once the staff got a sense that we were ready to take off, their energy level climbed,'' Schutz says.
The $1.5 million master plan for the fourth-floor redesign followed, along with the lobbying campaign for state funding.
Now, the museum is faced with matching the state's award of $625,000. Already, they have secured $255,000, including gifts of $100,000 from the National Science Foundation, $50,000 from the Bierne Carter Foundation, and another $50,000 from Roanoke.
With a big fund-raising drive planned for fall to raise the remaining $370,000, the museum is eager to replace its old exhibits with new ones. Listed in the plans are renovations to Hopkins Planetarium that will include equipment upgrades and laser technology; equipping a science laboratory and prep room with work tables, an environmental chamber, instructor's microscope and computers; installing an interactive ``Body Tech'' exhibit in the current health gallery; building an applied technology gallery aimed at conquering technophobia; and updating the physics, meteorology and energy galleries with many of the Exploratorium's state-of-the-art exhibits, customized for the Roanoke museum.
The physics gallery is scheduled to open in January 1995 - the 25 anniversary of the museum.
Of course, in 2000 Schutz knows the museum will need to replace these exhibits, too. But the museum's goal, he says, isn't to play catch-up with modern technology every five years. The museum, instead, wants to house the prototype exhibits, to be the place where other museums come to check out what's new in science museum exhibitory. ``As new ideas come on line, we'll be there to formulate them,'' he says.
Max Cameron, who is in charge of the Exploratorium's Science Exhibit Starter Kits and has visited the Roanoke museum, believes that's entirely possible for the Science Museum of Western Virginia. ``It's just a matter of an organization committing itself to that approach,'' he says.
``We kind of talk ourselves out of business by empowering people to think for themselves, think locally and experiment.''
That experimenting will cost more and more money in the end, however. But Ellen Griffee, government relations director with the Association of Science-Technology Centers in Washington, D.C., says a trend has developed over the last few years among science centers - ``almost in spite of economic downturn.''
In a recent study, the association found that four out of five science museums were in capital expansion plans, some of it catch-up, like the Roanoke museum. But much of it was attributed to community interest in science and technology. ``I think the fact that people want these things,'' she says, is the reason museums are growing today. ``The public is there. They're voting with their feet. Think of all the ways and reasons people go to the library. We're finding similar patterns with science centers.
``We can't see why [the growing trend] would stop,'' Griffee continues. ``Twenty years ago we only had a dozen [member science] museums. Now we have more than 400 in 36 countries. And we know a hundred other communities out there seeking help to start one.''
With such a sunny forecast, Schutz can't help but be optimistic. He thinks back to his days as director of marketing and development with the Baltimore Zoo. By the time he left in 1988, he had helped boost annual attendance from 170,000 to 600,000 and raise $19 million in public and private funds for the zoo's first campaign for new exhibits.
``I've seen it done before, where a place is really far behind, but got its act together,'' he says.``And everything fell into place.''
by CNB