The Wild Center will partner with Adirondack Museum, Cornell’s Maple Program, and New York State/Northeastern New York Maple Producers Associations to build regional identity, revitalize a heritage industry, and connect people to nature through the art, story, history, and science of maple sugaring. The Northern New York Maple Project will create interpretative exhibits with ecological, historical, and economic information. The museum will develop an instructional maple sugaring video; a touch-screen story kiosk that lets visitors share stories through the exhibit and social media; a storytelling workshop for staff, project partners, and maple producers; community events and conferences; a school education program; community sugaring workshops; and educational materials, website, social media, and outreach to industry, food enthusiasts, and the business community. Regular planning meetings on goals and deliverables will track results and an outside consultant will evaluate the overall success of the project.
In the Communities of Learning for Urban Environments and Science (CLUES) project, the four museums of the Philadelphia-Camden Informal Science Education Collaborative worked to build informal science education (ISE) capacity in historically underserved communities. The program offered comprehensive professional development (PD) to Apprentices from 8-11 community-based organizations (CBO), enabling them to develop and deliver hands-on family science workshops. Apprentices, in turn, trained Presenters from the CBOs to assist in delivering the workshops. Families attended CLUES events both at the museums and in their own communities. The events focused on environmental topics that are especially relevant to urban communities, including broad topics such as climate change and the energy cycle to more specific topics such as animals and habitats in urban neighborhoods.
On behalf of the Sun'aq Tribe of Kodiak, the SEALibrary (Sun'aq Ecological Archives and Library) will undertake a project to enhance access to information on Kodiak ecology and Alutiiq heritage while serving as a bridge between tribal members, researchers, and regulators. It will collect, preserve, and disseminate valuable local and traditional ecological knowledge with the goal of protecting the ecological resources of the region. It will create a local storehouse of knowledge accessible both in-house and online, including not only local knowledge but also legal notices and impact assessments from naval military exercises, hazardous waste cleanup, changes to fishing regulations, and threats to local food security. This comprehensive project will include document management training, policy and electronic database systems implementation, preservation planning, archives assessment, and cross-cultural outreach services.
The Missouri Botanical Garden and partners at Harvard University, Cornell University, and New York Botanical Garden will test new means of crowdsourcing to support the enhancement of content in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The BHL is an international consortium of the world's leading natural history libraries that have collaborated to digitize the public domain literature documenting the world's biological diversity, resulting in the single, largest, open-licensed source of biodiversity literature. The project will demonstrate whether or not digital games are an effective tool for analyzing and improving digital outputs from optical character recognition and transcription. The anticipated benefits of gaming include improved access to content by providing richer and more accurate data; an extension of limited staff resources; and exposure of library content to communities who may not know about the collections otherwise.