Forum

Q & A with Diantha Schull and Selma Thomas

As the first feature on this website we are presenting a dialogue on “Age in America” consisting of questions posed by Program Associate Sabrina Waldron to the two project organizers, Diantha Schull, Project Director, and Selma Thomas, Consultant.

Diantha Schull		Selma Thomas

SW: Can you talk a bit about the genesis of this project, ‘Age in America'?

DDS:  Age in America emerged from Libraries for the Future's Lifelong Access Libraries Initiative, which focuses on building the capacities of libraries as centers for lifelong learning and community engagement. In the early phases of Lifelong Access it became apparent to me that the national discourse on aging focused primarily on economic and medical issues, with little reference—if any—to cultural traditions or historical circumstances. Because of my career in museums and libraries I recognized that these institutions, with their vast collections of artifacts, images and documents, could add an important dimension to our societal thinking about aging. 
 
ST: I've been familiar with the Lifelong Access Initiative, since Diantha had invited me to participate in the Fellows' summer workshops, at the University of North Carolina. I learned about the growing ‘longevity' revolution from the various lectures, and I was also impressed by the Initiative's effort to train public librarians, to give them both the technical and the conceptual tools they need to address a changing demographic. The Lifelong Access Initiative really introduced me to the “fact” of Age as a growing social and public issue. That was the first, critical, step for me. This project is an effort to take those issues to a general public and to engage broader communities in a discussion about what it means to grow old in America.

SW: What are the goals for this project?

DDS: I see two fundamental goals. The first is to demonstrate that libraries, museums and other cultural institutions have important roles to play in helping all of us re-consider our images and assumptions about aging. The second is to demonstrate that each institution's capacity to address the theme of aging—and, indeed, other themes—is enhanced through collaboration with other cultural institutions. By working together, museums and libraries can bring so much more to a subject, can attract so many more partners, and can offer so much more programming. 
 
ST: I have two goals for this project. The first is to create a forum where people who live in the same community can discuss the reality of Age and aging. The second is to demonstrate how libraries and museums can work together and bring their combined resources to bear on critical social issues. I think that this kind of interpretive programming can give people a vocabulary, and perhaps an informed insight, that helps them grapple with complicated issues. The partnering institutions can benefit their entire community.

SW: How did you select the three participating communities?

DDS: We are so lucky to have identified three very different and very committed sets of museum-library partners. In our efforts to identify the three communities we were seeking situations that were different from one another in terms of geography, cultural traditions and types of cultural institutions, but shared the same demographic trend in the form of an aging population. We were also seeking institutional partners that had strong records of interpretive programming and where we knew the leaders were committed to experimentation. 
 
ST: From a programming perspective, this project is a fairly complicated effort—to create a national program that takes place in three different communities. We first thought about a national traveling exhibition but we realized we could develop a stronger project if we worked with each community from the beginning, instead of just sending a finished program to various communities. We wanted as many communities as we could manage, with the budget and the time constraints, and we settled on three. From there, I just trusted Diantha's judgment on which three would work best.

SW: How are you making sure that all three communities are kept ‘in the loop'?

DDS: We have devised an approach that focuses on Work Plans that were drawn up at the outset by each set of community partners, and that is updated every six weeks. As project organizers, we respond to those plans and facilitate exchange of information across the sites. Also we are using this website to facilitate exchange between and among the sites. 
 
ST: One of the most important means of keeping everyone in the loop is through our Community Collaborators Symposia. The first of these was held in Washington, D.C., at the Center for the Study of Modern Art, at the Phillips Collection, in January 2008. Two Project Advisors—Dr. Katherine Ott of the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Victor Marshall of the University of North Carolina Center on Aging—met with the community partners and gave special presentations on project topics. The collaborating organizations each presented their initial plans and were able to benefit from an exciting cross-site dialogue. We are looking forward to the next symposium in the fall.

SW: Besides the programs that Hartford, Norfolk and Middle Country/Stony Brook, Long Island, are developing, do you have any plans to create a permanent publication, or exhibit, that could be available to audiences outside of these three communities?

DDS: We have some thoughts about sustaining the work that is being started by this project, but expect those thoughts to evolve in relation to how the local sites develop their activities and our own analysis of how the parts of the project can be put together for a larger whole. 
 
ST: There are obviously all sorts of national “products” that could emerge from this project. Since one of our goals is to encourage creative interpretive programming at the local level, we are also hoping that the local sites may find opportunities to take their programs or products beyond their initial institutions. One of the reasons this project is so interesting is that the process is not typical and we want to make sure we are open to discovering new ways to disseminate public programs that have local and national significance.