0^ *?DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR AND RELATEDAGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS FOR 1996
HEARINGSBEFORE ASUBCOMMITTEE OF THECOMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONSHOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVESONE HUNDRED FOURTH CONGRESSFIRST SESSIONSUBCOMMITTEE ON THE DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR ANDRELATED AGENCIESRALPH REGULA, Ohio, ChairmanJOSEPH M. McDADE, Pennsylvania SIDNEY R. YATES, IllinoisJIM KOLBE, Arizona NORMAN D. DICKS, WashingtonJOE SKEEN, New Mexico TOM BEVILL, AlabamaBARBARA F. VUCANOVICH, Nevada DAVID E. SKAGGS, ColoradoCHARLES H. TAYLOR. North CarolinaGEORGE R. NETHERCUTT, Jr., WashingtonJIM BUNN, OregonNOTE: Under Committee Rules, Mr. Livingston, as Chairman of the Full Committee, and Mr. Obey, as RankingMinority Member of the Full Committee, are authorized to sit as Members of all Subcommittees.Deborah Weatherly, Loretta Beaumont, Mark Mioduskj, and Joel Kaplan,Staff Assistants
* PART 8 PageInstitute of Museum Services 1National Endowment for the Humanities 27National Endowment for the Arts IllSmithsonian Institution 219National Gallery of Art 327United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 383The Commission of Fine Arts 417John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts 439National Capital Planning Commission 461Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation 503Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 529Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Commission 585Advisory Council on Historic Preservation 601
Printed for the use of the Committee on Appropriations '

Friday, March 10, 1995.SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTIONwitnessesi. michael heyman, secretaryconstance b. newman, under secretaryrobert s. hoffmann, provostnancy d. suttenfhsld, assistant secretary for finance andadministrationl. carole wharton, dhiector, office of planning, manage-ment and budgetrobert p. dbllman, acting dhiector, office of facblitiesservicesmichael h. robinson, director, national zoological parklee denny, senior information officerOpening StatementMr. Regula [presiding]. OK let's get started this morning.We're happy to welcome the team from the Smithsonian today.Because of our time constraints, we're going to move right along.Whatever testimony you'd like to present will be made a part of therecord in total, and you may summarize for the members of thesubcommittee.So, Dr. Heyman, you're on.Mr. Heyman. Thank you.I just want you all to know that Connie Newman is sitting to myright, the Under Secretary of the Smithsonian, and Bob Hoffmannto my left, who is the Provost, and Carole Wharton, who is ourBudget Officer, and we have some other folks here who are re-sources to help me answer questions that you might have.I wanted to say a few things at the outset, Mr. Chairman. I havea longer prepared statement, but I'm going to reduce that, giventhe time constraints.I was going to emphasize that we are a unique institution, andin many ways our governance is much like a state university.We've got a board of regents. We're, obviously, created by the Fed-eral Government as a trust instrumentality, but we're not a Fed-eral agency. Our relations with Congress are really interesting be-cause both through membership on our governance board?6 of our17 members are congressional members?and through the appro-priations process. There's a close relationship, but, nevertheless,there's a certain kind of independence similar to what I enjoyedwhen I was at the University of California.And you know about the breadth of our charter. It really startedright out at the beginning with Smithson who wanted us to devoteourselves to the increase and diffusion of knowledge, which essen-tially meant?and has meant?a very rich research agenda and a(219)
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very rich exhibition agenda: exhibitions, publications, and pro-grams to diffuse, and basic research to increase. We've done overtime some extraordinary research, and we continue to do that infar-flung areas from astronomy through tropical biology with manystops in between. Of course, we have a very large exhibition pro-gram in a lot of museums.It's an enormous undertaking. We have over 28 million visitorsa year, and that's quite a few. Obviously, this represents repeatvisitors from the Washington metropolitan area, but we get peoplefrom all over the United States ana from foreign countries. Wevebeen trying to do some polling, really, in preparation for increasingour relationships with the private sector. I think it's fair to saythat something like 60 percent of the daytime for nonbusiness visi-tors to Washington is spent in the Smithsonian. So it's a reallyhuge attraction and a method of communication within the city.The heart of both our enterprises, be it research or be it exhi-bition, is really in our collections, and I know we're going to speakabout those some later because I know that the chairman has par-ticular questions with regard to them. But I just want to empha-size at this point how important they are.I also want to point out that we are rather unique in that about28 percent of our operating expenditures are not appropriatedfunds, at least funds appropriated to us, and we have an endow-ment. I wish it would grow faster than it has, and we're puttinga lot of attention to trying to increase that endowment, but we getsomething like $18 or $19 million a year income from that endow-ment. Then we have a lot of auxiliary activities, museum shops,catalog sales, licensing, and the like, Smithsonian magazine, andwe're trying very hard to increase that take. It's not so easy be-cause, as the folks in the private sector find, expenses go up atabout the same amount that you can charge for your goods.In any event, we're a big, vibrant place that's trying in a lot ofways to enlarge ourselves, and here's one of my regents now.[Laughter.] FY 1995 RESCISSIONMr. Livingston. Mr. Secretary, I apologize for being late.Mr. Heyman. I want to speak a little bit about the recent rescis-sion action you took, the $25 million that came out of Fiscal Year1995 appropriations, which, of course, represented a good portionof the construction budget. The reason that I want to talk aboutthat is because the funds that you deleted relate to requests in oursubmission in the 1996 budget, the one that's before you, and I fearthat if past action presages the future, youll zero out two verymajor activities that I really feel constrained to speak to you about.NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIANThe first are the planned local facilities of the National Museumof the American Indian. I believe?and that's why I'm stressing itas hard as I am?that Congress, as well as the Smithsonian, isunder a moral and legal obligation to proceed with the plannedconstruction. The museum facilities that are up presently for dis-cussion are largely a creature of congressional initiative. The mainobjective of its creation was the presentation and provision of pub-
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lie access to an extraordinary collection of over a million AmericanIndian artifacts that were collected in the late 19th and early 20thcentury by Gustav Heye. It's reputed to be the best collection in theworld. It's being housed under really rotten conditions, and wehave distributed some photographs to you that give you, I think,an accurate sense?I don't think we chose simply the bad places
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an accurate sense of what it looks like there, and we're really veryworried the collection's preservation and continuance under thosecircumstances.That collection was under the jurisdiction of a foundation in NewYork called the Heye Foundation, and for various reasons theFoundation came on hard times. Thus, the Smithsonian was ap-proached?this started in the seventies?to take over the collection.Multiple parties were involved: the attorney general of the State ofNew York, who resisted moving the collection elsewhere; the trust-ees of the Heye Foundation; representatives from American Indiancommunities; political leaders in Congress; and, of course, theSmithsonian.Our board of regents was really reluctant to undertake the finan-cial responsibilities entailed unless Congress passed appropriatelegislation directing the Smithsonian to establish the museum andpromising to support it. The result of the foregoing were agree-ments struck and statutes passed and judicial decrees rendered,mainly in 1989. We agreed with the Heye Foundation and theother stakeholders to accept the collection and house it in a mu-seum on the Mall, a branch in New York, and a state-of-the-art col-lection and conservation facility to which the Heye collection couldbe moved and preserved and, thus, taken out of danger.But our agreement was conditioned on the passage of relevantlegislation, and that legislation was passed in 1899Mr. Yates. No, 1989. [Laughter.]Mr. Heyman. I mean 1989. Yes, that is even a little before mytime.Mr. Yates. Not before mine. [Laughter.]Mr. Heyman. It comprises some 20 pages of provisions in theUnited States Code Annotated. I brought that with me because Iwant to quote a couple of sections eventually. It, among other mat-ters, directs the regents?and I really use that word because it's di-rective language?directs the regents to construct the three facili-ties in question with a net square footage of no less than 400,000square feet. It creates a board of trustees under the regents, madeup largely of American Indians, and provides that construction ofthe Mall museum will be financed no more than two-thirds by Fed-eral appropriations. The idea was the Smithsonian would raise thebalance of the cost of the Mall museum. In addition, there was aNew York court decree confirming the arrangement and permittingthe collection to be moved in view of the guarantees in the Federalstatute.Now a variety of events have occurred since 1989. First, thebranch museum in New York was established in the refurbishedCustom House in Lower Manhattan. It was financed by the FederalGovernment, by the State of New York, and the city of New York,in accordance with the requirements in the statute.
222Second, the Smithsonian has organized a major fundraising cam-paign for the National Museum of the American Indian. Its pri-mary focus is obviously on the third, or at least the third, that wehave to raise. We've already raised in cash and pledges over $26million toward the goal of $35.5 million to be applied to the Mallmuseum, one-third of its projected cost. It's enrolled over 72,000members of the museum who, hopefully, continue with annual sup-port. The total campaign goal is $60 million with some $25 millionto go to an endowment, the income of which is to support outreachactivities, activities really where Indian peoples live around thecountry.The basis of this whole campaign has been the plan that's con-tained in the Federal statute: a Mall museum, a branch in NewYork, and a state-of-the-art collection and conservation facility ade-quate to house the Heye collection independent of other collectionsof the Smithsonian. In light of the foregoing, we view, obviously,the rescission action and the potential desertion of the two museumfacilities with real alarm because, if this occurs, we've broken ourcollective promise to the American Indian community and we'veundermined the confidence we have so carefully nurtured in thedonor community to which we must turn increasingly for supportas Federal funds become less available.I just want to emphasize that a little bit. When I took over as
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I wanted to say "chancellor"?as Secretary of the Smithsonian, Imade an installation address last September, and I said, look, re-ality cautions us that we are not going to grow past where we arepresently and what's in the offing at present by getting Federalfunds. I said, whatever one thinks in terms of how persuasive wecan be, in the present fiscal climate that isn't going to occur. AndI said we're really going to have to do much more with the privatesector, both with the corporate sector and we're doing a lot ofthings that?some that have been done and more that are grow-ing?and with the philanthropic community.I am really worried that if we go away from this set of undertak-ings, we're going to have an awful lot of difficulty in the philan-thropic community, especially because there you've got to reallycarry through with what you say you're going to do. I had a lot ofexperience with this in building a fundraising capacity at Berkeleyand I know it better than I might know other things, simply be-cause I was so involved with it.NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM EXTENSIONThe other thing I wanted to mention?and I'm just going tospend a moment on it?was another portion of that constructionbudget which involved the Air and Space Museum extension atDulles. As you know, we've run out of space to exhibit planes, forinstance in relationship to the controversial Enola Gay exhibition.We never could have put that airplane in the Air and Space Mu-seum. First of all, it's too large. Second of all, it's much too heavyand would have gone through the floor. So the best we can doand as we shall be doing?is to display portions of it, a fuselageand some other portions in the course of an exhibition that is pres-ently being designed with yours truly as the guest curator.
223We need some large place. You'll recall all of the conversationsabout where that ought to be located. And, finally, you passed astatute that said it should be located at Dulles, and we had urgedthat, obviously.The total cost of that is $160 million. That's the estimate. Thereisn't a prayer that we could ever get that $160 million out of Fed-eral funds. The whole object is to relate to two other sources offunding for practically all of the money. One is the Commonwealthof Virginia to help us in various forms and the other is the privatesector, mainly, aerospace and like industry that can do things inconnection with that undertaking.The Commonwealth of Virginia?actually, the governor signed aMemorandum of Understanding yesterday?provides for anoninterest loan that can come to the Smithsonian to help with as-pects of the feasibility studies on methods of attracting private en-terprise.The second is a pledge to put existing infrastructure money intothe necessities around Dulles, roads and other kinds of infrastruc-ture investment. To my understanding, these monies are in ac-counts presently and the issue is how will they be spent, not if theycan be generated.And the third is the issuance of $100 million in State bonds atmunicipal rates which would be for the financing for the enterprise.These would have to be paid off, obviously, by sources other thanthe State of Virginia, but being able to go to them for financing,and really fairly low interest financing, is a great advantage.Well, the Federal investment in all of this, which I look at as akind of leveraged venture capital, is $8 million. If the project comesto pass?and I don't want to assure us all that this absolutely iscertain in all regards, although I think the bet is pretty good
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what we're asking for is an investment toward a very large returnin terms of others being involved in this. You rescinded the $4 mil-lion that was in the 1995 appropriation and we were asking for $2million this year and $2 million next year. I'm asking you not nec-essarily to do anything with the rescission, but to provide us $2million this year, which we can use to attract other investment.Mr. Regula. Who pays?how's the $100 million in bonds paid?Mr. Heyman. Oh, we have to pay it back. It's got to come out ofit's got to come out of this investment. It's got to come out of theactivities that will be carried out there by the private sector, essen-tially.Mr. Yates. Will you yield for a question?Mr. Regula. Yes.Mr. YATES. Is that a commitment of the United States of Amer-ica as well? As far as I understand, it is.Mrs. Newman. Yes. It would be, but we are talking about IMAXtheaters and trade fairs. There are some major activities thatwould be planned in order to repay, but it would be an obligationof the U.S.Mr. Taylor. Mr. Chairman.Mr. Regula. I'll yield.Mr. Taylor. Who set this up? Who approved it as far as theUnited States Government is concerned?
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224Mrs. Newman. Well, first of all, we haven't requested the bond.It is?Virginia has noted to us the availability of a $100 millionbond, but we have not taken any funding yet. It was part of theagreement when we asked for authority to establish the facility atDulles that there would be the $100 million bond availability, $3million in an interest-free loan, an estimated $40 million infrastructure, $6 million in state funding and another $6 million inprivate funding.Mr. Regula. This is all in the planning stage as yet?Mrs. Newman. It's all authorized; it's planning.Mr. Heyman. It's just in the planning stage, obviously, and theissue really on this is, is this promising enough to solve what arereal problems for the Air and Space Museum to go forward in acreative way? We certainly have not had this kind of undertakingbefore, and if it works, which I think it might well, if it works, thisis really a very interesting way to enhance a Federal facility.Mr. Regula. I'll yield to Mr. Yates.CONDUCTING MULTIPLE FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGNSMr. Yates. I don't understand one thing. You're going to raisemoney for Dulles, and you're raising money for the Indian Mu-seum. Aren't you in conflict?Mr. Heyman. Well, let me say more broadly, Congressman Yates,we're going to be raising money for a lot of objectives, and we'regoing to be raising money in campaigns that surround the differentmuseums. In this, we're going to be, if successful, planning verycarefully about how not to make multiple calls on the same donors.There are donor communities out there for different purposes thatwe're going to tap. I hope that a lot of the money that will comefor Air and Space is going to come from people who are deeply in-volved in air and space and who would not be interested at all ingiving money or providing concessions with regard to other activi-ties. It's a little like at a university; there's a group out there whowill give you money for intercollegiate athletics and not for othermatters, and you can carry on multiple campaigns at the sametime.Mr. Yates. I see. Okay. Thank you.Mr. Regula. Go ahead with your statement.Mr. Heyman. That's it.[The prepared testimony of Mr. Heyman follows:]
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TESTIMONY OF I. MICHAEL HEYMAN, SECRETARYSMITHSONIAN INSTITUTIONbefore theHOUSE APPROPRIATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERIORAND RELATED AGENCIESMARCH 10, 1995
Good morning Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. Iam pleased to appear before the committee today for the firsttime since assuming my role as Secretary in September of lastyear. I entered the office of Secretary with great enthusiasmfor this extraordinary institution and I can honestly say that myfirst five months have been more than challenging.The Smithsonian is a unique and dynamic institution whichbelongs to the citizens of the United States. Each secretarialera reflects unique circumstances and poses its own opportunitiesand problems. When I was selected for the position of Secretary,I began to explore in detail the opportunities and problemsfacing the Institution and how I could best address these issuesduring my tenure. I identified four areas where I believe Ishould focus my energies in the coming years. To address theseissues, I first implemented a reorganization which included thecreation of a provost to oversee all programmatic areas. Thiswill allow me to more actively and effectively manage theInstitution as a whole and ensure a greater level of oversightand accountability over the diverse components which make up theSmithsonian.The greatest challenge presently facing the Institution,along with the rest of the Federal establishment, is theconstraint on resources. In the past, the Smithsonian couldcount on increased resources from Congress and the ExecutiveBranch in discharging its mission. Those times are past and ifthe Institution is to continue as one of the world's premiercultural and scientific institutions, it must begin to rely moreheavily on private support from individuals and corporations. Asystematic effort to increase private support started very wellunder my predecessor and I intend to accelerate this initiativeas quickly and effectively as possible.This new era also demands from public, as well as private,organizations increased fiscal accountability. We must use ourresources efficiently and intelligently both to husband them andto underscore our credibility to those who provide them ? thegovernment and our donors. I believe that frugality also has apositive side. For example, it will require us to agree morespecifically than in the past on the dimensions of our mission.Second, we must take a hard look at the role of theSmithsonian as the nation's museum and at the goals of ourexhibitions and public programming. As you are all too well
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-2-aware, we have suffered through the long controversy surroundingthe National Air and Space Museum's proposed exhibition whichincluded a portion of the Enola Gay. There were mistakes made inthe development of this exhibition which, in the end, made itspresentation doomed to failure. This, and a small number ofexhibitions over the past few years, have raised importantquestions concerning the Institution's responsibilities inpresenting historical and analytical treatments to the public.Even before I made my decision to replace the original Enola Gayexhibition with a scaled-down display, I announced that we wouldundertake an assessment and review of the processes and criteriaused in determining what subjects to cover and how they are to beaddressed. I expect this review to be completed later this yearand that it might well call for the establishment of guidelinesto be used ac.ross the Institution regarding exhibitions andpublic programs. I will gladly report back to the committee withthe results of this review and on those steps I plan to take inresponse to it.Third, I am committed to developing, across the Institution,the ability to make our collections and information available tothe public through technology. With the great advances ininformation technology during the past decade, we now have theopportunity to take our collections, via electronic media, tovirtually every city and town in the nation, and ultimately, toalmost every household. I have made this a priority of mytenure.Within a few months the Smithsonian will go on-line on theInternet with a full and constantly updated information servicewith "home-pages" for our museums and research centers. Thiswill become a Smithsonian without walls , bringing our vastresources home to Americans and offering a perennial field tripfor students, young and old. This reach should increaseconsiderably in the near future as the private sector mergesmeans of communication and provides access to "ordinary" homesthroughout the country.I am told that one day soon emerging technologies will allowon-line visitors to look at 3-D images and, in essence, to "hold"an item in their hands, turning it through all its dimensions.We have already made plans to open a trial 3-D digitizing lab atthe National Zoo to test the possibilities for the entireSmithsonian. I am excited by what this technology can mean to usin extending the reach of our historic mission ? the "increaseand diffusion of knowledge." At the heart of the informationrevolution is something far more than an advance in technology;it is the fulfilling of one central promise of democracy: tomake knowledge available to as many citizens as possible, and toallow that access to be shaped by their needs. I see it as JamesSmithson's mandate reborn for a new century and a new generationof Americans.
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-3-On-line exhibitions can do things we cannot do throughconventional means. Take, for example, the major exhibition"Ocean Planet," which will open at the Museum of Natural Historyin April before going off on a national tour. I am sure that noone who actually visits the exhibition will easily forget theexperience. It is state of the art in the presentation ofimportant guestions regarding the health of the Earth's oceans.Noteworthy, however, is that this is the first exhibition that weare developing in parallel form on-line, in collaboration withscientists from NASA. That prototype will be available over theInternet. The on-line version will feature an interactive floorplan of the exhibit and will incorporate all of its elements.Its "resource room" will provide an interactive bulletin boardand instantaneous connections to many sources of oceanographicinformation available on the Internet. It will feature a varietyof special programs, including discussion sessions,demonstrations, curricula for elementary and high school courses,and meet-the-curators opportunities in r_eal time .New information technologies will also greatly enhance thebenefits of our research programs. For instance, we are puttingin digital form systematic collections of biological informationin the National Museum of Natural History which can be sharedamcng scientific researchers worldwide. Access to thisinformation and these collections will not require a special tripto Washington in order to undertake or continue researchactivities.Hence, greater access to our collections through advancedtechnologies will make a trip to the Smithsonian as easy asturning on a personal computer. The potential benefits of thiselectronic outreach to the American public are inestimable.Finally, we must continue to take care of the most importantasset of the Institution ? the national collections. Numberingmore than 14 million objects, the collections are the foundationfor all that the Institution does. From its myriad researchprograms to the hundreds of exhibitions and public programs wepresent to the public each year, the collections are whatdistinguishes the Smithsonian from other educational and culturalinstitutions. The primary target of increases in our request forthis Fiscal Year is in the management and conservation of thecollections. It would be impossible, however, for me to discussthese priorities without first commenting on the recent actiontaken by this committee with regard to FY 1995 rescissions.The rescissions of FY 1995 Smithsonian funds recentlyapproved by this committee cut right to the heart of our abilityto care for the collections. The effect of these rescissions,and their impact on our FY 1996 request, is to allow thecollections of the National Museum of the American Indian and theNational Air and Space Museum to continue to deteriorate with the
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-4-potential for permanent damage or loss. In both instances, theneed for new storage and conservation space is clearlydemonstrable. I would like to discuss each case in some detail.With regard to the NMAI Suitland collections center, thiscomponent is critical to both the preservation of the collectionand the success of the Mall museum. The Smithsonian, after manyyears of discussion and negotiation, and with the guidance andultimate direction of Congress, agreed to accept the transfer ofthe Heye collection ? the single largest and most importantcollection of Native American artifacts in the world ? and totake the necessary steps to preserve it. Upon Congressionalauthorization the Smithsonian entered into a legally bindingagreement with the Heye Foundation and the State and City of NewYork for theJ.construction of three facilities which wouldcomprise the NMAI. One of these facilities, the SuitlandCollections Center, would replace the antiguated and whollysubstandard Bronx storage facility at which the Heye collectionis now housed. Specifically, the legislation authorizing theSuitland facility prohibits any of the Heye collection from beingcommingled with any existing Smithsonian collections. This is akey provision of the agreement. It is the Smithsonian'sobligation to care for this collection. Without the constructionof an acceptable facility, we fail to meet this obligation.Another component of the NMAI legislation is the MallMuseum. As spelled out in the legislation, this facility is apublic/private partnership. The Smithsonian is responsible forraising one-third of the costs of this museum from privatesources. I am pleased to report that we have already raised$26.7 million towards the $36.7 million goal. The pledges ?ranging from the 71,000 members of the NMAI national campaign whocontribute a minimum of $20 a year to the $10 million gift fromthe Mashantucket Peguot Tribal Nation of Connecticut ? havebeen secured with the expectation that the planning, design andconstruction of the Museum would proceed in accordance with thelegislation. The rescission of FY 1995 planning and design moneyfor this component will result in a delay or possible terminationof the Mall Museum and will be viewed by donors and supporters asa broken commitment on the part of Congress and the Federalgovernment. Sadly, one of the best examples of public/privatepartnership will be seen as a failure at precisely the time weneed to demonstrate its potential as a future resource to theInstitution.Finally, the rescission of FY 1995 planning and design moneyfor the NASM extension at Dulles will have two immediate results:placing the collections in jeopardy as they continue to be housedin substandard facilities at our Garber facility; and thelikelihood that the significant commitment from the Commonwealthof Virginia which includes infrastructure improvements to thesite (estimated at $30-40 million) , a $3 million dollar interest
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-5-free loan and the issuance of up to $100 million in bondingauthority, will lapse or be withdrawn. As we have stated on therecord, with the exception of the initial planning and designmoney which totals $8 million, the funding for the constructionof this extension would derive from non-Federal sources. Thiswould seem to be a wise investment on the part of the Federalgovernment in which $8 million of Federal funds could leveragemore than $100 million of non-Federal funds.I felt the need to discuss these three projects in somedetail as our request for FY 1996 includes funding for all three.It would be a great setback for the Institution if these projectsdid not move forward and a real impediment to our being able toproperly care for the collections.I am fully aware of the difficult situation which faces thiscommittee specifically, and Congress as a whole. Reductions inthe Federal budget now, and in the near future, are a reality.Making decisions about what programs and activities the Federalgovernment should or should not support are difficult indeed.On this, the eve of the Institution's 150th anniversary, Iwould like to remind the members of the committee that theSmithsonian Institution was created by Act of Congress and hasevolved into a unique and revered institution which representsthe best of America and its people. The Smithsonian is themirror in which we, as Americans, see our history and culturefrom the past, in the present, and towards the future. I wouldventure that the vast majority of Americans believe the Federalfunds which support the Institution are a worthy and rewardingexpenditure of resources that provides direct benefits to allcitizens.I thank you and I would be pleased to answer any questionsyou may have regarding our FY 1996 request or any other topic.
230OPERATIONS OF THE SMITHSONIANMr. Regula. Oh, that's it? [Laughter.]Oh, okay, I thought maybe you were just getting underway. Youhaven't really discussed the operations of the Smithsonian. Perhapswe can get that covered in questions.First, I'm going to yield to the chairman of the full committeeand the regent.Mr. Livingston. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.I think that your last comment about getting an explanation ofthe operations would be helpful, but I, first of all, am late and Iapologize, Mr. Secretary, to all the folks you brought with you.GROWTH OF COLLECTIONSBut I guess the key problem before us is this Indian Museum.And it would appear to me that since you have $250 million back-log in unfunded facility renewal projects; you're in the middle of a$30 million building renovation at the Natural History Museum;the American Art/Portrait Gallery needs an overhaul of utilities,and many of the older buildings will need serious work done overthe next few years; we've spent $29.5 million on new storage forthe Natural History Museum; planning and design of the new Airand Space extension at Dulles will cost $8 million; $5.1 million hasbeen appropriated in recent years to add 95,000 square feet ofspace to the top of the Tropical Research Center in Panama, and$645,000 is requested in the 1996 request for additional projects atthe Panama facilities?the question is: where does it stop?It seems that we have?the Smithsonian is capable of finding ar-tifacts all around the world for every conceivable subject, all meri-torious, all worthy of compilation and preservation, but at somepoint we run out of our capacity to provide facilities and storage.And it almost doesn't seem worthwhile to simply accumulate arti-facts to store them if you're not going to show them. So, really,we're talking in terms of the need for construction, operations,maintenance of showplaces, which are vastly more important thanjust storage, although, obviously, you need storage as well.Where does one?where, in your opinion, do we draw the line?Mr. Heyman. Well, first of all, I think that we have to operateunder an assumption which we haven't operated under very wellin the past: that we've got to be much more careful and thinkingabout what it is that we're going to be acquiring, and we're reallystarting on trying to make much more fine-honed judgments witnregard to that.Second, we've got to, with more seriousness than we have in thepast, begin to coordinate our activities with some regional muse-ums in the United States, and I think that we've always thoughtthat was a good idea, but we've never had enough pressure on usof the sort that you're mentioning to really take it as seriously aswe should, although we have a number of objects on loan else-where, especially from the Air and Space Museum, and others, too.But, still, I think there's more of a capacity with regard to that.The third thing is, though, that we have to distinguish betweenour various collections in terms of what is really important to col-lect in large number and where we can do without the kind of com-
231plete collections that we have. I would mention that in the NaturalHistory Museum we have a very large collection of flora and fauna,the largest in the world. It is a really extraordinary systematic bi-ology collection, and it's extraordinary in terms of its importance tothe research community worldwide, not just here, and not just interms of our own scientists. It's really like the Library of Congressin the sense that it provides the kind of base for present and futureresearch which would be, I think, criminal to let go, and you neverknow what the value of it all is.One of the values that's come out lately is that it's a repositoryof DNA samples. Nobody even knew there was such a thing whenmost of this was collected, and now, because there are actual ob-jects that have been preserved, it's possible to do evolutionary stud-ies that are much more detailed than was ever otherwise possible,and we couldn't do if that material wasn't there.In that case, I think we ought to merely sustain that and main-tain that for the reasons that I'm stating. In some other areas, Idon't think we have to be as fulsome as we have been in the past,and I think there is no doubt, given the new fiscal climate and themessages that we are getting, that we're going to have to find sen-sible ways to constrain ourselves with regard to new collection.I think that the problem right now is we're getting caught at avery tough time in terms of this particular undertaking. I can'timagine coming to you next year or the year after and saying, well,I propose that we now go into?have a museum?somebody justsuggested this?a museum of the automobile. It would be reallykind of an interesting museum, but I couldn't imagine coming tothe regents and then coming to the Congress suggesting enlarge-ment into new topics. But this one, we're just caught at the mostunfortunate moment, for the reasons that I've stated, where wehave undertaken a set of obligations and, for the reasons I've stat-ed, I think we ought to be able to carry through with them.FISCAL CLIMATEMr. Livingston. Well, Mr. Secretary, just picking up on words,you say that we need to find sensible ways to restrain ourselves,but now is not the time. I'm reminded that President Clinton re-minds everybody that this is one of the best economic years of mod-ern times that we happen to be in. Unemployment is, in fact, ata low for many, many years, and, yet, he says this is not the timeto balance the budget. He presents us a budget that is $200 billionin imbalance and projects that every year from now until eternitywe're going to have another $200 to $300 billion in imbalance. Ifnow is not the time to balance the budget, yet, it's a good economicyear?and in bad economic years you can't balance the budget be-cause you need to pay more than you receive?why is it not thetime to restrain ourselves in terms of your accumulation of arti-facts within the Smithsonian?I don't denigrate the objectives of the Smithsonian. I realize thatthere are lots of commitments out there, but the problem is we arenow finding, many of us believe?and we are not alone; we seemto be supported by Alan Greenspan in his testimony just the otherday when he said, if we balance the budget, we'll be a lot better
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off and our children and our grandchildren will have much moresecure futures. My opinion is we need to balance the budget.So if we come to the conclusion here in Congress, as I think wehave, that we must restrain ourselves, when is the time and wherewould you begin to set priorities? What priorities would you saythat we can forego?Mr. Heyman. Well, I'm willing?I'm happy to try to respond tothat after I give that more thought in terms of our program. Imean, I do have a pretty good idea, if my budget got cut 10 percentor 15 percent, what that would entail in terms of trying to dealwith my present reality. In large part?put aside the construc-tion?in large part, what it would do would require that we havefewer people working at the Smithsonian because about 75 percentof my operating budget is in people, is in salaries. So I'd nave tostart to figure out how to downsize in those ways. I'd have to gofrom museum to museum and figure out ways to economize, andwe'd have to figure out ways that we would get along with fewerpeople because that's where most of the money goes. And, as newrealities make themselves apparent, clearly, we're going to be doingsome of that. There's no doubt in my mind.My problem is that, recognizing what you're stating and beingsympathetic to it, I'm in a situation in which a very firm deal wasmade well before I was Secretary, and a bunch of chips were puton the table, and a bunch of chips were put on the table by otherpeople in reliance on that deal. And walking away from that dealis (a) I think a real problem in itself, but (b) I think walking awayfrom that deal is just going to undermine us in developing newsources of funding that we?you know, we did pretty well last year.We raised about $45 million for a variety of topics. We're up to $25million in the first quarter of this year, and I do have some consid-erable optimism about this whole thing rising, but I've got to do itin a kind of ordered way. And if I walk away or if we walk awayfrom our biggest obligation, the biggest basis of having raised a lotof money, I'm really very fearful that we're going to poison the well,a well that we're going to have to rely on more and more as it be-comes more and more apparent that we oughtn't to and can't con-tinue to rely on Federal appropriations.Mr. Livingston. Thank you. I suspect my time has expired.Thank you, Mr. Chairman.COLLECTIONS INVENTORYMr. Regula. Speaking of the collections, you have 138 millionitems that are stored at some location. Do you have any inventoryof those items, because, otherwise, it would be impossible to loanthem out to museums unless they had some idea of what you have?Mr. Heyman. I'm going to turn to my Provost, my all-knowingProvost. [Laughter.]Dr. Hoffmann. We do have inventories of virtually all of theitems in the collection, and in many cases these are computerizedinventories, so that we can quickly retrieve information on the na-ture of the object and other associated information and where it isstored.We do a great deal of loaning of materials, both for exhibitionand for study, research and scholarly study, to museums?and, for
233that matter, university collections as well?not only all over thiscountry, but throughout the world.Mr. Regula. How many objects or how many items are on dis-play at any one time in the various facilities?Dr. Hoffmann. We do not have, to my knowledge, an inventoryof the items that are purely display. We do know when we take anobject from the research collections and utilize it, whether it be fora traveling exhibit or for a show in one of our museums, that thatobject is there. But it depends on the nature of the collection. Mostof the art is on display. Quite a bit of the history objects are ondisplay, and only a very small number of natural history objectsare on display. Now that is because of the nature of these collec-tions. The vast bulk of the collection is in natural history. Of the,roughly, 125 million objects in natural history, probably 120 millionof those, or a little less, are botanical, zoological, analytic kinds ofobjects, many of them very small.REDUCING COLLECTIONS STORAGE NEEDSMr. Regula. Realistically, could you reduce the numbers becausestorage facilities are expensive? You've had a request which wouldtotal about $40 million to build a new facility in Suitland, andthat's just the beginning. You have to take care of it. Is there someway you can consolidate and eliminate, like cleaning out the attic,so to speakDr. Hoffmann. We do this regularly. On an ongoing basis, weevaluate, and particularly when we are moving materials, weevaluate whether it remains valuable to us and to the scholarlycommunity or not. And if we decide that it is not, we de-accessionit.Another way in which we deal with this problem is to find .part-ners in other parts of the country who may be particularly inter-ested in working on a portion of our total collections. For example,the national collection of fleas?you'll excuse the term?or of ticks,those are both at other sites now because the active research isgoing on at those other sites. Another collection of particular kindsof beetles is at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii. There's yet anothercollection that is being stored in Mexico.We are working very hard to develop these kinds of collabora-tions not only because this eases the pressure on our collectionstorage space, but it actually is good science, good research, be-cause we are bringing together the resources of other institutions.So we are trying.And one final thing I'll say: the rate at which we are taking newmaterial into the Institution has declined rather drastically in thelast 10 years. enola gay exhibitionMr. Regula. Well, I have a lot of questions, but I want to giveother members a chance also. One final one, and that's the EnolaGay controversy. We've all read a lot about it. Tell us how you'regoing to handle that display.Mr. Heyman. Well, I'm not absolutely sure yet, but I'll give youa general outline. I indicated, when I said we were going to scaleit back and change it, that we would, largely speaking, let the ob-
234jects speak for themselves, and I also said that I was going to takepersonal responsibility for it. Both of those things are true. Cer-tainly, I have taken personal responsibility for it, although I'mworking with people who know things about how to display itemsand the like. But, essentially, I'm going to have the fuselage; I'mgoing to have some more portions of, if we can swing this, somemore portions of the plane available other than the fuselage itself.We're trying very hard to develop some information on the B-29and its history and how it got there, and the rapid fabrication ofit from planning to the actual plane. And we're going to have a sec-tion in there on the Enola Gay crew, and we're presently workingwith the group that recently made tapes of the survivors of the509th, and we're going to, if this all works out, be able to presentthose in a theater.The signage on this is going to be fairly minimal. I'm going todo something with regard to saying a little about the controversyitself at the outset, and then I'm going to have fairly minimal la-bels regarding the Enola Gay itself and its mission. Then we'llprobably have some portion of the exhibition that talks about whatwe have been doing in terms of renovation of the Enola Gay. Thatpretty much describes what I'm going to do.Mr. Regula. Has this new plan reached an accommodation withthe veterans' groups?Mr. Heyman. So far, it's only?you're the first person to haveheard about this other than, of course, the people involved with the509th because those folks want to make sure that there's an exhi-bition that they can live with if they're going to be evidenced andrepresented in the exhibition.Mr. Regula. Are they having input into your final design?Mr. Heyman. Oh, yes, they certainly are. I mean, in terms ofwhat those tapes will be that are available to us, Mr. Chairman,they're the ones who have to make the determination.Mr. Regula. I'll yield to the chairman for a comment or question.Mr. Livingston. I want to say that the Secretary has walked inand inherited this problem, and it was a severe one, and I appre-ciate the sensitivity that he showed to bring it to, I think, a properresolution. I think that it is satisfying most of the groups. Theremay be some lingering concerns on the extent of the display, butI don't think that the philosophical concerns have beenunaddressed. I think that they have been, and I think for the mostpart, as near as I can tell, the matter should be resolved with yoursolution. THE VIETNAM EXHIBITIONJust one other point, though: I noticed in the paper just a coupleof days ago that Vietnam veterans are now unhappy because youhave decided to postpone the Vietnam exhibit which they werepleased with. Could you tell us about that?Mr. Heyman. Sure. I was a little amused at that. In the veryearly days of this great controversy that I walked into, I discov-ered, almost inadvertently, that the Air and Space Museum wasconsidering an exhibit on Vietnam and the use of air power in Viet-nam. I asked to see a description of it, and the description at thisstage?there's no reason to believe this won't be a fine show when
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it finally comes up?was very general. I said to myself, my good-ness gracious, I wonder how this one will work itself out. And soI said, look, let's hold off on this for a couple of months or three,until we get this Enola Gay matter settled and we have someguidelines and the like.The curator and the director came back to me and said they un-derstood why I wanted to do that. Although there were veterans'groups they said they had consulted who were pleased with theplan, I remembered there were veterans' groups that were con-sulted early in the Enola Gay and they were pleased with it, too.But they said, look, this curator really ought to go and do otherwork and not just be in suspension; why don't we come back to thisafter he has done other work? And I said fine. So the ironic partabout all of this is obvious.Mr. Livingston. Thank you.NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIANMr. Regula. Mr. Yates.Mr. Yates. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.My good friend, Bob Livingston, talked about the necessity forbalancing the budget and its impact on the Smithsonian's plans. Idon't remember whether he was present when the Cato Instituteand the Heritage Foundation appeared to testify. Among the sug-gestions they had for balancing the budget was closing down theFederal lands, closing the parks, closing the Federal forests, closingthe historical stations. And I suspect that if one were to ask them,if they were to testify again today, if they believed the Smithsonianshould be closed, they probably would say the Smithsonian shouldbe closed as well.If you want to balance the budget, you've got to go on to thatkind of a regimen. My own feeling is the Smithsonian was createdfor a purpose. It has a mission. I think it's like the National Parks,one of the glories of the American Government that belongs to thepeople of the United States.Ajid as far as the Indian Museum is concerned, I came upon aspeech made in the Senate, or in a committee of the Senate, by mycolleague, Senator Inouye, and this is what he said about the In-dian Museum:I ask my colleagues, "What is your single overriding recollection of the history ofour Government and Native Americans?" I know for me it is broken promises, dis-carded commitments, and unfulfilled obligations. We can trace the abuse of NativeAmericans by the Federal Government to the founding of the Republic. Our Govern-ment established policies and implemented programs that all but obliterated theculture of hundreds of Native tribes across the continent by appropriating theirlands and homes, extinguishing their unique languages and customs, and makingthem ashamed of their Native heritage. What remains of the once vibrant and livingtribal cultures that populated America from coast to coast? It's the historical andcultural artifacts that comprise the collections of the National Museum of the Amer-ican Indian.And he continues,And who has the responsibility for these collections? The Smithsonian Institution,a trust instrumentality of the United States Government created by act of Congress.And who created the National Museum of the American Indian within the Smithso-nian? The United States Congress.He goes on with other things and he says,
236That, my colleagues, is why I'm feeling this immense sense of deja vu because we,the Federal Government, are again about to renege on a commitment, one of par-ticular importance to Native Americans and to do it in the name of what's best forour country.Well, I don't think it would be for the best for our country. And,actually, as you pointed out, we do have a legal commitment, dowe not, to go forward with the Indian Museum? If I understandcorrectly?has my time expired?Mr. Regula. No, no, no, no. I was going to have you yield whenyou get finished.Mr. Yates. I yield.Mr. Regula. When you say, "a legal commitment," I thinkthere's an authorization, but is there a binding contract? That's animportant element right here.Mr. Yates. Ask the Secretary.Mr. Heyman. Well, the Smithsonian entered into an agreementpremised upon congressional action in which, in return for gettingthe collection donated to the United States through the Smithso-nian, the Smithsonian made a bunch of promises about what itwould do in order to take it. It said in that that it was conditionedupon Congress taking an act. The Congress took the act. Nowwhether the United States could get sued in the court of claims Idon't know, but it's a lot more than just an authorization, Mr. Reg-ula. That's the point I've been trying to make.Mr. Taylor. Mr. Chairman.Mr. Yates. I have the time.Mr. Regula. Mr. Yates has the time.Mr. Yates. Shall I continue?Mr. Regula. Sure. Go ahead.Mr. Yates. I feel as does Senator Inouye about that commitment.I feel also that the American people want the Smithsonian to re-main open. As you pointed out in your testimony, millions of Amer-icans, as they come to Washington, go to the Smithsonian installa-tions. It's like the capitol; it's one of the centers of attraction forthe American people, as the National Parks are out West and asthe historic buildings within the National Park Service are in theEast and throughout the rest of the country.The Heye collection is one of the great collections in the world,is it not?Mr. Heyman. It is.Mr. Yates. And, currently, it's disintegrating, is it not? Is therea chance the Smithsonian might be sued later on for not havingproperly taken care of the Heye collection?I remember the tremendous difficulties that were encountered intrying to make the Heye collection available to the Smithsonian.The State of New York had to be importuned. You had to go tocourt and get changes of wills and things of that sort. And the rep-resentation was made by the then-Secretary to the court and tothe others and to the Congress that the Smithsonian would takecare of this collection. It is the last good or excellent collection ofIndian artifacts from the remains of all the civilizations of the var-ious Indian tribes. So I feel strongly about the Indian Museum aswell, and I'm sorry. I protested at the time the subcommittee tookthe action of not building the storage facility at Suitland that it
237was going to jeopardize the Heye collection, and I thought thatshouldn't be done.Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think my time has expired.RETURN OF COLLECTIONS TO NEW YORKMr. Regula. Mr. Taylor, you're up next, but why don't we sus-pend and all vote and come back?Mr. Taylor. Mr. Chairman, if I overheard one of the beepers cor-rectly, this is the Schumer amendment, which is the last amend-ment made in order on the bill. I'm just wondering whether we'regoing to be going to final passage after this, and if so, whetheryou'd want to consider adjourning until?taking an early lunch,rather than the planned lunch.Mr. Regula. Why don't you start?Mr. Taylor. I had several questions. One, you were talkingabout the commitment as far as contractual commitment. There isa case?unfortunately, there are many examples of cases. We havein my district a direct contract signed by the United States Govern-ment to build a road inside what is now the Great Smokey Moun-tain Park. It has been litigated. The courts have held it cannotforce the Government to fund it, and it's very specific. It wasn'teven projected on something coming, and the State put out moneyfor bonds and that sort of thing. So I doubt there's an enforceablelegal contract based on that and other contracts that are out there.What would be the possibility of New York taking the artifactsback and going ahead with something on their own? They were re-luctant to give them up. Is that an option? And building a new mu-seum in New YorkMr. Heyman. I really have no idea. I have no idea. I mean, allof this came at such a late moment that we have made no explo-ration of what might be alternatives.ENOLA GAY EXHIBITIONMr. Taylor. If we could talk a second, then, going back to theEnola Gay?and I know it wasn't something that you were?youcame in the middle of it, but could you tell us, for the benefit ofthe committee, how that got out of hand, what caused the problem,what happened, and how you might see that it doesn't happen inthe future?Mr. Heyman. It's really very hard to know without having beenthere, but I really came to the following conclusions. I came to theconclusion that the original conception of the exhibition was reallyflawed. It was flawed in two ways. First of all, nobody, includingthe whole Advisory Committee that had a lot of historians and alot of military people on it, thought about what I really finally con-cluded was the fatal flaw, which was that it's really inappropriateto have a very analytical show about an event like the end of thewar with Japan at the same time you're commemorating and cele-brating, basically, the 50th anniversary of that victory. They justdon't go together. So that's one thing that nobody thought about.So that was a real problem.Mr. Taylor. Do you, with your signage now and your state-ments, give a relevant justification for dropping the bomb, theUnited States
238Mr. Heyman. I, essentially, am just going to report the facts. I'mgoing to report the facts. I mean, I haven't done that label yet, butI'm just going to be very straightforward and indicate that some-thing along the lines that this led, this clearly led to the conclusionof the war immediately, and most probably resulted in the sav-ings?and I'll be?and I don't know how to quantify this yetMr. Taylor. Sure.Mr. Heyman [continuing]. Untold numbers of lives by avoidingthe necessity of an invasion and avoiding the time that would havepassed if other means had been used.So, yesMr. Taylor. And that will be expressed in the exhibit?Mr. Heyman. That's my language, yes.SETTING PRIORITIESMr. Taylor. Well, I think what you-Mr. Regula. We've got a couple of minutes. Go ahead.Mr. Taylor. Okay. I was wondering about the overall budget.Have you any suggestions or will you be submitting any sugges-tions of priorities if there is necessity to cut in the general oper-ations? Will you be prioritizing for us orMr. Heyman. I'll do my best to do that. You know, the problemreally is, as with any big, complex institution, that if you're goingto really start to cut budget, you usually go through a heck of aprocess that's really quite participatory, so that all the people whoare going in the end to find their programs reduced and the likehave an opportunity to make their arguments and feel a part ofthat process. So it really is hard for me to sit down and do that.In some ways?I mean, this sounds ridiculous, and in ways I don'tinvite it, but if it were absolutely necessary to cut me, I think I'dprefer it if you'd just cut me, my operating budget, some propor-tion, and let me deal with the problem, which I could then dealwith in process terms.Mr. Taylor. And I share the difficulty. I'm in the LegislativeBranch, and we're going to cut maybe $200 million of ourselves andit's not an easy thing to do, but I was hoping maybe you might giveus some guidance in prioritizing that would be helpful, butMr. Heyman. Well, I started to think about this. I don't know ofany single activity that I would just stop. So it seems to me thatwhat we would do would be to go within each of our activities andtry to prioritize within them, but I don't know how to do that with-out sitting down with the directors and with the unit heads andreally working it through that way.Mr. Regula. We'll come back to you. We're going to recess until1:00 because we have three votes coming up here, amendment, re-committal, and final, and there will be at least 45 minutes. So we'llreconvene at one o'clock and youll be the first one up.Mr. Heyman. So long as you don't think 111 come up with the pri-orities by 1:00. [Laughter.]
239Afternoon Sessionillustrative reductionMr. Regula. If Mr. Taylor gets back and Mr. Skaggs, they'rescheduled for questions.Dr. Heyman, do you have any additional comments you want tomake before we get into the questions?Mr. Heyman. Only one, sir. My Budget Director said, in listeningto my testimony this morning, she thought I had offered up a 10percent cut. I want you to know I was speaking illustratively only.Mr. Regula. I concluded that. [Laughter.]I did not interpret it even as an offer?speculation.REORGANIZATION AND RESTRUCTURINGYou proposed a reorganization last year involving consolidationof programmatic activities, operations, and administration?or theSmithsonian rather; this may have predated your service. Couldyou explain to the committee how this restructuring will result inefficiencies and savings in both the operations and administrationof the institution, as well as programs and research efforts?Let me add that, without question, we're going to have lessmoney to work with as a committee. Therefore, we're going to haveto make some priority judgments. I was interested in your com-ment this morning that it perhaps would be easier if you'd take anacross-the-board if that were necessary, and then you'd make theprioritizing judgments internally, and I have no problem with thatbecause I do not envision that essentially we should micromanageany of the departments. That's not our role. But our role is thatwe have to move toward a sound fiscal policy.Well, let me add one footnote. If you have an opportunity, readAlan Greenspan's testimony before the Budget Committee thisweek. He made a very compelling case for the balanced budget overa period of time because, as he said, this would result in a coupleof benefits. I don't know if he spelled it out, but a substantial dropin interest rates, which, of course, means investment in private sec-tor businesses which create jobs, and lower-cost housing, and, inturn, it allows people to improve the quality of their lives. He saidif we were to do it right, that the next generation could havemaybe even a better quality of life than thi3 generation, which, ofcourse, is a great worry to young people.So I guess I mention these things because I think it would be in-teresting for you to read the testimony, and it perhaps illustrateswhy we are concerned about how we deal with all these things interms of fiscal policy of the Nation, as well as a concern I have, andthat is to get on this glide path to the balanced budget in 2002,the seven-year program, means that you have to look at what theoutyear costs are of things that you put in place now. Therefore,I have tried to examine all of the functions in this subcommitteewith an eye to what it's going to cost downstream to either com-plete a building or a project and/or to operate it.So I guess just so you have some understanding of where we'recoming from. Again, I emphasize that I don't want?and I don'tthink the committee wants to?micromanage your agency.
240Mr. Heyman. Well, I'm going to ask both the Under Secretaryand Provost to help address this question. But when I started outlast September, I really concluded that we ought to consolidate atthe Castle. So what I did on the program side is that I appointedDr. Hoffmann, who was then Assistant Secretary for Science, asthe Provost, and all of the museums and the research institutes onthe program side now are going into the Provost office. And I didthat for a lot of reasons.First of all, I'm trying to have wither away multiple levels in theCastle where there are multiple decisionmakers who don't have tointeract. For instance, prior to doing this, we had an Assistant Sec-retary for Arts and Humanities, an Assistant Secretary for Science,and an Assistant Secretary for Education and Public Service. Thosethree individuals are still there, but they're there in really a deputyrole to the Provost. Actually, we don't have?the person who wasthe Assistant Secretary for Science, obviously, is the Provost, andthe person who was his deputy now is the Assistant?the ActingAssistant Provost.What I really want, I want to eliminate at least one layer herethat was at the Assistant Secretary level and the Deputy AssistantSecretary level, and I want that to happen in the normal course ofoperations, but that's what I want to do. I want decisions to comeout faster than they had previously, and I want to consider trade-offs. We sort of have no way at the program level to make tradeoffsbetween the science activities and the arts and humanities activi-ties, and we now have a mechanism because we have a person whois responsible for both, and if the budget gets limited or there isn'tenough money, we have a person who can look across that spanwith regard to making decisions.The same thing is really happening on the Under Secretary sidebecause the Under Secretary is principally in charge of all the ad-ministrative activities of the Institution, but much more, and playsa very principal role, obviously, in the budget. But, again, we'retrying to consolidate jurisdictions under them to both reduce thenumber of people, but I think, more importantly in terms of effi-ciency, of getting decisions out faster, and have them lessbureaucratized because there's less horizontal room.But now I want each of them to talk a little bit about what spe-cifically is occurring within their realms.Mrs. Newman. What I'd like to do is suggest some of the stepsthat have been taken that will give you an idea of what we're talk-ing about in terms of restructuring. In the last year or two years,we've already closed a number of programs, such as AmericanStudies. We've combined the Joseph Henry Papers grouping withthe Archives, but we have then asked for a number of studies tolook at not only how can we bring about greater efficiencies, butare we prepared to operate in this new environment? We havePeat-Marwick going in to look at the Smithsonian Press. We alsohave another group that will be looking at our businesses.The Assistant Secretary for Finance and Administration has anumber of initiatives. One is to have a review of centralization anddecentralization because it may?it very well may be that there areactivities going on in the central part of the institution that can
241more efficiently and effectively go on within the museums and theresearch institutes.Mr. Regula. I have to smile because I don't know if you read theDavid Osborne articles in The Post a month or so ago. He said thatwhat people voted for was a more efficient and a more effectiveGovernment. So you're going to give us that?Mrs. Newman. We are certainly going to work toward that andexpect that we will be able to say to you that we are doing justthat.One other thing is that there is a review by Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology on protection services, helping us to determinewhat is the proper ratio of the security officers to the space, to theobjects. In all of this, then, we not only are trying to determine howwe have our resources support the mission of the Institution, butalso if there is a way in which we can do it and reduce the numberof people and dollars that have to be spent.Dr. Hoffmann. On the programmatic side, in addition to flatten-ing the administrative structure, reducing the number of layersthrough which a decision has to pass, we are also integrating theadministrative functions. Rather than there being three independ-ent administrative groups?one for sciences, one for arts and hu-manities, one for education and public service?well have a singleintegrated group serving the entire programmatic area. I think thisway we can perform more effectively, more efficiently, and at thesame time not require as many people and as many resources inorder to accomplish this.Mr. Heyman. But you're also looking for redundancy in pro-grams, aren't you?Dr. Hoffmann. Yes, we are also looking at redundancies in pro-grams, and there it's far too early for us to start getting specific,but there are a number of ways in which presently independent op-erations can be collapsed, can be merged in ways that will allowus to create more efficient operations and reduce our overall costs.Mr. Regula. I think, if I hear you correctly, if you were to ap-proach your mission on a zero- based budgeting policy that if wewere to just give you a level of funding, whatever it might be, with-out attempting to line item, that you then, in turn, might collapsea program; you may even enhance one, depending on what yourjudgment would be as to their priorities. Is that a fair statement?Mr. Heyman. Exactly.MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN?SUITLAND FACILITYMr. Regula. I'm going to yield to you, Mr. Skaggs.Mr. Skaggs. I didn't realize our numbers would be so depletedafter the period of recess.Mr. Regula. Since there are no more votes and since apparentlyyou aren't going to Colorado this weekendMr. Skaggs. We needn't comment on our weekend plans?atleast not until later in the afternoon. [Laughter.]I wanted to return to the Museum of the American Indian issuejust for a couple of minutes. I thought the comments that Mr.Yates read that Senator Inouye had delivered added considerablyto not just the rhetoric, but the reasons that he brought to bearhere. What happens next, from your point of view, on all of this?
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I mean, I listened to you lay out the steps that had been taken andthe logical and moral, and I think legal, relationship that runsthrough them. Have you asked counsel to examine this? Where arewe with regard to funds that have not been obligated, but arepending obligation as part of the Suitland facility?Mr. Heyman. Well, I haven't asked counsel to look at it, Mr.Skaggs. As far as funds are concerned, those which were to be obli-gated, obviously, are gone. The ones that preceded it, we put inMr. Skaggs. Well, there's no reason to assume that the otherbody will go along with withMr. Heyman. No, I understand.Mr. Skaggs [continuing]. The wisdom, or lack thereof, of thisbody. [Laughter.]Mr. Heyman. We have already spent monies that you appro-priated, a little over $6 million, and that's been for the design ofthe facility. So that facility's all designed and we paid $5 million-plus for that, and we put in not quite a million, but around a mil-lion dollars, in site preparation cost. So if we don't go forward withit, we've lost it.And, by the way, we've been doing some exploring about whatwould be alternatives to that facility, perhaps another pod in theMuseum Support Center or a somewhat smaller building, and thedifferences between the total cost of the alternative and going for-ward as we are now are not very large. One of the major reasonsthat they're not large is because for any other solution there wouldhave to now be a design, and those costs, as far as this buildingis concerned, have already been spent.So if you look at how much money would have to be spent fromthis moment on, the differences are not great. I mean, they're $3or $4 million, or something of that sort.Mr. Skaggs. Well, let me walk through this. We've got the collec-tion. The United States is obligated to care for it or give it back,or is there anybody to give it back to?Mr. Heyman. There really is nobody to give it back to.Mr. Skaggs. So we've got it, and we've got to care for it, andwhat is the less expensive alternative to going ahead with thebuilding that you've already planned and designed?Mr. Heyman. I really don't see a less expensive alternative tohaving a building at Suitland. It is possible to have a somewhatless expensive alternative by creating a new pod which is one ofthe extensions of the spine of the existing Museum Support Centerbuilding. But if we did that, it would only save about $2.5 or $3million because we'd have to design it. The design costs alreadyhave been spent on the other facility. So I don't see very many al-ternatives other than what I've just stated.Mr. Skaggs. Given the trustee relationship or responsibility thatthe Institution has assumed as part of the transaction in obtainingthe Heye collection, I mean, my memory?and I haven't examinedthis part of my law school curriculum for a while?is that there arelegal obligations incurred with respect to conserving something ac-cepted in trust.Mr. Heyman. Clearly, we're obliged and have a fiduciary obliga-tion. Whether we can be sued or not, I really honestly don't know.
243Whether there's a sovereign immunity defense, whether there's anact of God kind of a defense, because we haven't been providedwith the funds that we otherwise would, I don't know. But, never-theless, I do know that we have an obligation.Mr. Skaggs. I know that Mr. Regula doesn't aspire to that char-acterization. Others around here I can't speak for. [Laughter.]Mr. Regula. The act of God was November the 8th. [Laughter.]CURRENT STORAGE CONDITIONSMr. Heyman. This is an opportunity, if you wouldn't mind, forme to ask Bob Hoffmann to vividly portray where these artifactsare now and where they would be storedMr. Skaggs. Yes, I would appreciate that.Mr. Heyman [continuing]. If we go forward with some kind of areasonable plan for Suitland.Dr. Hoffmann. There were a series of photographs of thepresent storage conditions in the Heye Foundation facility up inthe Bronx. This is just one of them. You can see that the potteryand ceramics are extremely crowded. They are on open shelvingand vulnerable to dust. Any attempt to move one thing endangerssomething else because it's not possible to get things in and outvery readily.Here is a photo from the museum support facility, one of the so-called dry storage pods. These are similar ceramics, as well assome baskets, and you can see that we have modern shelving therethat permits the drawers to slide in and out. The objects are storedwith sufficient space, so that they can be handled and examinedwithout endangering them. These are with the doors taken off thecases, so we could actually pull the drawers out and you canseeMr. Skaggs. What would a professional curatorial staff memberbe likely to say upon seeing the first photograph in person, if youcan delete the expletives?Dr. Hoffmann. They would be extremely concerned about thecondition of the objects and the inevitability of continuing degrada-tion of the collection over time. There's no way to store a collectionin this way without its degrading in a very serious way.Mr. Skaggs. We are not meeting our fiduciary responsibilitiesthere?Dr. Hoffmann. We are not meeting our responsibilities. I havea few other pictures of other sorts of pods, if anyone is interestedin looking at those storageMr. Skaggs. It sounds like something from a science fictionmovie. [Laughter.] VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONSAs I recall, I don't know whether it was last year or the year be-fore, we had some testimony about the Smithsonian's trial run withvoluntary contributions by visitors, and I don't know whetheryou've already touched on this when Tve been absent. If youhaven't, I'm interested in what the experience has been and whatthe prospects might be, and, also, whether you are legally con-strained from charging admission.
244Mrs. Newman. I'm going to take the voluntary contribution partof this. As you remember, we did in March attempt a trial of vol-untary contributions and, as a matter of fact, at the outset it wasnot that successful. In part, I think, we were too subtle. In fact, youhad to look for the boxes. We did kind of tiptoe into doing this, it'strue, and our protection security people had a great deal of concernabout being held accountable for the money.However, after working on it for about three or four months, werealized that we needed to be much more aggressive, and beingmuch more aggressive meant redesigning the boxes and moving theboxes around. In the Air and Space Museum a mock space shuttlewas put in at two different exits. They moved the boxes in both theMuseum of American Art and at the National Zoo. When we didthat, we went to a threefold increase in voluntary contributions tothe point that we now have raised?and you're not going to be too,I think, happy with this number, but we have now raised about$58,000 that way. But what we feel more, I think, happy about,and have greater confidence in, when we are more aggressive,when we are more creative is that and when we move the boxes,frankly, closer to the door, we have a greater chance that this isa source, but it's not going to be a source of major contributions inthis context. ADMISSION FEESMr. Skaggs. And the question of whether you can decide tocharge admission?Mr. Heyman. I really haven't done a thorough study of that, butI know there are some museums in which we're constrainedagainst charging because in the original gift to the museum therewas a restriction on being able to charge admission. That is trueof the Freer; I don't know if it's true of other of our museums atall, but I'd have to look at that. But there are some questions ofthat sort.Mrs. Newman. And the Hirshhorn, too.Mr. Heyman. And the Hirshhorn, also.The question of whether we ought to do that or not is one thatI've obviously been giving some thought to. It's sort of like thethought that I had to give to questions of tuition at the Universityof California, as there were similar kinds of problems. And I saidthe other day at the Press Club, in answer to a question, that Ireally am reluctant about it. I'm reluctant about it in one instancebecause, for one reason, I really foresee that it would end up ex-cluding some folks who otherwise would come. How many I don'tknow, and I think that if we really get into this seriously, we'vegot to do a lot of work to try to make real estimates and look atalternative ways that one can do that.But the other thing that came to me?and, really, this is moreof a political question than it is a technical question of any sort
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I view the Smithsonian in terms of its place in Washington as oneof the principal reasons for which people come here. What do theydo when they're here? They spend an awful lot of their time atplaces like the Smithsonian, at the monuments, and the Capitol, atthe White House, a whole array of things. I see those places kindof similarly, and somehow it just doesn't sound right, feel right, or
245what you will, to charge fees for people to come and to participatein those places.In a way, I really think it's more of a political decision than itis a kind of a decision that the regents find it really appropriateto make, but I don't know how that would come out. Obviously, ifwe got pressed in a terrible way, where the Institution is going tobe seriously harmed, one would have to look at these as a potentialsource of alleviating that.Mr. Skaggs. Well^ I think you've demonstrated a facility to makeat least quasi-political decisions already. [Laughter.]Mr. Heyman. Let's just depoliticize some, please. [Laughter.]Mr. Skaggs. It's a baby step from?I'm reminded of the experi-ence that you have when you visit the Metropolitan Museum inNew York, which is a terrific experience, but on entering there isalmost a compulsory voluntary contribution, and I say that know-ingly.Mr. Regula. If you would yield?how much?Mr. Heyman. Six dollars, I think, Mr. Chairman.Mr. Skaggs. And I don't know how they're able to run that bythe tax lawyers and have it count as voluntary and deductible andall that, but I guess theoretically it is. At a much lower level, some-thing along those lines may be something that you have to resortto Mr. Heyman. Well, you know, in a way that's what we've startedto do in putting out voluntary contribution boxes, and the move-ment from having them hidden behind walls to having them nowmuch more prominentMr. Skaggs. They have sort of imperious docents at the Metro-politan. You can't get by without clearing your name somehow oranother. [Laughter.]Mrs. Newman. And then you wear a sign.Mr. Regula. If you'd yield?I wonder if that isn't to meet a re-quirement underlying the museum that they can't "charge" fees.Mr. Skaggs. Right. I think that may well be itMr. Heyman. Yes, it probably is.Mr. Skaggs. It's an elevation of form over substance that woulddo this place?tell me when I'm out of time, Mr. Chairman. I havea couple of other things
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Mr. Regula. That's okay.inspector generalMr. Skaggs. Does the Smithsonian have an IG?Mr. Heyman. Oh, yes.Mrs. Newman. Oh, yes. [Laughter.]Mr. Skaggs. Okay. The record will show all witnesses answeredin chorus. [Laughter.]Mr. Heyman. A very effective one, I might say. [Laughter.]Mr. Skaggs. Have we visited with the IG, Mr. Chairman, in thepast? I can't recall, and IMr. Regula. No, but it's not a bad idea.Mr. Skaggs. Well, that was quick.
246WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARSYesterday we had your colleagues and tenants from the WoodrowWilson Center in, and we discussed a little bit of their situation,in particular, the kind of domino effect on space that their presencethere has versus your having to rent space elsewhere and theirhaving to rent space elsewhere versus their hoped-for relocation,and also your, I guess, legal relationship in providing certain kindsof administrative support services.I'm curious whether you see from your side of that relationshipany opportunities for efficiencies, cost savings, that, since both ofyou fall under the jurisdiction of this subcommittee, we might, eventhough it bumps up in one side, the net will be lower.Mr. Heyman. Well, I have the sense that a lot of those have beenrealized already because we provide general counsel service; weprovide a variety of other kinds of administrative service now. Sothey've never had to duplicate. They're a relatively small organiza-tion in relation to the Smithsonian. As far as I know, they reallyhaven't had to duplicate a number of things that we provide forthem at a very low fee, I might say. So I think most of those, justin the normal trying to save money mode, have already been cre-ated. RENTAL SPACEI certainly have looked forward to their moving to their newquarters because it would reduce our rental problem because wecould start moving people who are in rental space into the mainpart of the Smithsonian.Mr. SKAGGS. How much do you spend on that extramural rent?Mrs. Newman. About 5
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Mr. Skaggs. Five?Ms. Wharton. For all our leases, for all our Federal leases.Mr. SKAGGS. Five million?Ms. Wharton. Yes.Mr. Skaggs. And how much of that would you save if you wereto be able to get the space back that's now used by the Center?Mrs. Newman. We'd have to submit that for the record.Mr. SKAGGS. If you would?if you would, please.[The information follows:]Rental Space SavingsIf the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICSj space wereused entirely to house Smithsonian staff currently in leased spaced, the Smithso-nian could potentially save up to $750,000 in annual rent costs. However, the majorsystems in the SI Castle buildings are in serious need of replacement. The work,planned in the Repair and Restoration of Buildings (R&R) account, will require thephased relocation of staff now in the Castle out of the construction zone. The projectcould take ten years to complete. The Institution plans to use the space now occu-pied by the WWICS as "swing space" to house temporarily the staff dislocated bythe R&R project. At the end of the construction period, the Smithsonian will lookat various options for permanently relocating staff from leased space, as well as con-solidating staff now occupying space in the Mall museums.RESEARCH PROGRAMSMr. Skaggs. Finally, I just wanted to continue a conversation onthe record that we had the other day privately having to do with
247the basic research programs that take place under your auspices,and, in particular, get your counsel as to how well integrated thepriorities of those research activities are into a sort of national gridof important areas of research, and one that is peer-reviewed andvetted with NSF and comparable agencies.Mr. Heyman. I asked the Provost to really think about those, andhe's going to start out and I might have some observations.Mr. Skaggs. Great. Thank you.Dr. Hoffmann. I might first point out that we are active partici-pants in several interagency committees that are concerned withenvironmental and biological research. On the other hand, we co-ordinate through NASA in terms of our work at the astrophysicalobservatory. We also participate in the interagency group con-cerned with educational initiatives. So we have representatives oneach of those groups.We overall are viewed by the agency scientists as working in avery complementary way. Much of what we do is simply not donein those agencies, and the work we do is of great use to them. Forexample, in the Interior Department, where we have the system-atic biological expertise to identify organisms, they insteadMr. Skaggs. Let me interrupt you.Dr. Hoffmann. Yes.Mr. Skaggs. I don't want you to say anything about participatingin the National Biological Service because it will only get you introuble.Dr. Hoffmann. Thank you. I was not intending to.Mr. Skaggs. Good.Mr. Heyman. The National Biological what? [Laughter.]Dr. Hoffmann. We provide a great deal of support there. We dowork collaboratively with the U.S. Geological Survey, with the De-partment of Agriculture, the Agricultural Research Center. Wehave a Memorandum of Agreement with the Forest Service for col-laborative forest studies. So in a number of ways we work veryclosely with the agencies. We have National Marine Fisheries Serv-ice people actually within our building, as is true of some of theother kinds of scientists.Now as far as how we fit into the grid of peer-reviewed researchprograms, we are excluded by law from applying to either of thetwo Endowments, Arts or Humanities, and, by decision of the Na-tional Science Foundation, we are not welcome to apply for mostof their program funding for research. There are a few exceptions.We do?they do accept proposals in the education area and in a fewhighly specialized areas.We would be delighted if we could have our scholars compete forthose funds because we think that we have a very highly-qualifiedgroup of people, and, in fact, that is demonstrated by the fact thatin those programs where our proposals are accepted?for example,NIH or in some of the other Government agencies?we are verysuccessful in competing for funds.We do, however, also support research through a series of com-petitive programs within the Smithsonian that are supported byour trust funds, and most of these, the bulk of the funds, are sub-ject to external peer review, and the results of those peer reviewswe feel are as rigorous as those in NSF and other agencies.
248Mr. Skaggs. Let me put it a little bit differently. If we were
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as you know, other subcommittees of Appropriations have jurisdic-tion over most of the basic research programs in the Government,but if we had someone hypothetically before us from NSF and said,"Hey, what do you think about the kind of work in astronomy orbiology or climatology, or whatever, that's going on at the Smithso-nian? Is it off on a tangent that doesn't make sense with wheremost of science is going in those disciplines or is it?does it fit,"what would you suppose this all-knowing NSFer would tell us?Dr. Hoffmann. I think, and I certainly would hope, that theywould say, yes, our research is just as good as research anywherein the country. I would also hope they would recognize that becausewe do have the ability to apply our trust funds, we can be?we cantake risks in areas that sometimes it is difficult for the agency-funded research to venture into. The other important advantage wehave is that we are capable of undertaking long-term research andmonitoring that simply does not fit within the publish-or-perishcycle of a university researcher being funded by NSF.RESEARCH BUDGETMr. Skaggs. What of the $407 million that we're being asked forthis coming Fiscal Year, how much of that will go to support yourresearch activities?Dr. Hoffmann. The $407 million in the 1996 budget? There isa major item there, $650 million, to support the continued develop-ment of the submillimeter array telescope.Mr. Heyman. Six hundred and fifty thousand.Dr. Hoffmann. I'm sorry, $650,000. I slipped a decimal point.[Laughter.]And this is a project that got started in 1989. It has been pro-ceeding on schedule and within our budget estimates, given thatthere's been some inflation over that period of time, and also giventhat we decided, on the basis of strong advice from our peer com-munity, to locate it in Hawaii rather than in Arizona, but that's avery important initiative.Mr. Heyman. I would think that in terms of our operating budg-et, about a third goes into research. It's hard to say exactly. Actu-ally, when we get a new financial system, which we're working onpresently, which is going to let us extract at the sublevels what itis we're spending our money on, we can say it with more exactness,but I think about a third because, if you look at the research that'sgoing on, for instance, within the Museum of Natural History, aportion of that, the funding of the Museum of Natural History isexhibitions, obviously, but a good portion of it is in research. Thenin other museums it's much more?it's flipped. But I'd say roughlya third.Mr. Skaggs. And about a third, then, of the Federal contributionwouldMr. Heyman. Yes.Mr. Skaggs [continuing]. Be accurate as well? Great.
249EVALUATION OF SMITHSONIAN RESEARCHHas NAS or any other outside group taken a look at this ques-tion of the relationship of your research with other Government-funded research activities in similar disciplines?Dr. Hoffmann. In the nearly nine years I've been here there hasnot been any kind of National Academy review. On the other hand,we regularly undertake reviews of our programs, and for this weinvariably select external review panels that come in from the out-side and look at what we do, and make recommendations as to howwe can strengthen our programs.Mr. Skaggs. Any merit or good to come out of some kind of acomprehensive look at this, or do you think the incremental ap-proach that you've taken over the years is sufficient?Dr. Hoffmann. I think we ought to expand the pace of that kindof review, and what we have not done in the past, but the Sec-retary and I have been discussing this, is to, in a systematic way,work through each of our major units and review them as a whole.Now, we have done that within the last five years. We have re-viewed the Environmental Research Center. We've reviewed theConservation Research Center. We have not, however, reviewed theMuseum of American History as a whole. In the Museum of Natu-ral History, we have reviewed the research portion, but not the mu-seum as a whole. So we have focused on more manageable chunks.However, we're not getting the full picture, and we do feel the needto develop a review system that will look at all of the activities,both the scholarly research and the exhibition and education, foreach of the major units.Mr. Skaggs. Well, if it makes sense from your point of view
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and I don't want to do anything that's more of a problem than ahelp or is punitive in any way, but maybe we could work on somereport language that would satisfy our curiosity as well as yourson an appropriate way to work through that over the next coupleof years.Mr. Regula. Would you yield?Mr. Skaggs. Certainly.Mr. Regula. Are you, as part of this, evaluating how this isused? How does it serve society, I guess is what I'm trying to say?A hundred million dollars is a lot of money annually. How do wetranslate that into value received for the public that pays the bill?Mr. Skaggs. That's why I try to look at this or see how it isbeing looked at in the same way that NSF- or NIH-sponsored re-search is looked at, which isn't always in a way that is able to dem-onstrate an immediate practical benefit, but we?I think the Fed-eral Government's necessarily the source of last resort for fundingbasic research. I don't quarrel with the legitimacy of that, but Ithink we should have a good sense that it's being done in an inte-grated and governmentwide, a coherent fashion. That's what I'mlooking for.Mr. Heyman. What the purpose was, speaking about it, I couldelaborate on it just briefly. Certainly, my experience at the univer-sity has been that the major portions of tne university and thedeans and others who were responsible for running them gothrough periodic reviews, and a review committee comes in, usually
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of peers from other places, an external review committee and says,"How is this place doing? What kind of research is it undertaking?Is that state-of-the-art? Is it relevant? Who benefits?" And it asksabout the teaching program in the university context, which is real-ly like the exhibition program and education program in our con-text. How well is that being carried out? What's happening? Andit brings peer judgment to it.That hasn't been our experience. As the Provost says, we've re-viewed particular portions of some of our enterprise, but we haven'tlooked at the whole. Now, interestingly enough, we're doing this,or about to do this, for a whole variety of reasons at the Air andSpace Museum, but that got me to thinking that that's really some-thing we ought to be doing on a systematic, regular basis for thewhole of the institution.The Provost and I and the Under Secretary are really startingto think about how to do that, and we've got to bring our directorsaboard, which I'm sure we can. But I'd like to make that a programthat gets instituted on a regular basis in our institution.Mr. Skaggs. Well, if your schedule can either accommodate or beaccelerated to accommodate something that we might try to inte-grate into our?the report accompanying our bill, again, withoutsurely being disruptive, I'd be interested, and I hope the chairmanwouldMr. Regula. Definitely.Mr. Skaggs [continuing]. And try to work on that.Mr. Heyman. We'd be happy to work with you on that.Mr. Skaggs. Thank you.DUPLICATION OF RESEARCHMr. Regula. I think Mr. Skaggs has focused on something thatwe need to explore and I think you should explore as to the validityof all that's being done. It's an expensive undertaking and, hope-fully, it's being productive for the people of the Nation.Do you try to avoid duplication? We have, as has been pointedout by Mr. Skaggs, a number of different agencies of Governmentinvolved in various types of research. Is there some mechanism toascertain whether or not you are duplicating?Mr. Heyman. Well, I don't know. I think maybe Dr. Hoffmannhad better take a shot at that.Dr. Hoffmann. As I indicated, we work closely with the sci-entists in the various Government agencies, and we have a prettygood idea of the work that they are doing. They know what we aredoing. For the most part, the kinds of work we do are complemen-tary.In those cases where similar work may be going on, it is oftengoing on at two different places, and it is important, as a scientistwould say, to replicate this work, so that you have greater assur-ances that the results that you are getting are actually representa-tive. And to the degree that they differ, that may relate to the na-ture of the environment in these different places. NowMr. Regula. Go ahead.Dr. Hoffmann. I was also going to say that when we undertakebasic research, we do so because we are interested in understand-ing how the world works, how the universe is put together, broad
251questions like this, and within that we're asking quite specificquestions. We cannot predict in advance what will be of practicaluse to humans, but, in fact, we often find that there are unexpectedbenefits from this sort of research. I can give you some examples,if you'd want to go into it, but the shorter answer is that, yes, whatour research accomplishes is of value.Mr. Regula. If you would, put a few examples in the record. Ithink it would be nice to have that.Dr. Hoffmann. Okay. In the record; right?Mr. Regula. Yes.Dr. Hoffmann. Okay.[The information follows:]
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UNEXPECTED BENEFITS FROM BASIC RESEARCH
As stated in the record, we cannot predict in advance what will be of practical use tohumans, but, in fact, we often find unexpected benefits resulting from basic research. Inaddition, basic research lays the essential groundwork for later applied research that can bespecifically directed towards advances in agricultural technology, pharmaceuticalbreakthroughs and medical advances. The few examples cited below illustrate theseconnections between basic research and practical benefits for society.
Pest control is an essential component of our agricultural technology and success; togrow rice effectively, one must learn to control weevils. Weevils that live in rice fieldswere for a long time considered to be one species. Careful research on large collections ofweevils showed that they were, in fact, two species, only one of which was a serious pest ofrice crops. When this was clarified, it was possible to focus effective control measures onthis pest species. This advance was only possible because of earlier systematic researchilluminating the various species of weevils.Taxol is a new life-saving drug, originally extracted from the Western Yew tree,which lives in old-growth forest of the Pacific Northwest. Taxol has proved to be effectiveagainst certain cancers in humans such as ovarian and breast cancer. However, the WesternYew is a relatively rare tree in those forests, and the amount of tree tissue required to extractuseable amount of taxol is very large. In fact, it takes three trees to provide enough taxolfor one cancer patient. The understanding of the evolutionary relationships of the PacificYew and its close relatives achieved through basic research led scientists to investigate theEuropean Yew, Taxus baccata . This abundant European species of Yew has enough taxol ina small quantity of leaves to produce the drug at lower cost, with no harm to the tree itself.Without the collections and the basic systematic research on those collections, this medicalbreakthrough would not have been possible.DNA is proving to be an enormously valuable resource for understanding our worldand for developing a wide number of new advances helpful to our society ? in agriculture,medicine, and technology. It took several decades of solid basic research for scientists tounderstand the structure and potential of DNA, research that today provides the basicbuilding blocks for these advances. For example, a gene for resistance to cold temperatureshas been extracted from an arctic fish and can now be transferred to commercial crop plants,extending those crops' useful growing season. Our collections of museum specimens rumout to be a veritable treasure trove of the basic genetic material of life, DNA.The Simian Immunodeficiency Virus has turned up in African monkey specimensfrom the collections at the National Museum of Natural History, specimens that werecollected between 1896 and 1971, long before the spread of AIDS among humans. Thisstrengthens the case for the recent evolution of HIV from the monkey virus, and provides anessential historical perspective on the disease. An NMNH zoologist and his colleaguespioneered this use of museum specimens in basic medical research.
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It is often difficult to distinguish between "basic" and "applied" research, as theseexamples demonstrate. While scientists at the Smithsonian aim to better understand theworld around them ? whether this be the tropical rainforest, or the Chesapeake Bay, therainforests of Brazil, or the stars and planets ? the knowledge they create, and the methodsthey develop, inevitably feed into the advancing technology and scientific advances that areincreasingly important to all of us.
254GLOBAL BENEFITS OF SMITHSONIAN RESEARCHMr. Regula. Do you find that international groups?i.e., othergovernments, other universities around the world?use the productof your research efforts?Dr. Hoffmann. Yes. In fact, one of the things that we do quitewell is to work with other scientific groups in other parts of theworld, and we do so by means of training courses which are focusedshort courses?they may be two weeks; they may be ten weeks
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that bring scientists to a place. It might be here in the UnitedStates or we might take our instructors there in order to showthem how certain kinds of scientific questions can be examined.These largely relate to environmental studies of various sorts.Mr. Skaggs. Mr. Chairman, would you yieldMr. Regula. Yes.Mr. Skaggs. I don't know whether this would help or not, butI'm aware that one of the measures that many universities look toof the quality of the work being done by the faculty is the citationrate in scholarly journals. That sort of struck me as a little incestu-ous, but it tells you something. I don't know whether you have anyway of tracking Smithsonian-funded research being cited in otherscholarly work, but that might be one way of responding.Dr. Hoffmann. Yes, we do use citation frequency. We use it inevaluating the research of our scholars. This is scientific work pri-marily. And it is part of what is looked at when we are decidingwhether or not to promote someone.Mr. Regula. Do you get reimbursed for the expenses if you areproviding facilities for others?Dr. Hoffmann. Yes, for these training programs there's very lit-tle in the way of Federal support that goes into them. We rely onraising money from Government organizations, such as USAID, orfrom foundations, a few trusts, and the like, and the foreign gov-ernments also often make an in-kind contribution.Mr. Heyman. A very good example is in Panama, Mr. Chairman,because there a number of foreign scholars come from universities,especially in Europe, but elsewhere also. There's a whole scheduleof fees that have to get paid, which are approximately the cost ofhousing them and providing the support they need for their re-search.Mr. Regula. I would assume from this that you get a lot of indi-viduals that were in the domestic university system that alsouseMr. Heyman. Yes.Mr. Regula [continuing]. Facilities. I would assume that STRI atPanama probably has the most superior tropical research facility inthe world.Mr. Heyman. It does. And, as you've noted, or Chairman Living-ston noted, it has not been an expensive set of facilities, but it real-ly is first rate. My wife and I went down there about three or fourweeks ago, and my mind was opened with respect to the qualityof the work that's going on there and the quality of the facilities,especially the new facilities, because not only is there systematicbiology going on, which is really collection of specimens, but there'smicrobiology now about to go on there at the same place, and that's
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really a rather extraordinary undertaking for a location in the trop-ics. GLOBAL WARMINGMr. Regula. Do you get into the question of worldwide environ-mental problems which are perhaps exemplified by "global warm-ing"?Dr. Hoffmann. This is not a principal object of research, but wedo make contributions. The Tropical Research Institute, for exam-ple, has long-term meteorological and other environmental recordsgoing back for 20 and 30 years. And we have been tracking thosephenomena that are generally called El Nino, the warm pool of Pa-cific water that periodically builds up and causes things like theterrible floods in California. So we can contribute to that, although,obviously, many other governments and agencies are working onthat. We do make a contribution, both at STRI and at our environ-mental research center on the Chesapeake Bay where we are doingin-depth studies related to such things as changes in atmosphericcomposition, in fallout, either wet or dry, from the atmosphere, itseffect on vegetation, how it works and how these things work theirway through the environment, ending up in the Bay, and the like.So a lot of that goes on.Mr. Heyman. One fascinating thing that I'm not fully cognizantof, but I have begun to become, is that there are some folk overin the Museum of Natural History who are a little skeptical aboutsome of the claims with regard to global warming. The basis forthat for them is to look at specimens, fossil and others, over longperiods of time, and to be able to determine fluctuations over longperiods of time. So having the actual objects really can be extraor-dinarily important, and nobody thought about that application fortheir use, but applications just arise all the time.Mr. Regula. I suppose the development of DNA as a science hasmade your collections more useful.Mr. Heyman. Yes, it certainly has.SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION'S RELATIONSHIP WITH PANAMAMr. Regula. A practical question on Panama: you proposed anumber of construction projects there that are rather expensive.What type of legal arrangement do we have? I assume this is landthat's controlled or it's part of the country of Panama. What assur-ance do you have that we will have long-term stability there?Mr. Heyman. Well, of course, we've nad legal stability, but thathas been dependent in part on the existence of the Canal Zoneunder U.S. jurisdiction. There has been a lot of conversation be-tween the Smithsonian, through the Tropical Research Institute,and the Panamanian Government, and one of the reasons for mytrip down a few weeks ago was to speak at least briefly with thePresident of Panama and to gauge what the receptivity is for con-tinued good relations. I think we'll be shortly entering into a wholenew treaty with them, and the level of enthusiasm with respect toour presence is great because I think the Panamanians really viewus as a great asset for Panama, an intellectual center that willdraw other people there, No. 1, and being very helpful potentiallywith their development of some of the lands that are reverting to
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256them from the United States in the Panama Canal Zone for variousactivities they're going to carry out. One of their plans, in anyevent, is for something called "the Knowledge City," in whichthey're really going to try to attract a number of scholars from anumber of places for a number of activities, and they really see usat the heart of that.So my guess is, with the very adroit leadership of our directordown there, I think it will be okay, but we'll see within the nextfour or five years whether that prediction is correct.Mr. Regula. But wouldn't you hesitate to invest too much in theway of construction until you have a stable relationship?Mr. Heyman. Well, that's a thought, and I think we've reallythought about that a lot in terms of the plans we've undertaken.GUIDELINES FOR BALANCED EXHIBITIONSMr. Regula. On a less esoteric subject, a recent article in U.S.News and World Report entitled, "A Museum in Crisis"?and I as-sume you've seen this?attempts to trace the long-festering disputeover how the Smithsonian should be telling the story of Americanhistory. How do you react to this article and does it have validity?Mr. Heyman. Well, one of the problems with all of the discussionthat has arisen, especially in relation to the Enola Gay, and someobservations of the sort that were in U.S. News & World Report,is that the whole of the Smithsonian is somehow embroiled in this.Of course, the controversial exhibitions that have been involved atthe Smithsonian over the past number of years are really a verysmall proportion of the whole. But let me tell you how I feel aboutthis subject.In the old days, what museums did, essentially, was put out ob-jects and people came and brought whatever they had in theirheads to viewing that object. What's happened over the last 15, 20years is that the museum profession has gone in the direction ofdoing interpretative exhibitions. So they've added a lot of contextto the objects.There are different reactions to doing that. Putting aside the po-litical spin that is or is not put on an exhibition, some folks justlike to look at the objects and don't think the rest of it is an aidat all. There is a dispute, for instance, with regard to the First La-dies' exhibition of whether we should simply have the gowns or ifwe should have much more explanatory material with regard to thepeople who are inside of the gowns and what they did during theirperiod of being First Ladies. I think it's fair to say that most peoplekind of like the context because it really is an enriching education.It's brought to bear at the point you look at the objects, but let mesay that not everybody agrees with that.When I went out to see our telescopes in Arizona recently, I wasin Tucson, where the headquarters is, and I went into the StateMuseum of Arizona. The State Museum of Arizona has a veryelaborate exhibition presently of Indian tribes in Arizona, and thatwhole exhibition is the history of the beginning and the dismantle-ment, to some extent, of those Indian tribes, and it's very straight-forward. I don't?I didn't have the sense that anybody was preach-ing to me or anything else, but it was very straightforward and I
257learned a lot more than I otherwise would by simply looking at ar-tifacts.So I think we're going to continue both to do objects?certainly,the objects that speak for themselves. And what I mean by that isthat people know enough and feel enough in relationship to the
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you don't need a big explanation of Old Glory. You don't need a bigexplanation?at least you haven't up to now?for the Spirit of St.Louis and other objects that just are part of our collective heritage.But for a lot of other things, education really comes from context.But once you get into interpretative and educational exhibits ofthat sort, you start to worry about what message is being givenand how is that message being given. I think that what we hadthought up until recently is that curators are the ones who createthe exhibition and they're the last word with regard to content, andwe have thought about them a lot like one would have thought ofme a couple of years ago when I was teaching, that I what I doin the classroom and the like is up to me, and other people aren'tsupposed to regulate it.Well, I've tried to make it pretty clear that in my view books thatcurators write belong to them. Articles that curators write belongto them. But what goes up on the wall belongs to the Institution,so that we're collectively responsible for it. Maybe in some in-stances we might experiment with exhibitions that are signed, but,nevertheless, people expect, if it's up there, it is the Institution'sproduct and not simply the product of an individual.So I am trying to orchestrate now, with the help of my col-leagues, a whole set of conversations within the Smithsonian withrespect to, how do you handle these kinds of matters? How do youtry to make sure they are really balanced? How do you try to makesure that there aren't subliminal messages being given? How doyou try to make sure there's a very explicit statement of what thisexhibition is about?And, by the way, if you really ask for real explication of it, thenpeople have to start to face up to not only what they're trying todo, but what is occurring that might be unintended. We're in themiddle of trying to get a whole sense of ourselves, and, also, I'vereally made it pretty clear that the directors of museums are reallyresponsible for exhibitions which are improperly controversial.These are tough definitions, and you don't want to squelch the cre-ativity of curators because you really want them to be creative andthe like, but, on the other hand, there is some stuff we have hadup that I think really bears applying some rules of the game be-cause I think that we haven't been careful enough on those. I'vecome into this job undertaking a number of difficult circumstances,and this one's hard in the sense that it's running uphill againstwhat are just the perceptions and the history of how people behave,but we'll do it. So I look at that article as another prod for us get-ting on and getting this done.We're going to have a very interesting conference on the 19th ofApril out at the University of Michigan. That was one of the thingsI said when we decided to change the Enola Gay exhibition, andwe're taking the subject straight on, and we're bringing a lot ofpeople together, and I think some very interesting analysis andproduct will come out of that conference.
258Mr. Regula. I might say we share a common concern. I've dis-covered the job's a little more than I anticipated, too. [Laughter.]I yield to Mr. Skaggs.Mr. Skaggs. Mr. Chairman, thank you for yielding.I just wanted to make an observation in this context, and it re-lates back to the earlier conversation about the Enola Gay. Itseems to me inherent in Mr. Smithson's charge in the dissemina-tion of knowledge that one encounter a certain level of disagree-ment and controversy, and ideas are not going to be germinatedout of a homogeneity of views. And so if you're going to fulfill avery worthy mission for this country and this culture, I'd hate tosee you intimidated by the political correctness of any particulartime in our history from continuing to stretch minds. That's a dif-ficult balance to strike, given that you have Federal money en-trusted to you, but I think there's a way to do it without sort ofbecoming bland in the process.Mr. Heyman. I think that's what I'm really trying to do. I mean,for instance, as I say, I think we ought to take on controversy, butI think we've got to give more than one point of view. I think thatif, for instance, in an exhibition, as is presently true, it turns outthat, for understandable reasons, one has selected a bunch ofevents?I'm talking about Science in American Life?that are allcontroversial in order really to rivet attention and especially to getkids interested and involved in the show, at the same you have tounderstand that that approach, by leaving out triumph, is ratherdenigrating to a whole bunch of people. So you, in some sense,must also get that in there in order to be accurate. That's the kindof thing I'm groping for.Mr. Regula. Well, I have to assume that your mission is to in-sure that there's objectivity in the interpretation as presented. Imight say that it's my plan to adjourn here in about the next sevenor eight minutes, and I'll have a lot of questions for the record, andI'm sure some of the other members will, too.Mr. Heyman. Surely.ELECTRONIC OUTREACHMr. Regula. I'm interested in the America Online. One of theconcerns I've always had with, whether it's the Woodrow WilsonCenter or the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress, or whatever,is this outreach, because, ultimately, the budget is paid by theAmerican taxpayer from 50 States, and there's such an enormousvalue to what's done in the Smithsonian that it seems unfortunatethat maybe a very limited number of people get there. I don't knowwhat percent of the population ever gets to the Smithsonian, prob-ably 20 max. That may seem some days like 100 probably, but
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that's true here in the Capitol. Even if they were to come here, itwould take months to ever really see it adequately.What's being done to reach students in a classroom in Navarre,Ohio or wherever?Mr. Heyman. I'm going to say one very general thing and thenI want Lee Denny, who is the new Senior Information Officer atthe Institution, to talk a little bit.I said it when I took over last September, that I had two or threeobjectives. I said that we weren't going to grow physically. At least
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until you fellows balance the budget, that probably was not goingto occur, but what we had to do was to grow in access, and we hadto bring the Smithsonian to a lot of people elsewhere. So, I mean,there are a lot of cliches in this game, but we really did have tobe in some way without walls.We've really been taking this very seriously in this first six,seven months. Well, we had been previously, but we're trying to doit in a much more coordinated way, and here's one of the fellowswho's really making that possible.Mr. Regula. And I'd ask you to comment on the magazine cir-culation, and so on. I read it; it's excellent.Mr. Heyman. We have about 2.21 million?is that it??for cir-culation. That's stood up and it's been about that.Mr. Regula. Do a lot of those go to libraries which would, ofcourse, meanMr. Heyman. Yes.Mr. Regula [continuing]. That a lot more people would readit Mr. Heyman. Yes, yes, yes.Mr. Regula [continuing]. Than would be indicated by the rawnumbers?Mr. Heyman. It used to be a very profitable operation, too, butwith paper costs going up and advertising revenues going down, wedon't make nearly as much off of it as before, but we make some-thing.Mr. Regula. It's well done.Mr. Denny. I think I'd like to comment specifically on some ofour electronic outreach. It's not the only kind of outreach, obvi-ously, we do, but it's certainly part of my job and what the Sec-retary brought me in to do.The America Online relationship began about 18 months ago andis almost an experiment of how we could get objects in pictorialform out to the public. Since that time, we've had something in theneighborhood of 50,000 hours of usage for that service. At the sametime, we've been using Internet, which is also probably much morepublicly accessible over about the last three years for more re-search collaboration, and, again, over about the last 18 months formore educational purposes. And we have redoubled those effortsover the last six months to strengthen our network here on theMall, so that we could begin to make a great many more thingsavailable throughout the country. We have put together a productthat we will be offering over the Internet that will, even in its ini-tial stages, have something in the neighborhood of 18 to 20 hoursif you sat down and went through every aspect of it. So it wouldbe a very extensive Internet product. That will be available to the30 million or so people around the world who currently haveMr. Regula. Who are subscribers?Mr. Denny [continuing]. Who have Internet accessMr. Regula. Right.Mr. DENNY [continuing]. Through universities, public libraries,school systems. There are about 40 percent of the schools in theUnited States that have Internet capability, only 3 percent of theclassrooms, unfortunately, but that's growing exponentially.
260So we view this type of electronic access as a real opportunity forus to carry everything we do here on the Mall to everyone in thecountry, and we have an enormous amount of focus in that areaand an enormous number of people that we're collaborating with inboth the public and the private sector.Mr. Regula. Do you have any way to gauge the usage of this?Mr. Denny. We have not turned our?the new product loose yet,and I do have a statistical capture within it. Within the existingproducts that we have now, just say in our photo services that wehave online, we have a photograph being downloaded about every78 seconds day and night from that service. We have had accessfrom 84 percent of the countries that are being serviced now byInternet, which is?it's probably 80 to 90 percent of the countriesin the world. So it's been an absolutely amazing amount of activityfor something that we have not advertised or promoted in any way.Mr. Regula. I'm not an expert on it, but, as I understand it,don't you have to digitize theMr. Denny. Yes.Mr. Regula [continuing]. Exhibits to put them on Internet?Mr. Denny. When we look at our critical success factors in thistype of access, the foundation pieces of that are digitization andhaving enough network there to get the things out. Obviously, ourobjects are exciting, but they're three-dimensional. They're difficultto digitize. We want good text around them so we tell a good story,and we put it in context, and they're equivalent to an exhibit, butwe have 140 million objects. That's an immense amount of materialto digitize.Mr. Regula. That's amazing. I think I read where somebody wasgiving a tour in some overseas location, and they had the equip-ment there so that you could follow them on Internet as if you werethere.Mr. Denny. Yes.We essentially have that type of capability established now andwe're just in the process of making that available to the public.Mr. Regula. Would a scholar in California be able to Internet orinterconnect with your Tropical Research Facility in Panama?Mr. Denny. Yes. Yes, we have that capability now.ELECTRONIC OUTREACH FUNDINGMr. Heyman. Let me just say one thing also. First, part of thisis awfully complicated because there are so many different thingsthat are possible, and we're beginning to touch this and touch thatand touch the other as we experiment. Secondly, there's no freelunch in this game. The cost of putting a lot of our stuff in digitalform is going to be very expensive. Thirdly, I'm a realist and I rec-ognize I've got to get this money from some place other than here.And, fourthly, we can put stuff on a network, but we can't reallyassure easy access to this material. So, fifthly, we've got to be inpartnership with the private sector on this. My rules of the gamefor that are that we're going to enter appropriate arrangements sothat our materials really are accessible around and we're going torecover from that no great big profit, but the cost of doing our digi-tal conversions.
261Along those lines, we are presently interviewing about 15 cor-porations that in one form, shape, or manner are in this game, andwe've now done three or four, and we're going to, over the courseof the next month, we will have done them all. What we're tryingto do is to get educated enough to know how we'd even write a re-quest for proposals. But as we've started now, some kind of excitingthings jump out in terms of the interest of various private sectorfirms in getting access to us and what are going to be some of therules of the game. One of the rules of the game that's been clearis that, as far as the use of whatever it is for educational purposesin K through 12, or the like, it's got to go free. So that's part ofwhat is in the midst of all this discussion.I don't have any plan at the moment because I'm being educated,but I really have a sense of optimism talking with everybody thatwe're going to be able to pull this off somehow.Mr. Regula. Well, I trunk this is extremely important and anenormous multiplier in terms of the use of facility.MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN COLLECTION ON DISPLAYI was curious?I saw just that one pod or one display there. Ofthe number of items that you have in storage, what portion ofthose would you be able to display in the museum itself if it wereto be built on the Mall?Dr. Hoffmann. The Indian Museum?Mr. Regula. Yes.Dr. Hoffmann. This collection is fromMr. Regula. I don't mean of that one, but generally. Of the totalnumber of artifacts that you have stored, what percent of thosecould be displayed in the museum at any one time?Dr. Hoffman. Okay, the number is quite small, on the order ofno more than 5 percent, depending upon theMr. Regula. Would you contemplate rotating them then?Dr. Hoffman. Yes, we do that, and we also, depending upon tem-porary shows?two sorts of display. One is the so-called permanentdisplay where the objects may be there for several years. The otherare temporary exhibits, where we wish to illustrate particularthings, and those things come out of the study collections and theygo on to display for a particular purpose.Mr. Heyman. But the other thing I think that's going to be espe-cially important with regard to the Indian Museum is traveling ex-hibitions, and I think we're going to be able to bring a lot of theseartifacts to the Indian people where they are, because they're notgoing to come to where we are very often. I think that's going tobe quite possible. In fact, I'm going over in about an hour to talkwith one of the Senators from Alaska about how to bring materialswe have in the Museum of Natural History that are Alaskan Na-tive materials both to permanent or at least semipermanent exhi-bition in a museum in Anchorage, but also a rich set of exhibitionsthat will go around Alaska to where Native peoples are.So I see this one, I see the American Indian one, really has a po-tentiality for that, probably more so than other objects that wehave.Mr. REGULA. Well, I'll put the balance of my questions in therecord.
262CLOSING REMARKSMr. Regula. I've just commented we have two things in common.One is, of course, we're both new challenges, but also we both havesome tough prioritizing to do, and I don't know if you'd like tomake any final comment before we adjourn.Mr. Heyman. Well, sir, I found this a very useful session for mein a lot of ways, both learning in terms of attitudes and priorities,but also getting?you know, the more you talk about stuff that'sclose to your heart, the better you understand it. So this has beena good opportunity for me.Mr. Regula. Thank you all for coming.The committee's adjourned.[Committee note.?Additional committee questions and answersfor the record follows:]
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ADDITIONAL COMMITTEE QUESTIONS
RestructuringQuestion 1 : The Smithsonian proposed a reorganization late last year that involvedthe consolidation of programmatic activities, operations and administration. The Committeehas not yet approved the reorganization and yet your budget justification indicates that youhave implemented the reorganization. Is this accurate?Answer: The Smithsonian Institution budget request for FY 1996 reflects theproposed reorganization. Because there was no immediate budgetary impact, the Institutionprepared its budget request along the new organizational lines in anticipation ofCongressional approval of the reorganization.
Question 2: Could you explain for the committee specifically how this restructuringwill result in efficiencies and savings in both the operations and administration of theInstitution as well as the programs and research efforts?Answer: One of two major components of the proposed restructuring is theestablishment of the Office of the Provost. This office will have responsibility for oversightof all programmatic and research activities within the Institution. One of the first tasks ofthis office will be to restructure the offices of the Assistant Provosts for Sciences, Arts andHumanities, and Educational and Cultural Programs so that the administrative functions ofthese disparate staffs are consolidated into one. The other major component of the proposedrestructuring is to consolidate all administrative operations under the Office of the UnderSecretary. By having these two offices report directly to the Secretary, more coordinatedcontrol can be achieved.
Question 3: If there has been actual savings from your downsizing, streamliningefforts, what were those savings and were they applied to programmatic increases or appliedtoward deficit reduction, or a combination?Answer: The actual savings from downsizing were $9.5 million. Of this amount,$3.1 million was applied to FY 1995 reductions; the remaining $6.4 million is shown as areduction to the FY 1996 request. The positions associated with the savings have beenapplied to meet the President's Executive Order to reduce the federal workforce.
Question 4: How much of the savings were associated with the Congressionally-approved buy-out program and how much was a result of the Institution's internalstreamlining?Answer: The $9.5 million in savings was associated with the Congressionally-approved buy-out program.
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Budget ReductionQuestion 5: The FY 1996 budget request is $36 million higher than 95 enacted.There are increases in each category, Salaries and Expenses up $11 million, Construction isup $9.4, Zoo Construction is up approximately $1 million, and the Repair and Restorationaccount reflects a $10 million increase.
If the committee allocation for FY 96 reflected a 5 or 10% reduction compared tocurrent year, how would you reduce your budget submission? Please be specific.Answer: The Institution, if such reductions were mandated, would prefer to take thepercentage reduction and then make decisions on how to specifically reduce its budget.There are many areas that could be affected by reductions of this magnitude, as shownbelow:
? Drastic staff cost reductions through reductions in force, hiring freezes andfurloughs
? Closing of museum galleries or reducing public hours in order to reduce securitycosts
? Curtailment or elimination of research projects throughout the Institution
? Reduction or deferral of critical collections management activities
? Drastic curtailment of all employee travel, training and overtime; curtailment ofsupplies and equipment purchases; curtailment of all other non-critical purchases
? Reduction of the Traveling Exhibition Service's outreach programs
Exhibits ControversyQuestion 6: A recent article in U.S. News and World Report , entitled "A Museum inCrisis, " attempts to trace the long festering dispute over how the Smithsonian should betelling the story of American History. Although the recent Enola Gay exhibit, whichenraged World War II veterans by insinuating that the Japanese were innocent victims of anunnecessary act of vengeance, was the most egregious example of reinterpreting history,there have been others over the last few years. Some include the recent Science in AmericanLife and an American History Museum exhibit on life after the Revolution.What is the Smithsonian doing to reassess the way major exhibits are planned andinterpreted?Answer: Under the auspices of the Office of the Provost, the Smithsonian isundertaking a comprehensive review of how each Smithsonian museum develops exhibitions.This effort will result in the development of a policy on exhibition processes that shouldensure objectivity, accuracy and balance in public exhibitions.
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Question 7: Would you say that part of the problem stems from virtually nooversight by top management and no official guidelines?Answer: There have been no institution-wide guidelines, nor a strict policy on themanner in which the Institution should address controversial exhibitions. In the case of theEnola Gay Exhibition, the principal flaw lay in the National Air and Space Museumattempting to couple an historical treatment of the use of atomic weapons with the 50thanniversary commemoration of the end of the war. Granted, exhibitions have manypurposes. The Institution needs a process to determine which of many goals is paramountand how to help ensure objectivity, accuracy and balance. Such processes will improveoversight by senior management in the early stages of exhibition development.
Question 8: What is meant by political correctness?Answer: The definition found in the Random House WordMenu @ 1992 states:
"politically correct (adj.) marked by or conforming to typically progressive, orthodoxviews such as environmentalism, pacifism and social equality for those outside thewhite male power structure and Western, Judeo-Christian tradition".The term has no specific meaning within the Smithsonian.
Question 9: Some major exhibits involve as much writing as object display. Is thereany consideration being given to displaying smaller exhibits so that the general public canspend less than several hours in an exhibit and still come away with a feeling ofunderstanding and appreciation of the exhibits theme?Answer: The Smithsonian does attempt to present exhibits in a broad size range, withsome as small as a single display case. However, we can and must continue to understandthe best ways to communicate through exhibitions.
Question 10: Based on your experience with the Enola Gay exhibit, might it be moreimportant to focus the interpretation and context of the exhibit on explaining events as theywere understood and experienced by the people living at the time, as opposed to raisingissues that have come up since the incident?Answer: Each exhibition topic is different. It is difficult to make a declarative policythat "all exhibitions must explain events as they were experienced and understood at thetime." However, we can say that there should never be confusion with regard to the basis ofthe facts and interpretation.
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Collecting FeesQuestion 1 1 : Last month we conducted oversight hearings on how to downsizegovernment. Several groups such as the Heritage Foundation recommended that Smithsoniancharge admission fees to help partially offset operational expenses.
Last year, the Smithsonian, with the approval of the Board of Regents, ran pilotprojects to collect fees at several locations. What was the result of that effort?Answer: On March 25, 1993, the Smithsonian began a demonstration project forvoluntary contributions in four museums (National Portrait Gallery, American Art,Anacostia, and Air & Space) and the Zoo. Eight collection boxes were created for theselocations.The capital start-up costs for this project were $25,000. An additional $6,430 hasbeen spent on supplies for videotaping each cash count and for the redesign of two boxes atthe Air and Space Museum, making a total of $31,430 in cash outlays. Donated equipmentvalued at $10,000 also was used to establish this project.As of March 9, 1995, approximately $60,000 has been collected in the eight boxes.Thus, this project has netted the Smithsonian $28,301 over the two year course of thedemonstration project.
Question 12: What was learned from the experience?Answer: Originally, the collection boxes were all placed away from the entrances orexits so as to not imply mandatory donations or admission fees. They were also placed awayfrom the building entrances for security reasons. Because the early results of the projectwere not encouraging, a decision was made to redesign the boxes and place them closer tothe entrances. Initially, it was assumed that the boxes should be generally uniform in design.Over time it became apparent that the boxes should relate more closely to each of theindividual museums. Air & Space redesigned their two boxes into "space ships" andinstalled them closer to the entrances in December, 1993. Since that time, the collectionsthere increased two fold over the original monthly collection rates.The major lessons learned were: 1) the public is not offended by a request forvoluntary contributions; 2) we must be more aggressive in the design and location of thecontribution boxes; and 3) we must explain to the public the importance of their giving to theInstitution and our ability to be an exciting and forward-looking Institution.
Question 13: Could adjustments be made to improve the collections?Answer: In December of 1993, the two collection boxes in the Air and SpaceMuseum were redesigned and physically moved to the entrance areas. Both of these actionsimproved the amount of money collected to a significant degree. Further adjustments couldbe a stronger message to the public regarding the rationale for the contributions.
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Question 14: Most large city museums in this country have either an admissions feeor a range of voluntary collections. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is quiteaggressive with their voluntary fee others have collections boxes located at various placesthroughout the museums. Does the Smithsonian have specific plans to implement a newprogram? If not, why?Answer: While these issues are considered from time to time by the Institution'sBoard of Regents, that consideration never occurs in isolation from the overall considerationof a variety of revenue-generating options; concern about accessibility by the public that theInstitution is mandated to serve; and the economic environment in which it exists.As was noted in previous questions, the Institution can and should make moreadjustments with regard to its voluntary contribution initiative. With regard to admissions,the Smithsonian Institution staff continues to believe that the Institution is special in theworld in that it does not determine who comes to the museums along economic lines.
Questica 15: What is the approximate amount of revenue collected at the Met inNew York? At other major museums? The Smithsonian visitor figures for FY 1994 were inexcess of 28 million. What is the potential revenue for the Smithsonian's 16 museums andgalleries and the Zoo if fees were collected?Answer: According to the Met, the total amount of admission fees collected hasaveraged approximately $8.6 million for the past several years. This year, however, it isprojecting revenues more than $11 million due to a greater number of exhibition openingsthan usual. The experience of the Met is that revenue fluctuates with the exhibitionschedule.
In evaluating visitor information for the Smithsonian, it is important to note that thefigure generated represents the number of visits , not visitors. Therefore, the figure of 28million for FY 1994 represents the number of visits counted. These visitor counts do notdiscriminate among one time visitors, repeat visitors, visitors to multiple facilities, staff,contractors, and others conducting business with the Institution. Estimates suggest thatapproximately 10,000,000 individuals visit the Smithsonian each year.Any effort to consider the potential revenue that might be generated by an admissionfee must take into account a variety of considerations. At the outset are the establishingauthorities of the museums, which, in the cases of the Freer, Sackler, Hirshhorn, PortraitGallery, and the National Museum of the American Indian, state that they are free, publicinstitutions. Thus, only certain museums could charge fees.Of more immediate importance, however, is the fact that in FY 1994 the Smithsoniangenerated nearly $23 million - about 5.5% of its total operating income - from sales ofobjects, food, and publications, together with membership activities and miscellaneousincome. All of these activities are tied to one degree or another to freely accessible visits tothe Mall museums. Rather than producing revenue for the museums, admission fees arelikely to reduce attendance, and therefore sales. While fees alone would deny to largesegments of the public the fullness of the current museum experience, through the reduction
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in sales and net operating income they also could deny the Institution the margin of resourcesthat assists in acquiring significant objects for the collections, maintaining a vibrantexhibition program, and developing electronic communications systems to reach those incommunities beyond the Mall.
Question 16: I believe there was also thought given to opening museum shops atdifferent locations throughout the city and eventually the country. As you know the Met andthe Boston Museum have done just this and their stores have been quite successful in raisingadditional revenue. I believe you ran such a test program at a popular Mall in the Marylandsuburbs recently, what was the result of that demonstration?Answer: The Museum Shops Division of the Business Management Office conducteda test project for off-Mall retailing during the Smithsonian's holiday season of 1993. FromOctober 15, 1993 until January 30, 1994, the Division rented approximately 2,500 squarefeet of retail space in the White Flint Mall in North Bethesda, Maryland on the second levelnear Bloomingdale's. The Friends of the National Zoo (FONZ) rented a similar retail spaceadjacent to the Smithsonian's. For the period that the Smithsonian Shop was open, theDivision generated enough cash flow to cover all of the operating expenses for the Shop, thefull costs of the build-out for the fixtures, and a small profit. For the short period that thisshop was open, this represents a reasonable operating performance, bearing in mind thatthese three months represent the strongest retail sales period of the year. The inventory forthis Shop was taken from the existing merchandise carried in the Mall Shops.
It was determined that much of the traffic in the White Flint Shop was the result ofthe traditional Smithsonian shoppers being able to shop at this intercept location in theMaryland suburbs without having to travel to the Mall in downtown Washington. Longterm, this would defeat the purpose of promoting, within the metropolitan Washington area,visitation to the museums with the additional benefit of a shopping experience. Shopping inthe museums is seen as an enhancement for the visitor. The opportunity to increase, notcircumvent, visitation should be stressed as the desired goal.
Question 17: Do you have plans to expand that project?Answer: In 1994, the Business Management Office thoroughly researched thefinancial implications of a true off-Mall (midtown Manhattan in New York City) locationwhich could leverage the Division's strength of appealing to a broad mix of transientcustomers' interests in the arts and sciences.The senior management of the Institution determined that the near-term financialposition of the Unrestricted Trust Fund would not be able to support the additional requiredasset investment for inventory and leasehold improvements to the physical space. The returnon investment would be significant for the Institution, but only after the second full year ofoperation. The Institution's Trust funds cannot absorb that burden of financial risk alone atthis time.
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However, the Institution will be opening a shop at the Baltimore WashingtonInternational Airport in a cooperative effort with the State of Maryland. In addition, theInstitution will have shops in conjunction with the traveling exhibition, America'sSmithsonian, to twelve cities in the United States in 1996 and 1997.
Question 18: If not, can you explain why admission fees and other revenueenhancements such as museums shops outside the museum work for other institutions and notfor the Smithsonian?Answer: Meeting Smithsonian standards and achieving success in an highlycompetitive off-Mall retail environment such as Fifth Avenue in New York would require avery substantial investment of resources in, among other items, the development ofspecialized products and the acquisition of inventory. We will, however, continue to assessthe costs and benefits of a number of revenue-generating activities including arranging tohave SI licensed products sold in established businesses.
Question 19: Mr. Secretary, your budget justification speaks of the need to rely moreheavily in the future on private support. You have also been quoted in various newspaperson this same issue. What specific plans do you have for raising funds and how would theybe used ? to offset operations , research or construction?Answer: The Smithsonian's future plans for fund-raising activity will support thelong-term strategic plan we are developing. While the Institution anticipates a continuingneed for unrestricted support - and will rely heavily on its business activities for a majorportion of same ~ a significantly expanded effort already has been initiated to secureadditional funds from non-Federal sources to help meet both our restricted and unrestrictedneeds. Specifically:The Smithsonian's 150th Anniversary Celebration is being planned to build on theInstitution's fund-raising and marketing strengths.The National Campaign for the National Museum of the American Indian and aneventual effort to support the National Air and Space Museum Extension are twoconstruction projects for which we are and will be seeking private funding.Our fund-raising efforts among prospective individual donors will be accelerated by arecent administrative decision which placed the Contributing Membership program under thepurview of the Office of Development. That decision will contribute to our intensifiedefforts to build the Smithsonian's endowment through the Smithsonian Fund for the Future,with leadership provided by the Smithsonian National Board. Increased endowment fundingwill stabilize the Smithsonian's programs in research, education, acquisition, fellowships, andinternships.
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Setting PrioritiesQuestion 20: Federal discretionary budgets have bee.i on a downward slide forseveral years now and the likelihood that this trend will continue is very high. In fact, it islikely that the FY 96 allocation to our subcommittee will be dramatically under current yearfunding. With these facts in mind I would like to know:Can you describe your priority setting process? I ask this in light of the fact that youobviously have significant deterioration of older structures, and the need for collectionsstorage is significant . At the same time, you have three separate facilities in mind for theAmerican Indian Museum, one just opened in New York, one planned for Suitland, and onefor the Mall; you are planning for the Air and Space Extension at Dulles and the Old PostOffice Building renovation; and you have been exploring the idea of a new Afro AmericanMuseum.Answer: As one of his first acts, Secretary Heyman has begun a strategic planningprocess intended to take a comprehensive look at the Institution's programs and operationsand to reevaluate priorities in light of the current and anticipated funding limitations. It isintended that this process will be completed by the end of the fiscal year. Beginning in1977, the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian and the Secretary established a five-yearplanning process. That process produced a five-year prospectus to outline the Institution'sprogram plans for the next five fiscal years and describe longer-term plans for constructionand facilities. In addition, there is an annual planning and budget process which enunciatesthe more immediate priorities for spending. Both of these processes were comprehensive andrequired the input of every office in the Institution. Annually, the Under Secretaryconducted individual hearings with each museum, research center, and office to discuss needsand priorities. These individual priorities were then evaluated based on available resourcesand the goals of the Institution to arrive at a set of Institutional priorities.The Institution also has an established Capital Program Planning Board, chaired bythe Under Secretary. This Board establishes priorities for construction and for repair andrestoration of the Institution's facilities. As part of its work, this Board assesses the impactthat the construction of a new facility will have on the Institution's operating budget.
Question 2 1 : While some of these projects have involved a private cost-sharingcomponent, they eventually require yearly operations and maintenance funds. It appears as ifthe Smithsonian has not adjusted its planning for new museums and collections centers asFederal funds have declined. Can you explain this?Answer: The Institution has, in fact, responded to the decline in Federal funds inseveral ways. One is by creating public/private partnerships. The National Museum of theAmerican Indian is the principal example of this kind of partnership. The Institution iscommitted to raising one third of the cost of construction for the Mall museum. In addition,funds are being raised to endow the programs of the museum.Recognizing that the Federal budget could not support the $160 million needed tofund construction of the Air and Space extension at Dulles, the Institution has turned to two
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other sources of funding. The Institution has signed a memorandum of understanding withthe Commonwealth of Virginia that pledges interest-free loans, the installation of thenecessary infrastructure at Dulles, and the issuance of $100 million in State bonds atmunicipal rates to finance the enterprise. The bonds would be retired from income streamsthat the Institution currently is exploring. In addition, the Institution would also raise fundsin the private sector. The total commitment of the Federal government for the extensionwould be $8 million. As planned, this represents a significant leveraging of federal funds forthose in other sectors.Another recent example of a public/private partnership is a fund-raising effortcurrently being conducted by the Cooper-Hewitt. The Secretary has required that $8 millionbe raised through private sources to assist with a renovation project which totals $20 million.The unsuccessful legislation before the Congress in the last session to establish theAfrican-American museum made it clear that no federal funds would be sought forconstruction or operation of the museum. Again, the Institution intended to raise funds tosupport the ongoing operations of the enterprise.The Institution is making difficult choices about which facilities it will be able tomaintain. For example, the Regents recently gave their approval for the Institution todispose of the Barney Studio House either through sale or by donating the house to a non-profit organization that is able to restore and operate the property as a house museum. Thisdecision was based on the simple fact that the Institution cannot afford to repair the house orto operate it as a museum, particularly in light of more pressing Institutional priorities.These examples serve to illustrate that the Institution recognizes that Federal fundingwill not be available to meet its growing needs. We will continue to develop new ways inwhich to address them.
CollectionsQuestion 22: Your request states that the Institution has over 138 million o!*$ects,works of art and specimens, 121 million of which are in the National Museum of NaturalHistory. The Committee has appropriated approximately $30M for new storage facilities andlab space in Suitland and it is estimated that by the year 2005, this space will be completelyfilled. Given the fact that federal funds are limited, has the Smithsonian given any thought tolimiting new acquisitions and downsizing the current collection?Answer: Each collecting organization at the Smithsonian has a collection policywhich establishes general guidelines for new acquisitions and also the deaccessioning objectsfrom the collections.The subject of collections acquisition, care and deaccession will be a majorcomponent of the Secretary's strategic planning process. The national collections are at theheart of the Institution. They are the basis for research, exhibition, public and educational
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programs. The issue of downsizing the collections through such mechanisms as long-termloans will be carefully considered in the stratetgic plan.Question 23: Do the individual museums have acquisition plans completed whichprioritize the needs of the Institution with regards to the collections? In other words, howmany of each object are necessary? What is missing from the collection and what might beconsidered duplicative to the Smithsonian collection or available at other major museums?Answer: As required by the Smithsonian Collections Management Policy, eachmuseum and collecting organization develops an individual collections management policyspecific to the nature and needs of its collection. Each collections management policyconsists of a statement of purpose, a statement of authority, a collecting plan, a definition ofthe collections, and a description of collections management activities. Collecting plansdefine the collecting parameters, goals and objectives of each museum and collectingorganization in relation to its mission and collection. At a minimum, these statements outlinecollecting philosophies, strategies, and specify collection types the museum seeks to activelyacquire. Collecting plans ensure logical and responsible collections growth by establishingwell-defined goals and priorities that guide collecting activities. Smithsonian scholars workwith colleagues throughout the world, sharing collection resources through loan andborrowing programs that minimize duplicative efforts in collections growth.
Question 24: Why do you feel it is necessary to keep so many collections?Answer: The collections represent both the scientific and cultural heritage of theUnited States, as well as a research resource for scientists of today and tomorrow.NMNH has over 121 million catalogued specimens. Some specimens are one of akind, others are multiple samples of the same organism, mineral, or cultural object. Eachspecimen, however, contains unique information that can tell us about a biological, physical,or cultural pattern or process. The color or size variation of dozens of specimens collectedover the geographic range of a single type of bird allows us to say that two quite different-looking individuals actually belong to the same species. Multiple specimens of the same kindof volcanic rock from different parts of the world have chemical variations that tell us aboutthe evolution of the earth's crust. Hundreds of clay pots provide clues about differencesamong ancient cultural groups and even individual artists. Multiple samples are so useful inresearch and education that museum people often collect several of a kind as a matter ofcourse; sometimes they collect large series for a particular research need. Specimens are notonly used for descriptive purposes, but large quantities of the same artifacts are necessary sothat researchers can support their interpretations with statistically significant findings. Butwe cannot keep everything, and the museum also is selective about what is catalogued for thepermanent collection. We regularly make decisions to reject or deaccession collections thatunnecessarily duplicate existing specimens or are judged to be of low priority or poorquality.
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Question 25: How many new objects are acquired each year for the collection?Answer: Collections are enhanced each year by the acquisition of new items whichcontribute to the understanding of our cultural and natural heritage and increase the value ofour holdings as a research resource. In order to provide responsible stewardship of thecollections held in trust by the Institution, proposed acquisitions undergo a rigorous selectionand review process. Each museum actively assesses the degree to which new acquisitionsare consistent with the mission of the museum; enhance objectives in research, exhibitions,or public programs; and can receive appropriate care and management. The Smithsonianacquires collections through gifts, bequests, purchases, exchanges, transfers, field collecting,and other methods which vest title in the Institution such as births and hatchings at theNational Zoological Park. Each year the Institution acquires approximately 450,000 -500,000 objects and specimens of which approximately 95% are for the National Museum ofNatural History. However, it rejects substantially more because they do not meet the criteriathat have been outlined.
Question 26: What is the current storage condition of the other museums andgalleries?Answer: Storage conditions range from the climate controlled, secure MuseumSupport Center to asbestos contaminated, World War II temporary buildings at the GarberFacility.
Question 27: What percentage of objects are damaged or destroyed each year becauseof substandard storage conditions?Answer: In utilizing available collections storage space, the museums assign lesssensitive objects to the least desirable space to minimize deterioration. Because of the vastsize of the Smithsonian's collections, annual inventories to determine the condition of eachobject are not possible. However, we are aware of existing conditions that are causingcertain collections to deteriorate, in particular the current storage facility housing the Heyecollection of the National Museum of the American Indian. For the interim period thefacility has been stabilized.
Question 28: What would be the cost of providing adequate storage for the otherSmithsonian museums and galleries?Answer: The National Museum of the American Indian's Cultural Resources Center,and the Air and Space Extension are the Institution's highest priorities for collections-relatedspace. Estimates are $50 million and $160 million, respectively. The actual cost of thesetwo projects would be dependent upon the construction start date.
Question 29: Is there a research fee charged to academia and other private interestsfor the use of research materials?
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Answer: The Institution does not charge fees to scholars from other non-profitinstitutions (other museums, universities, state or federal agencies, etc.) for the use ofresearch materials. Requests from private for-profit organizations to use research materialsare comparatively rare, but the Institution recovers its costs on a case-by-case basis.
Question 30: Your budget justification states that the collections and informationassociated with them forms the basis of Smithsonian research, exhibitions and publicprograms. What percentage of these 138 million objects are on public display and how manyare involved with public programs?Answer: Vast as Smithsonian exhibition spaces are in what has grown over the yearsto an aggregate of 16 museums and the National Zoological Park, only a small proportion -approximately 2% - of the total collection holdings are on exhibit at any given time. Objectsand specimens on exhibit may change as items often are rotated to provide the public anopportunity to see more of the objects and to safeguard their physical integrity. In addition,while only a select number of artifacts from a particular collection may appear in anexhibition, a greater portion is used in developing it. Supplementing traditional exhibitionformats, collections also serve as the primary resource of interpretative public programs anddiscovery rooms, including behind-the-scenes tours, hands-on demonstrations, school andteacher-training programs, symposia, publications, films and videos, interactive and on-lineservices, and even musical performances.
Question 31: What percentage will be shown in traveling exhibitions?Answer: The two percent of Smithsonian collections on public display includesobjects in travelling exhibitions.
Question 32: What percentage is used primarily for research?Answer: Collections-based research involves the entire spectrum of Smithsonianholdings with specific emphasis in certain collection areas. The collections in NaturalHistory - 121 million specimens or 88% of total Smithsonian holdings - support the largestand most comprehensive program of basic research in systematics in the world. Suchactivities are founded on excellence in scholarship, vast and well-managed collections, andwide-ranging field investigations. Collections-based research in the cultural and historicalfields (17 million objects) sometimes takes the form of analyses that disclose provenance,design, and fabrication, but more often relates the contextual role of objects in theirinstitutional or societal settings, their purposes or uses, and the meanings attached to them.The Institution also lends collections for research and study. Approximately ninetypercent of total outgoing loans are specifically lent for research and study purposes in anygiven year. During the period of 1988-1994, over one million objects and specimensconstituted research loans. In addition, the Institution's archival and library holdings,totalling 60,000 cubic feet and 1.4 million volumes respectively, support the research
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activities of Smithsonian staff, visiting scholars and researchers, and the general publicthrough reference and interlibrary loans.
Question 33: It appears that a majority of the collections is used for researchpurposes. Can you give the committee some examples of what that research has yielded,both basic and applied?Answer: Basic research on the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)collections results in the publication of over 700 books, journal articles, and monographsannually by NMNH scientists as well as contributions to many more articles andpresentations authored by the hundreds of scholarly visitors and students from theinternational community that come to the museum or borrow specimens each year. Theprimary scientific literature serves the scholarly community and the public at large byproviding an increasing, high-quality foundation of knowledge about the natural and culturalworld and its history. The collections increase in value as reference materials when newstudies are published and this knowledge is made publically accessible through publications,exhibits, and electronic media.The NMNH collections serve as a national and international center for factualknowledge about the world in which we live. Whenever published interpretations arequestioned (e.g., in legal disputes), it is critical to be able to go back to the originalspecimens to check the facts. Often the only way to resolve a dispute over speciesidentification or the origin of a human cultural artifact is to refer to the original collections.Concern about high levels of mercury in tunas and swordfishes led scientists to ask aquestion that only museum specimens could answer. Has the level of mercury in fishes beenrising over time along with industrialization and pollution, or have fish naturally maintainedwhat we consider to be high mercury levels? Sampling of tissues in museum collectionsrevealed that mercury levels of tuna caught nearly a century ago, before widespreadpollution, are comparable to those of fishes living today. Some fishes may alwaysconcentrate a background level of mercury in their bodies. Therefore, mercury in fishestoday is not necessarily a result of their living in polluted waters.How long has Lyme disease been present in eastern North America? Museumcollections of ticks from the 1940's have been analyzed for the genetic indicators of thebacterium responsible for the disease. There is solid evidence that Lyme disease has beenpresent for at least 3 decades, long before it was recognized by doctors. Not only that, buteven older specimens show that Lyme disease has been present at some sites for muchlonger. The evidence from museum specimens and the information on when and where theywere collected has allowed researchers to trace the spread of the tick and the disease it bears.The NMNH bird collection is being used to help save human lives by identifying theremains of feathers from birds that get caught in airplane engines. One needs to identify thespecies in order to plan how to keep these birds away from airports or other heavily usedflyways. By comparing bits of feathers from the "birdstrikes" to the reference specimensthat are part of our extensive bird collection, researchers also can tell aircraft engine
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designers the weights of birds that are potential hazards, enabling them to produce a saferengine.Continued collecting and identification of the flora and fauna of the United Statesallows us to identify pests that threaten food production. Ongoing research by an NMNHEntomologist on a group of small, inconspicuous moths that are known pests in Europe andRussia unexpectedly revealed that one of these moth species exists in the U.S. The speciesin question, known as the Cereal Stem Moth, is an accidental import to our country and nowis recognized as an important threat to the winter wheat crop. Its identification, whichrequired the comprehensive collections at NMNH, allows agriculturalists to plan how tocontrol it before it expands its threat to our crops by referring to information from othercountries where the same species has been studied as a pest.The Museum's American Indian Program sponsored a recent visit to the NMNH forseven members of the Southern Cheyenne Tribe residing in western Oklahoma. Tribalmembers came to study and interpret objects crafted by their ancestors as much as 130 yearsago. Such visits benefit the tribal members because the collections tell them about theircultural past, and they also increased the value of the collections for future visitors bycontributing their knowledge about the objects to the Museum's information database.The Simian Immunodeficiency Virus occurs in African monkey specimens from theNMNH collections, which were collected between 1896 and 1971, long before the spread ofAIDS among humans. This strengthens the case for the recent evolution of HTV from themonkey virus and provides an essential historical perspective on the disease. An NMNHzoologist helped to pioneer this use of museum specimens in medical research.Some songbird species are disappearing, and the cause or causes are subject todebate. One hypothesis holds that their southern wintering grounds are being affected bydeforestation. In order to test this idea, we need to be able to trace where birds that breed inNorth America spend their winters. Now this can be done by analyzing the chemistry offeathers from specimens of the same species in NMNH collections. Preliminary resultsindicate that populations of the Black-throated Blue Warbler winter on several differentislands of the Caribbean. Linking declining species to specific wintering sites will becritically important for conservation planning. These are only a few of the many examplesof both basic and applied research based on the NMNH collections.
Question 34: How has the quality of life for the average American citizen beenimproved by this research?Answer: As demonstrated by the examples given in response to Question Number 33,the collections-based research at NMNH contributes daily to the present and future well-being of the average American by providing critical information on such things as the historyand context of disease and its vectors, the effects (or lack of effects) of pollution and otherforms of human impact on natural ecosystems, access to cultural history, safety in airplanedesign, and a myriad of other practical outcomes of work that is done by the Museum'sresearch staff and by outside scholars that use the NMNH collections.
277NMNH researchers use the collections to provide expert identifications and basicinformation to anyone who seeks their help, from U.S. government agencies to Universityprofessionals and students to the public at large. With the increase in media access to suchinformation, the collections will become even more accessible as a source of facts and ideasfor education and problem-solving. NMNH also provides training in museum curation andspecimen-based research for students, teachers, and professionals from the United States andmany different countries.NMNH also increases the quality of life by providing intellectual stimulation,education and enjoyment for a broad sector of the public, primarily through exhibitions andother outreach efforts that educate and inspire over 6 million visitors annually. The Museumallows visitors to explore aspects of the natural world around us and how we as humans arepart of that natural world. The impact of the "electronic museum" now planned to bringsuch educational experiences into homes and schools through the Internet will greatly expandthe impact of this role.
Electronic TransformationQuestion 35: Mr. Heyman, in one of your recent publications, you discuss the
"electronic transformation" that is underway at the Smithsonian. The purpose, you state, isto make knowledge available to as many citizens as possible and to allow that accessto be shaped by their needs.Can you give the committee a brief range of the options currently available throughthese various systems?Answer: The Smithsonian is currently using, and is further evaluating, a broad rangeof technologies to provide electronic access to the Institution's many audiences (the generalpublic, students, teachers, scholars, museum professionals, etc.). Appropriateness to missionand cost effectiveness are the primary decision criteria in devising the Institution's outreachstrategy. Initiatives currently underway include the Internet on-line access, Smithsonian On-line (through America On-line), a number of CD-ROM and interactive CD-ROMproductions, interactive distance learning, broadcast radio, and television. As a major holderof artifacts, the Institution's strategy is to distribute rich "content" through currentlyestablished delivery mechanisms (private networks, public networks, and other distributionchannels). The overall strategy is to use these technologies, in conjunction with moretraditionally delivered exhibits and scholarly work, to reach audiences throughout the nationand the world. As CD-ROM (multi-media), television, and radio, are discussed at somelength further in this section, the two key on-line initiatives underway will be addressed morespecifically in answer to this question.
Internet Access. Consistent with the goals originally established for this service,Internet was initially implemented at the Smithsonian to provide collaborativecapability for scholars and educators among the many communities of interest withwhich the Institution fosters participation. As the Internet's purpose has evolved, andits reach increased, the Institution's use has increased, and significant amounts ofadditional material (photographs, library catalogues, research material) have been
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made available. With the focus of the education community on providing Internetaccess more generally in schools, libraries, and in some instances, directly to thehome, the Smithsonian has begun to establish high quality material with bothphotography and text through the emerging Internet capability referred to as the
"world wide web". The Institution has ready for imminent release, a large amount ofgeneral information about the Smithsonian based on existing printed material and isbeginning to plan and implement specific electronic exhibits solely over the Internet,and in combination with more complex capabilities such as CD-ROM. Much of theeducation and library community will have immediate access upon release throughtheir existing Internet network access mechanisms. More general public access to thisservice is offered through "value added networks" (VAN) such as America On-line,CompuServe, and Prodigy.Smithsonian On-line. In non-exclusive partnership with a value added networksupplier, America On-line, the Smithsonian established an on-line capability in 1993.The difference between this service and the Internet capability is that the suppliermaintains the base of material on their equipment, it is available only to thesupplier's client base, and the Smithsonian receives a royalty on access fees paid bythe client base. This service contains over 500 photographs from across theInstitution, teacher's classroom materials, "frequently asked questions", bulletinboards, articles from various museums, schedules of exhibitions (including travelingexhibits), and standard visitor's information. Additional information and context willbe provided by the answers to the several following questions concerning theSmithsonian On-line and America On-line relationship.These two on-line initiatives are being pursued concurrently and without substantialduplication of effort. In conjunction with a major "shake-out" of this industry in thefollowing months, the Smithsonian anticipates that the two services will converge andrationalize (along with the network access and network content industries) into a singleservice with fee-based service providers focusing on more complex services such asknowledge "agents", credit card verification, and order provisioning (books, video, CD-ROMS, and other products). Most of the current services will be provided directly throughInternet via all access providers.
Question 36: How much revenue is generated by each initiative?Answer: The Institution currently generates no direct revenue through the use ofInternet. Internet does provide a medium by which the Smithsonian can reference productsthat are sold, such as CD-ROM, video, and books.From its June 28, 1993 launch through February 28, 1995, Smithsonian On-linegenerated $30,615.66 in payments to the Institution.
Question 37: What is the difference between your new public access program,described in your 96 budget (three pilot projects) and the SmithsonianOn-Line initiative?
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Answer: The three pilot projects described in the FY 1996 budget submission addressthe organization and digital imaging of significant portions of the collections in order to makethem available in electronic form. Digital information such as this is the primary source ofmaterial for electronic dissemination. The Smithsonian On-line initiative is the means bywhich that information can be disseminated to the public.
Question 38: How many current subscribers does America On-line have?Answer: According to their estimates, America On-line surpassed two millionsubscribers in February of 1995.
Question 39: Who are the principal users of America On-line?Answer: According to America On-line, American households are their primaryusers followed by businesses and some schools. They estimate that about five per cent of allpre-college schools across the country have an America On-line account.
Question 40: How much revenue is generated from this service and how have thoserevenues been used?Answer: The revenue generated to date ($30,615.66 since the June 28, 1993 launch)has been used to support the service (equipment and technical services).
Question 41 : What museums and galleries are currently involved with AmericaOn-line?Answer: As of March 1, 1995, the following units offer services over SmithsonianOn-line: National Museum of American Art, National Museum of American History, threemajor divisions of the National Museum of Natural History, National Zoological Park, Officeof Architectural History and Historic Preservation, Office of Elementary and SecondaryEducation, Office of Telecommunications, Smithsonian and Smithsonian I Air & Spacemagazines, Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, and the Visitor Informationand Associates' Reception Center.
Question 42: Is there an effort to increase the data base to other museums andgalleries?Answer: Many other parts of the Institution are preparing to join Smithsonian On-line. Several are in the process of developing services for launch in 1995 including theCenter for Museum Studies, Sackler Gallery/Freer Gallery of Art, National Portrait Gallery,Folkways Recordings, and The Smithsonian Associates. A number of others are planninglater implementations.
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Question 43: The Smithsonian has made significant entries into television and radioand other multimedia products have been created with Smithsonian participation. Can yougive the committee a summary of these activities?Answer: Over the years the Smithsonian has been engaged in a number of discreteventures in electronic media, including television, video, radio, and more recently,multimedia and on-line services. Today, in the latter areas especially, many of theInstitution's museums and research institutes, as well as several central units, are exploringprojects in interactive media and establishing presences on-line.The Smithsonian made its most significant entry into television with the PBS series,Smithsonian World , a co-production with WETA-TV. Thirty-eight programs aired in thisseries from 1984 to 1991. Some of the programs have had subsequent airings in syndicationand on The Learning Channel, and the series is now being licensed internationally. Themajor funders were the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, followed by Southwestern BellCorporation. In 1991 Southwestern Bell decided not to continue its support, and because ofthe timing of the decision, the Smithsonian and WETA concluded they could not mount asuccessful campaign to find a replacement.The Institution is now represented by two series on cable television. The SmithsonianPresents Invention is produced and broadcast by The Discovery Channel and will soon enterits sixth season. Under another agreement, Hearst Entertainment is working with theInstitution to produce a series called Smithsonian Expedition Specials , broadcast on the Artsand Entertainment Network. Previously Discovery produced and broadcast a 13-programseries called Frontiers of Flight, in conjunction with the National Air and Space Museum.Another series, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World , was producedin cooperation with the Smithsonian in 1992, to mark the Columbus Quincentenary. Theseries aired on The Discovery Channel and on various networks in Europe.
Additional single programs, produced primarily by the Smithsonian's Office ofTelecommunications, have been broadcast over PBS and sold on videocassette. Titlesinclude "The Movie Palaces," "Dream Window: Reflections on the Japanese Garden," "TheWork of Peace," "Yorktown," "Our Biosphere: The Earth in Our Hands," and "In OpenAir: A Portrait of the American Impressionists. " Another series of six programs, calledthe Smithsonian Video Collection, was produced specifically for the home video market.Titles in that series included "The Flying Machines," "Dinosaurs," "Insects," "Gems andMinerals," "First Ladies," and "The National Zoo." Under an agreement with the ProductDevelopment and Licensing Division of the Business Management Office, an independentlicensee produced the series Smithsonian's Great Battles of the Civil War , sold onvideocassette and now airing on The Learning Channel. Working with Air andSpace/Smithsonian magazine, Sunwest Media Productions produced a video series titledDreams of Flight that also was marketed on videocassette.A number of multimedia products have been created with Smithsonian participation,and many more are now being explored. The Smithsonian has an ongoing relationship withPhilips Interactive Media of America for production and distribution of CD-i and, now, CD-ROM software. Thus far, this collaboration has yielded five discs, the latest being twoprograms on blues music, "The Uptown Blues" and "The Downhome Blues." Production is
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just beginning on the next disc in the series "Information Age. " Working closely with theNational Zoo, Computer Curriculum Corporation developed two laserdisc/CD-ROMprograms title "Amazonia" and "Virtual Biopark," primarily for school use. The NationalMuseum of American History has initiated two CD-ROM projects: "Smithsonian'sAmerica," based on a major exhibition mounted by the Smithsonian at the American FestivalJapan '94, and "Science in American Life," part of a curriculum kit based on a newpermanent exhibition at the museum. Under an agreement initiated by the ProductDevelopment and Licensing Division of the Business Management Office, PerspectiveVisuals, Inc., produced a CD-ROM program titled "Dinosaur Museum," working with theNational Museum of Natural History. The agreement with Perspective Visuals calls foradditional titles in the future. Additionally, Discovery Channel Interactive is now creating aCD-ROM to be released this spring in conjunction with the upcoming "Ocean Planet"exhibition at the Museum of Natural History. Smithsonian units have also been involved inproduction of a number of CD-ROM titles intended primarily as reference tools. A primeexample is the "Permanent Collection of Notable Americans," a guide to the collections ofthe National Portrait Gallery.A number of Smithsonian units have developed web sites on the Internet. At presentthese are maintained completely by the individual units. The Institution's new SeniorInformation Officer has mounted a major effort to establish a Smithsonian Home Page on theweb, providing a large volume of information on all the Smithsonian museums, research andexhibition activities, publications and products. The Home Page provides a central
"gateway" to the Smithsonian on the Internet, allowing the user to access all the web siteslocated within the Institution.Various Smithsonian museums and other units have established presences oncommercial on-line services, most prominently on America On-line. America On-line givesa high profile to Smithsonian On-line, and a number of units have begun to makesophisticated use of this venue. The National Museum of American Art has been especiallyproactive, placing a broad sampling of its collections, exhibitions, and publications on-lineand drawing strong participation in interactive dialogues between users and museum staff.There is some Smithsonian involvement on a much lower level on CompuServe, Prodigy,and Genie, primarily through banks of photographic images from the Smithsonian.
In recent years the Institution has also greatly expanded its presence on radio. RadioSmithsonian, the radio arm of the Office of Telecommunications has two ongoing series onpublic radio, Folk Masters and Jazz Smithsonian . A previous series, Spirits of the Present:The Legacy from Native America was heard on more stations than any other documentaryseries in the history of public radio. Now in production is a 13-part series, Black Radio:The History of African Americans on Radio , set to premiere in the fall of 1995. BerniceReagon, curator emeritus at the National Museum of American History, collaborated withNational Public Radio to produce the very successful series, Wade in the Water , focusing onAfrican American sacred music. Future plans call for additional science and music projectsand exploration of non-broadcast and on-line audio services.
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Question 44: How much revenue is generated from these activities?Answer: For fiscal year 1994, the net revenues from sales and licensing of videoprograms, films, interactive, and computer programs totaled approximately $296,000.
Question 45: How will these revenues be used?Answer: The revenues are used to augment funding for the Institution's educationalprograms, research, exhibitions, and public programs, as well as to fund the ongoingmanagement, development, production, marketing, and distribution of media projects.Question 46: Are other ventures being currently considered?Answer: As discussed in response to Question number 49, the Institution places greatimportance on digitization of its collections, as a critical means of expanding public access tothe Smithsonian's resources. While the digitization itself will not yield revenue, and indeedrequires funding that is not currently at hand, the digitized images can themselves becomeresources from which new products can be developed, particularly in the multimedia realm.These possibilities are now being explored in a preliminary way with major companies in thefield.
In conjunction with the Smithsonian's 150th anniversary in 1996, the Institution isseeking a broadcast partner to present major programs to a national audience. Under currentplans, these would include: two prime-time specials, one airing in January 1996, and theother at the time of the official anniversary in August; a series of "Smithsonian Minutes" tobe broadcast throughout the year; and possible feature segments to appear on newsmagazineprograms of the network partner.The Institution is examining various possible strategies for establishing an ongoing,comprehensive electronic presence for the Smithsonian via some combination of cable,satellite, video dialtone, and broadcast television. Several members of the Smithsonian staffhave proposed a broad conceptual framework for such a venture.Several new television projects are now under active consideration. A contract wasrecently signed with Lancit Media, Inc., a major producer of children's programming, tocreate plans for a Smithsonian TV series for 8- to 12-year-olds. Limited series now indevelopment are A River of Song , a four-hour series celebrating the rich variety of musicfound along the Mississippi River, and If This House Could Talk , an original look at aspectsof our history through famous and distinctive American homes.The Office of Telecommunications, the Smithsonian Institution Press, and ProductDevelopment and Licensing, as well as several museums, are actively exploring majorrelationships for creation of CD-ROM and other interactive titles. The three central unitsnamed have recently begun to coordinate their activities in this area. In this way the unitsaim to maximize the effectiveness of their efforts and achieve the greatest impact inmultimedia for the Smithsonian.
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In future years, the Office of Telecommunications, through its Radio Smithsonianarm, intends to further expand the Institution's presence on radio, both public andcommercial. Current plans call for additional science and music projects and exploration ofnon-broadcast and on-line audio services.
Question 47: How much revenue was generated this past year from the Smithsonianmagazine, gift stores, CD's and other similar ventures?Answer: In FY 1994 the business activities contributed a total of $15.1 million to theUnrestricted Trust budget of the Institution. These activities include Smithsonian Magazineand Air and Space Magazine, Smithsonian Press, Mail Order, Museum Shops, Concessions,Product Development and Licensing, and Media Activities.
Question 48: Was this an increase or decrease over FY 94?Answer: Revenues in FY 1994 reflect a decrease of $1.3 million from FY 1993.Revenues from the same activities totalled $16.4 million in FY 1993.
New Public Access ProgramQuestion 49: You admit in your justification that public access to Smithsoniancollections and information is poor. The budget requests additional funds for three pilotprojects to accelerate modernization of the information technology infrastructure that willprovide greater access to the general public who cannot always travel to Washington D.C. Iffunded, how extensive will this system be when fully implemented?Answer: The three pilot projects for which funding has been requested are critical tothe Institution's efforts to provide more extensive electronic access to the collection ?particularly on-line access. These projects, one for each of the art, history, and sciencecommunities, provide for the development of the electronic collection's structure andorganization as well as for the development of the necessary methodologies to manage thelogistics of digitally imaging one hundred and forty million objects. These systems will be
"functionally" extensive but rather limited in the actual amount of material digitized. As wasindicated in the Secretary's testimony, digitization of the collection will require considerableresources and other funding mechanisms must be (and are being) investigated and pursued.The strategy is to develop a large, well-organized digital repository of source images andtext. This can be efficiently accessed and creatively used for multiple purposes and deliveredover different types of electronic media ("re-purposing" in the industry's term).
Question 50: Who would have access to the information?Answer: Broad public access will be provided through delivery mechanisms currentlyin place, or in development, by the public and private sector.
Question 51: Specifically, how will schools and private citizens access theinformation?Answer: Perhaps it is important to underscore that no on-line access is free. Internetis a powerful "network of networks" but requires some basic "access service provider" toconnect the user. Research institutions and higher education entities use large accessproviders through high speed links costing two to three thousand dollars per month. Thegeneral public, libraries, and schools typically use lower speed services (such as AmericaOn-line, CompuServe, Prodigy, and a number of newspaper publishers) to individuallocations at twenty to thirty dollars per month. There is a high level of activity in theeducation and library communities to establish comprehensive networks (throughcommercially available means and otherwise) with capability to provide Internet and anumber of other distance education technologies. The Institution is approaching citizenaccess on a very broad front endeavoring to provide the most cost effective approach for aparticular audience or purpose over the long term.
Question 52: What is the current plan for phased funding and how long will it taketo be fully operational?Answer: Phasing is different for different museums. In the case of the art museums,digital imaging of their collections, which are relatively small and consist mostly of two-dimensional paintings, prints, and drawings, is underway at a rapid pace, and projects tocreate high quality, electronic exhibits are being developed. Museums with larger, morecomplex collections, such as those of Natural History and American History, have requiredconsiderably more effort to identify priorities for imaging and logistics for doing so on alarge scale, processes which are likely to extend over the next five to seven years.
Question 53: Will there be a fee charged to the user?Answer: The Smithsonian currently does not anticipate charging direct fees to usersof Smithsonian electronic services. As was indicated in the answer to Question number 5 1
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there are costs associated with on-line access.
Question 54: Can you briefly describe your pilot projects?Answer: The three pilot projects, one for each of the art, history, and sciencecommunities, provide for the development of the electronic collection's structure andorganization as well as for the development of the necessary methodologies to manage thelogistics of digitally imaging the collections. See the response to Question number 49 foradditional information.
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Question 55: Since not all Americans can or will travel to Washington, D.C. ,and their tax dollars pay for a large part of the Smithsonian budget, would you say thatimplementing this information highway system should be a higher priority than some of thenew, major construction projects?Answer: It is obvious that the Institution will have to make hard choices and setpriorities for the use of its resources. Modern technology allows the Institution to serve theAmerican people in ways we were never able to before. Bringing the Smithsonian toAmerica is an exciting prospect. This does not diminish, however, our responsibility tomaintain historic facilities in Washington D.C. for the millions of visitors that arrive eachyear or to care for the national collections.Constructing the Smithsonian's lane of the information highway will be expensive,and the Secretary is already engaged in serious exploration of public/private partnerships tomake it happen. Constructing new facilities and maintaining current facilities will be equallyexpensive. Where possible we will endeavor to generate private funding for those facilities.The National Museum of the American Indian and the Air and Space extension at Dullesboth require significant private support.The Secretary has initiated a strategic planning process, scheduled to be completed bythe end of this fiscal year, that will serve to focus the Institution on its priorities for thefuture. As part of that planning process, issues such as the appropriate level of resources forinformation technology versus the appropriate level for the construction and maintenance offacilities will be addressed.
Question 56: As federal budgets decline, priority setting becomes increasinglyimportant. Has the Smithsonian seriously considered delaying major new buildingconstruction until: your collections can be downsized; greater access to collections andinformation is available to all Americans; more private cost-sharing can be attained for majorconstruction initiatives?Answer: The subject of collections acquisition, care and deaccession will be a majorcomponent of the Secretary's strategic planning process. The national collections are at theheart of the Institution. They are the basis for research, exhibitions, public and educationalprograms, and indeed, the reason to be on the information highway. How they areconserved and maintained is integral to the Smithsonian's continued operations. The issue ofdownsizing the collections through such mechanisms as long-term loans will be carefullyconsidered in the strategic plan. The results of this process will inform the discussions ofconstruction requirements.Planned construction of facilities such as the Air and Space extension which isnecessary to conserve the collections is wholly dependent on the Institution's ability to raisefunding in the private sector to support it. Likewise, the construction of the NationalMuseum of the American Indian requires that the Institution raise one third of theconstruction costs. The Institution is extremely conscious of the need to generate sources offunds other than those received from the Federal government.
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Salaries and Expenses AccountQuestion 57: The FY 1996 request for S&E is $329.8 million, $14.3 million abovethe FY 1995 base. Mandatory increases for pay, utilities, rent etc. accounts for $4.8 millionof the increase. Can you explain the balance? What programs or projects are associatedwith the increases?Answer: The increases above those for pay, utilities and rent include $2.6 million foroperational support of new facilities which have been funded through the Institution's capitalaccounts ($1.1 million), as well as for administration of the Repair and Restoration program($1.5 million). An additional $4.3 million is requested to continue development of theNational Museum of the American Indian; $0.7 million to complete development of theSubmillimeter Telescope Array at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory; and,$2.1 million to increase public access to the Institution's collections through expansion of theInstitution's automated collections management programs.
Question 58: How many federal and trust fund positions have been eliminated as aresult of the federal buyout program?Answer: As a result of the buyout program, the Institution eliminated 206 Federalpositions and 23 trust fund positions.
Question 59: Do you intend on offering a last round of voluntary buy-outs prior toMarch 31 when the program ends?Answer: The Institution does not intend to offer a last round of buy-outs. TheInstitution has offered early outs in March 1995. Five employees applied and were accepted.
Question 60: What is the total number of reductions in FTE's required to meet thePresident's five year downsizing plan?Answer: The total number of reductions from FY 1993 to FY 1999 associated withthe President's downsizing plan amounts to 571 FTE's - 12% of the Institution's federalworkforce.
Question 61: How do you intend to achieve these reductions - attrition, rifs?Answer: The reductions through FY 1995 have been achieved through theInstitution's FY 1993/FY 1994 restructuring and the recent buyout program. A portion ofthe FY 1996 reductions (18) has also been achieved through the FY 1995 buyout program.The remaining reductions through FY 1999 will be achieved through a combination offurther restructuring, reductions in force, and attrition.
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Question 62: Your budget states that there are mandatory increases for facilitiesoperations. What is the total budget and FEB increase associated with new and expandedfacilities projects funded through the capital account?Answer: The Institution has requested a total budget increase of $1.05 million and1 1 positions associated with new or expanded facilities. This increase is broken down asfollows: $000 FTESmithsonian Tropical Research InstituteNational Zoological Park (Amazonia)National Museum of Natural History(East Court)Cooper-Hewitt Museum
Total 1,050 11
Question 63: Your budget lists the following key projects which are either underwayor completed: Tropical Research Institute in Panama, the National Zoo, Cooper Hewitt inNew York, and the Natural History Museum. Which of these projects would you consideressential to the mission of the Smithsonian, critical as far as health and safety issues andideal to have under the best of financial situations?Answer: All of the projects are consistent with the mission of the Smithsonian andessential to its execution. Their presence in the budget request reflects the Institution'sinternal process of prioritizing its needs and seeking funding for those most critical. At theNational Zoo, the Amazonia exhibit, widely hailed for its inventiveness and rich learningpossibilities, remains only partially utilized because funds have not been available to fullystaff it with qualified personnel. At the Tropical Research Institute, funding for themaintenance of air conditioning and fire and sprinkler systems is crucial for reasons of healthand safety and for the achievement of program objectives.
Question 64: Can any of the ongoing, non-essential projects be delayed? I amparticularly interested in ongoing projects at the National Zoo? (Grasslands, AquaticTrail etc.)Answer: Delaying these projects could have a wide range of consequences. Thecontinuing process of exhibit upgrading at the Zoo is a necessity for a number of reasons.The scrutiny of exhibits by animal rights groups, which are increasingly active, exert publicpressure on zoos throughout the country. Delaying the process of enhancing animal welfareand exhibit quality could expose the Institution to public protests and media attention.Congressional construction support has enabled the National Zoo to eliminate orupgrade many of the outdated exhibits and greatly enhance the lives of the animals. Theconstruction of Living in Water, Phase One of the Aquatic Trail will totally refurbish the old
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wetlands exhibit as a modem educational experience highlighting issues such as the clean-upand restoration of our national freshwater areas, particularly rivers. In the process it willgreatly increase the security of a presently underutilized area of ponds close to Rock Creekand a major visitor access point. The Grasslands Exhibit will modernize an obsolete exhibitarea close to two major visitor entrances and greatly enhance the visitors access and safety.It will particularly expedite the entrance of burgeoning school groups. The educational valueof these exhibits will be dramatically increased. Obsolete animal holding facilities, givingrise to welfare concerns, will be eliminated.
National Museum of the American IndianQuestion 65: Thirty new positions and $4.3 million is requested for the NationalMuseum of the American Indian. I assume both the Kit's and the funds relate to both theCustoms House in New York and the planned new construction of the collections center inSuitland. Maryland. What will be the total annual operating costs and Kit requirements forthe Custom House. Suitland facility and the Mall museum, if built?Answer: The following chart outlines the National Museum for the AmericanIndian's anticipated FTE and operating requirements for FY 1995 through FY 2001.
National Museum of the American Indian Operating Costs
Facility
FY 1995 FY 1996 FY 1997 FY 1998 FY 1999 FY 2000 FY 2001FTE $000 FTE $000 FTE $000 FTE $000 FTE $000 FTE $000 FTE $000
Mall - - - 131 - 3,833 159 19,392CustomHouse 61 6.270 67 6.816 78 9.431 78 9,834 78 8,989 78 9,046 78 9,057Suitland - - - 137 10 3,990 18 6.124 42 7,977 57 9,386 67 10,276Bronx 43 3,775 46 4,380 54 5,369 54 5,369 31 3.704 19 2,613 9 2,053DC 48 5.292 56 6,048 77 7.079 81 7,441 95 8,370 105 9,483 - -
Note: Operating costs include salaries/benefits for NMAI staff, direct (NMAI) and indirect (other SI offices) support coats. SI officesproviding NMAI support include: Office of Protection Services, Office of Plant Services, (including Utilities), and SI Libraries at the Suitlandfacility. Move costs and one-time start-up costs such as furnishings, computer equipment, andconservation-related equipment, are as follows:
National Museum of the American Indian Move and One-Tune Start-up CostsFY 1996$000 FY 1997$000 FY 1998$000 FY 1999$000 FY 2000$000 I"V 2001$000One Time 1.826 5,496 1.837 7.200 12,500 3.500Move 1.065 2,169 2,129 2.129 2.129
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Question 66: What will be the total federal commitment for planning, design andconstruction? And the private financial commitment?Answer: The total federal commitment for planning, design and construction for theSuitland facility will be $50 million. At present, no private contributions are planned forthese expenses. For the Mall facility, the federal contribution is expected to be $73.3million, or two-thirds the total cost. The Institution is required by the legislation to raise onethird of the cost of construction for the Mall museum. To date we have raised over $27million of the $36.7 million we are required to raise.
Question 67: Has there been a financial commitment from Native Americans forany of these facilities?Answer: Yes. Native Americans have contributed to the National Museum of theAmerican Indian construction and endowment funds. Most notable is the $10 millioncontribution received from the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.
Scientific New EquipmentQuestion 68: An additional $650,000 and 6 positions would support continueddevelopment of the submillimeter telescope array project located in Hilo, Hawaii.When will this project be completed and what will be the total federal construction,acquisition and operating costs?Answer: The Institution expects the submillimeter telescope array to be completed byFY 1998. Total Federal construction and acquisition costs are projected to be slightly lessthan $50 million. Operating costs are projected to be $5 million per year. These costs, withallowance for actual inflation, are within the budget developed when the project wasproposed eleven years ago. With approval for the requested funding in FY 1996, allpersonnel will be in place and about 60% of the operating costs will already be included inthe SAO base when operations begin.
Question 69: What is the mission of the project and equipment?Answer: The last frontier for ground-based astronomy is observing the skies withtelescopes sensitive to submillimeter waves, invisible light with wavelengths between those ofinfrared and radio waves. The submillimeter telescope array will play a major role inunderstanding the enigmatic processes by which stars form, including our sun, and themechanisms that generate prodigious amounts of energy in quasars and in the centers ofactive galaxies. The array will also be used to study objects closer to home, providing newinformation on the surfaces and atmospheres of planets and other objects in our solar systemincluding comets, which from time to time impact the Earth, sometimes with devastatingconsequences. Because the array will open a new window on the universe, it will also likelylead to wholly unanticipated discoveries.
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Question 70: Can you give the committee examples of the types of practicalapplications that might result from research using this new equipment?Answer: Development of the array requires the fabrication of extremely sensitivereceivers that may have very significant applications in opening up channels forcommunications on Earth, outside the ever-more-crowded range of frequencies currentlyavailable for such communications. Results from the array may also play a role in thedevelopment of future energy sources. In the twenty-first century fossil fuel reserves will beincreasingly depleted and will have to be replaced by other, as yet undeveloped, energysources. One such source will likely be the extraction of energy from fusion, the source ofenergy that powers the sun by converting hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. Theastronomical universe provides a much larger laboratory than any we could ever hope toconstruct on the earth to study how energy from fusion can be turned into useful forms. Thearray will be used to study astrophysical phenomena where electrically charged gases play anessential role. Determining the role of such plasmas in star formation and in the energyproduction in quasars and active galaxies may provide important insights into processesneeded to extract energy on Earth from fusion.
Question 71: Are there other facilities with this capacity?Answer: No. The submillimeter telescope array will be unique in the world byvirtue of the unprecedented combination of its ability to observe wavelengths betweeninfrared and radio waves and to resolve fine spatial details.
Question 72: Your request included $36.3 million in no-year funds to remainavailable until expended. This involves support for the upgrade of major scientificequipment, new collections acquisition, and the new museum support center in Suitland toname a few. How are priority decisions made to upgrade or replace equipment?Answer: Each unit of the Smithsonian has an equipment replacement plan based onrates of obsolescence of both research and administrative equipment. Replacement is basedupon both equipment condition and enhanced capability of new generations of equipment.
Question 73: What has been spent to date on the support center, how much will berequired to complete the project, and when will the collections move be completed?Answer: The Museum Support Center (MSC) was constructed from 1981-1983 at acost of $29.5 million. Until the design is completed for the High Bay and the completion ofthe Pod 3 wet collection storage systems, the total costs of the MSC storage equipmentcannot be firmly estimated. The present assumption is that the current funding level of$2,184 million to procure and install the MSC storage equipment will be needed through atleast FY 1997. The Institution anticipates that the current funding level of $1.3 million forthe move will need to be maintained through at least FY 2001 to complete the move to theMSC.
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Question 74: What process does the Institution use to purchase new objects for thecollections? Are the decisions made by the Director of a museum, gallery or is the Secretaryor the Board of Regents involved?Answer: Once the Secretary has approved a museum's collecting policy, majoracquisition decisions are made by its advisory board, with the director given discretion up toa certain dollar amount.
Latino InitiativeQuestion 75: The budget again requests funding of $998,000 for the Latino Initiative.Your budget justifications mentions pilot projects and the desire to attract matching andeventually, sustaining funding from private sources. Can you explain the rationale behindinitiating this program?Answer: This program seeks to stimulate a series of coordinated activities focusingon Latinos throughout the Smithsonian. Taken as a whole, such activities will address theurgent need for the inclusion of Latino art, culture, and history in the Institution's exhibitionsand public programs. The activities will energize sectors of the Smithsonian that areparticularly sensitive to the opportunities inherent in Latino-related programs, therebycreating a "multiplier effect" that will: a) re-orient unit priorities, and b) open the possibilityof significant outside funding.
Latinos constitute approximately 10 percent of the U.S. population. They are thesingle largest potential new national audience for the Smithsonian, but their rate of visitationto the museums and their patronage of SI services and products is comparatively very low.We are convinced that the national Latino community can be brought to the Smithsonian notonly as museum visitors and clients, but indeed as contributors and benefactors. The LatinoInitiatives pool gives us the opportunity to "jump start" several key projects with remarkablepotential to become self-sustaining.
Question 76: By the above statement, one could easily conclude that you do notenvision this program remaining a special line item indefinitely. When would you projectthe program being self-sustaining and no longer requiring federal appropriations?Answer: The Institution does not envision that this program will remain a special lineitem indefinitely and expects that it will become self-sufficient in three to five years.
Question 77: Can you describe some of your pilot projects?Answer: The National Museum of American Art seeks to present a major exhibitionof Latino art by 1998. Such an exhibition would not be feasible now given the still relativelymeager inventory of first rate works in the field held at the NMAA. As a result the Latinopool, the Museum is undertaking a sharply targeted, systematic program of acquisitions that
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will make the exhibition possible in three years' time. Meanwhile, the Museum isdeveloping an educational package for schools (none now exists) that will attract attentionfrom educators nationwide. These projects hold excellent potential to attract major corporatefunding. However, a level of credibility needs to be attained before any funding effortsucceeds. The National Museum of American History and the Hirshhorn Museum andSculpture Gardens are in essentially similar circumstances.The Cooper-Hewitt Museum will use funds from the Latino Initiative to include aLatino designer in its "Designers' Choice" series of exhibits. This, and the fact that theMuseum has initiated a "Latino Design Archives," will make the Museum an attractiveprospect for Latino-oriented outreach and fundraising in a metropolitan area containing oneof the largest Latino populations in the nation.
This summer, the Smithsonian's Center for Museum Studies will host 15 Latinograduate students at the Qualitative Methods Seminar for a "total immersion" exposure to theSmithsonian world. Many of those students are contemplating careers in the museum andkindred fields. They exert an immediate and vitalizing effect on museum staff, bringing tothe forefront critical perspectives and "can do" and "why not?" attitudes. This program ispossible in the summer of 1995 thanks to the Latino pool.
Question 78: Has there been any private contributions to date?Answer: Yes, the Qualitative Methods Seminar to be held in the summer of 1995 hasattracted matching funds from the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, aconsortium of nine universities with Latino Studies programs.
Question 79: What source of funding do you envision supporting this programprospectively?Answer: We expect that these programs will eventually become established withinthe diverse units' portfolio of normal offerings. The Latino Initiatives pool, moreover, offersa significant opportunity to generate corporate and philanthropic support, especially as part ofthe Smithsonian's 150th Anniversary effort. Each museum receiving funding from theLatino Initiatives pool has been asked to submit a matching plan.
Question 80: What would be the impact of eliminating federal funding for thisinitiative? Could it be funded with unrestricted trust funds?Answer: The elimination of federal funding at this stage will set back Latino-relatedinitiatives by several years. To the extent possible, unrestricted trust funds have beenallocated to this effect through such mechanisms as the Special Exhibition and theEducational Outreach funds. The loss of the request for FY 1996 would be unfortunate.This would be especially so at a time when the Smithsonian is beginning to make progress,however modest, and when the prospect of successful fundraising activities vis-a-vis Latinoaudiences is more promising than ever.
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Astrophysical Observatory Salaries & ExpensesQuestion 81: The budget for the Astrophysical Observatory remains constant;however, there is a slight increase for scientific equipment.Can you give the Committee several examples of significant advance or discoveriesmade at the facility?Answer: Instruments originally developed by SAO scientists for astrophysicalmeasurements have been used by them to study the abundance of bromine, a key destroyer ofozone in the stratosphere. SAO scientists also have made significant advances in studies ofinterpreting astrophysical phenomena. SAO scientists have discovered that the hugeaggregates of stars called galaxies are not scattered randomly throughout space, as previouslybelieved, but instead are confined to the surfaces of giant "bubbles" and to huge "greatwalls" that extend across much of the observed universe. These structures have baffledtheorists; explaining these features may turn out to have unexpected consequences for ourunderstanding of nature. Most recently, SAO scientists and their colleagues discovered aremarkable rotating disk of matter in a distant galaxy. The only convincing explanation forthis phenomenon requires the existence at the center of the disk of a supermassive blackhole, an object so dense that not even light can escape from its grip; it likely contains enoughmatter to make forty million stars the size of the sun. Continued study of this spectacularobject may yield many surprises and an improved understanding of how galaxies, includingour own Milky Way, have formed.
Question 82: What are the practical applications of these advancements?Answer: A technique developed by SAO scientists studying fundamental atomicproperties of matter shows great promise for aiding the early detection of multiple-sclerosislesions and breast cancer. SAO scientists are collaborating with physicians at Boston'sBrigham and Women's Hospital to develop the full potential of this new technology. OtherSAO scientists have applied unique instrumentation developed for astrophysical purposes tostudying the chemistry of the Earth's upper atmosphere. Their measurements are vital forpredicting the future severity of ozone depletion. In many cases, however, importantpractical applications of advancements in basic research made at SAO may not becomeapparent for many years.
Question 83: Does this program have an educational component?Answer: SAO has a very successful continuing program of developing materials andcurricula for precollege science courses and conducting workshops and summer institutes tohelp precollege teachers to enhance their competency in science. Students lack of facility inscience and mathematics has been a major national concern for more than a decade. Thisnational problem led SAO to develop the first astronomy high-school text to be written in thiscentury. The STAR (Science Teaching through its Astronomical Roots) project, consistingof this text and integrated hands-on activities, builds on students' interest in astronomy toteach science and mathematics. SAO also developed an award-winning video, A Private
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Universe, that highlights problems in teaching science. This video has become the basis fora series of television programs on science education being prepared by SAO for broadcast onPBS this fall.
Question 84: If so, for which grade levels is the program designed?Answer: SAO's programs cover the entire range of precollege schooling fromkindergarten to senior high school. SAO is creating discovery-based elementary-schoolscience curricula using astronomy as its unifying theme, producing videos designed tosupport K-8 teachers in teaching science, and developing a set of junior high-school Earthscience activities in which students learn to interpret satellite imagery. SAO also regularlyconducts summer institutes of precollege teachers to enhance their understanding of scienceand to provide them with materials they can use in their classrooms.
Question 85: If the new information system is completed, will this information beaccessible to all Americans?
-Answer: All materials developed by SAO are accessible to all Americans.
Tropical Research Institute (Panama) Salaries & ExpensesQuestion 86: There is a $128,000 increase proposed in FY 1996. This is directlytied to the completion of major construction and renovation projects which added 95,000square feet of space to the facilities in Panama. What was the total cost of the project andhow many FTEs are involved?Answer: The proposed increase for FY 1996 is for operational costs associated withvarious construction and renovation projects carried out under a facilities Master Planapproved by the Smithsonian Regents and authorized by Congress in 1986. The total Federalcost of the five construction and renovation projects at the Tropical Research Institute whichinvolve the 95,000 sq. ft. has been $5.1 million in Federal funds. The Institution is notrequesting FTEs for FY 1996 because the proposed increase will be used to secure therequired contract services for the maintenance of vital systems, such as air conditioning,security, mechanical and elevator services.
Question 87: What are the annual operational costs?Answer: The proposed increase of $128,000 will augment $1,226,000 and 39 FTEswhich is the existing building maintenance base for all STRI facilities.
Question 88: Your budget states that the facility houses 33 resident scientist and over250 visiting researchers from other countries. Was there any cost sharing involved with theconstruction or operation of the facilities from either the private sector or other countries?
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Answer: Between 1986 and 1989 we received a $4 million contribution from aprivate donor to construct our major research laboratory, the Tupper Research andconference Center. Additional cost sharing from the private sector for the construction andrenovation of projects addressed in Question number 86 has amounted to about $1.4 million.These include funding to renovate facilities that house our paleoecology and marine biologyprograms, to renovate and expand our Library, and the purchase of a crane for canopyresearch through funding from Finland, Germany and Norway via the United NationsEnvironmental Program. Our research operations have been supported during this sameperiod by $5,370,000 in private grants and contracts. Additionally, our host country(Panama) has provided land at no cost and the waiver of customs duties for all Instituteimportations.
Question 89: Is there any charge associated with those 250 visiting researchers?Answer: Visiting researchers are charged fees for the use of STRI facilities. Forexample, from $150,000 to $200,000 in fees are collected annually for the use of the BarroColorado field station which are deposited in the Barro Colorado Trust Fund(20 U.S.C. Sec. 79 et seq.) and are used to support the operation and protection of thisfacility. Most of the visitors to STRI, however, are graduate students from universities inthe United States whose expenses are subsidized. Without basic support from STRI, theseunique facilities would not be available for the research community, including the futuregenerations of American scientists.
Question 90: Are there any other private or public facilities either in the U.S. orabroad conducting similar research?Answer: No other U.S. or international institution conducts research in the full rangeof tropical biology, including programs on tropical rainforests, long-term marine andterrestrial environmental science monitoring, marine ecology (especially coral reefs),molecular evolution and past global change. The only other U.S. sponsored activity in thetropics is the Organization of Tropical Studies (OTS), based in Costa Rica, and funded by aconsortium of about 50 U.S. universities and Costa Rican organizations. The OTSconcentrates mainly on educational activities, lacks a marine program, and does not maintaina permanent staff of scientists. The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute maintains theonly major U.S. research facilities in the mainland New World tropics. This uniquegeographic location enables our researchers to access protected forest areas, and compare andcontrast the different marine systems of the tropical Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
Question 91: What is the primary mission of the Tropical Research Institute inPanama?Answer: The primary mission of the Tropical Research Institute in Panama is tosupport research, education and conservation of tropical ecosystems conducted by it'sresident staff, fellows and visitir scientists from the U.S. and around the world. In 1994,362 visitors came from 41 nations, representing 1 10 institutions. The Institute is also
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custodian of the Barro Colorado Nature Monument as designated in the Panama CanalTreaties of 1977 under the Convention of Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation in theWestern Hemisphere to which both the U.S. and Panama are signatories.
Question 92: What major contributions have been made by STRI researchers?Answer: STRI publishes 200-300 scientific articles per year. Major contributionsmade by STRI researchers have included the following:
1
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Studies on African Bees.STRI has pioneered studies of the migration of the Africanized honey bees and theirimpact upon the ecology of native plants and animals. STRI also helped to developmethods of control and public health management of swarms.
2. Studies on the Evolution of Virulence.Research on the relationship of figs, their wasp pollinators, and their nematodeparasites has revolutionized the approach to controlling virulent diseases, includinghuman epidemics, such as AIDS and other easily transmitted viruses.
3. Studies on Canopy Biology.STRI installed the first construction crane for safe access to the previouslyinaccessible tropical forest canopy. This is the area where most terrestrialphotosynthesis and gas exchange between the atmosphere and geosphere occurs. On alarge scale these processes strongly affect global climate, and the canopy is also thearea of greatest biological diversity, mostly undescribed.
4. C02 Enhancement and Plant Growth.Large scale experiments in the open forest of Barro Colorado Island are testing theperformance of forest trees under elevated C02 conditions, one of the predicatedfuture effects of global climatic change. This is the only location where such studiesare being conducted, in situ, on tropical forest species.
6. The Dynamics of Tropical Forests.STRI's creation of the Center for Tropical Forest Science has established acircumtropical network of forest plots (500 m x 1000 m) in which all the trees over1 cm. diameter are mapped, identified and measured every five years. This studyprovides comparisons between diversity of forests in Africa, Asia and the NewWorld, and information on rates of growth, as well as identifying species suitable forplantation forestry, and estimation of sustainable extraction rates. These techniquesalso provide information on how forests respond to temperature and humidity changessuch as those brought about by periodic El Nino droughts.
7. Studies of the Molecular Clock.Studies in marine species isolated on either side of the Isthmus of Panama, known tohave formed 3 million years ago, allows testing of the molecular clock hypothesis thatasserts that genetic mutational changes accumulate in all organisms at a constant rate.
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8. Monitoring of Global Climatic Change.STRI's long-term monitoring of the fluctuations in physical environmental parameters,combined with censuses of the most important marine and terrestrial tropical species,will provide early and sensitive indicators of global changes in climate.
9. Caribbean Geological Studies.Detailed studies of recent geological history have reconstructed the formation of theIsthmus of Panama and documented a series of evolutionary and ecological effects ona global scale. These include the triggering of glaciation in the northern hemisphere,seasonal upwelling in the Pacific, creating major sources of marine fisheries, El Ninodisturbances, and the interchange of the previously isolated faunas of North and SouthAmerica. These studies provide basic data for global climatic models that predictfuture climatic changes.
10. Environmental Impact of Sea Level Canal in Panama.STRI has contributed to predicting and understanding the environmental impacts ofvarious alternatives to the Panama Canal.
Question 93: How have these advances helped the average American citizen?Answer: In addition to the scientific contributions, some of which are outlined inanswer to Question number 92, STRI studies are contributing to the general knowledge of thebiology of our planet. As part of our educational contributions, STRI hosts a number of filmcrews which use our facilities and expertise, making possible educational films often shownon television. There are currently eight different film crews who use STRI facilities,including crews from the National Geographic Society, National Public Radio, BritishBroadcasting Corporations, Oxford Scientific Films, and the Tokyo Broadcasting System.STRI also serves as the base of operations for a number of important applied researchprojects of direct significance to the American public. For example, from 1986-1992 STRIconducted a major study, funded by the Mineral Management Service of the Department ofInterior, and the Marine Spill Response Corporation on the Effects of a major oil spill in thetropics. The information developed on what to do in case of a major oil spill in the tropicsis of critical importance to some coastal regions of the U.S., such as the coral reefs,mangroves and seagrass beds of Florida, upon which the tourism industry depends heavily.Another project presently hosted by STRI is one funded by the Department of Agricultureinvolving the eradication of the screwworm, a major scourge of the cattle industry. Theresults of this program could save millions of dollars to the cattle and meat industries of theUnited States. We are also currently exploring a joint research program to be carried outwith a pharmaceutical company which involves a global survey of fungal extracts that haveproven to be the source of a number of major antibiotic drugs. Finally, STRI scientists arecooperating with the National Institute of Health to establish a research site in Cameroonswhere investigation of specific plants likely to yield pharmaceutically valuable drugs in thetreatment of AIDS has been targeted. All these programs would not be possible without theresearch history and permanent operating base provided by STRI.
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National Zoological Park Salaries & ExpensesQuestion 94: The operational budget for the National Zoo includes a $390,000increase to support the new Amazonia and Living in Water exhibitions. Construction hasalready commenced for both projects, are additional construction dollars needed to completeeither exhibit?Answer: The Institution will ask for an additional $2.1 million (probably inFY 1997) to complete the Aquatic Trail Living in Water exhibit.
Question 95: If they are complete, what was the total federal and non-appropriatedinvestment?Answer: They are not complete. To date the Zoo has received $15.2 million inFederal appropriations for the aquatic and forest part of Amazonia ($7.7 milbon), AmazoniaGallery ($4.6 million), and Aquatic Trail ($2.9 milbon). With the scheduled request of$2.1 milbon in FY 1997, the total is $17.3 million for the three exhibits. There are no Trustfunds planned for this construction.
Question 96: What is the projected total operational costs for each?Answer: The Zoo's request for FY 1996 includes a total of $390,000 to support theexhibits. This included both staffing needs and other support related costs. To allow theexhibits to be fully functional, as envisioned, the requirement would total nine keepers andsupport staff and approximately $540,000.
National Museum of Natural History Salaries & ExpensesQuestion 97: The operations budget for the National Museum of Natural Historyincludes a ba.se increase of $986,000 and 12 positions. Nine of those positions and $283,000are directly related to the East Court Facility program, three positions and the remaining$665,000 are associated with the Collections and Research Information System -- the publicaccess and outreach initiative.Does this complete the federal funding requirement for the Natural History East Courtproject?Answer: The request for a base increase of $283,000 and 9 positions for the NMNHEast Court operations budget does not complete the federal funding requirement for theoperations portion of the Natural History East Court project. In FY 1997 the Institutionanticipates requesting funding for the following operational costs:
? National Museum of Natural History: 3 additional positions, salaries and funding tosupport the facilities maintenance requirement and additional one-time funding for atelephone system and other electronic communications costs
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? Office of Protective Services: 5 security officers and support costs to providesufficient security for the buildings
? Office of Plant Services: utilities costs and 3 maintenance mechanics to run themechanical equipment and repair the building
Question 98: Regarding the new public access initiative, will this project requirephasing over several years? What is the total cost?Answer: The Collections and Research Information System public access initiativewill be phased over multiple years. Current projections are that full implementation will takefive years and will require an estimated $2 million increase in base funding. Definitive costestimates and scheduling for the full program cannot be established until requirements arefully defined and designs completed for each development phase.
Question 99: Can the information be accessed at each phase, or will the public haveto wait until the project is completed?Answer: The phased build up system capabilities will enable the public to haveincreased levels of access at each phase of development. NMNH recently successfullyimplemented a small prototype public access component. Based on usage statistics, we havefound that there is strong public demand for electronic access to the National Collections.
Museum Support Center Salaries & ExpensesQuestion 100: The budget justification for the Museum Support Center movedescribes the concept of the "Initial Move" with the objective of phasing the transfer ofcurrent objects from the museum to the support center over a period of several years. Theseitems , because of their less than ideal current storage, needed to be cleaned of asbestoscontamination, inspected for pests and other contaminates, cleaned, computer labeled, andspecially packed before transferring.You state in your justification that during this process the collections of thedepartment have continued to grow and as a result, the distinction between those objects inpoor storage and the new objects targeted for future "growth move" have been blurred. Asa result, you explain, the Smithsonian is actively conducting "growth moves" for newcollections prior to completing the "initial move" for collections in jeopardy for which theappropriated funds have been provided.Given the diminishing federal budget, the fact that the two-thirds of the space at thesupport center was intended for the current collection, and the urgent need according to theSmithsonian to get the current objects which have been improperly stored for so many yearsin more ideal storage, can you explain why the new acquisitions have not been slowed orhalted until you have properly cared for the current collection?
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Answer: In fact, the Museum's new acquisitions rate has slowed substantially.During the early 1980's, the Museum had been acquiring new collections at an average rateof over one million items per year. In comparison, during the first half of this decade, theaverage acquisition rate has dropped to approximately 400,000 specimens per year. TheSmithsonian acquires items only after careful consideration by museum curators, collectionsmanagers, and directors. Because of this rigorous selection process, the Institution adds tothe collections only a small percentage of what is offered. The study of natural history isdynamic. Therefore, natual history collections cannot be static and must be reflective of theever-changing world around us. Thus, the Institution continues to acquire new specimenseven as it grapples with issues of care and storage for its collections.
Question 101: How many objects have been moved to date?Answer: The Institution has moved 18.4 million objects/specimens to date.
Question 102: How many will be moved in FY 1995?Answer: The Institution currently projects the number of collection objects/specimensto move to the Museum Support Center during FY 1995 at 4.6 million.
Question 103: How long will it take to move all the current collections to theSuitland facility?Answer: The staff of the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) estimatesthat it will have completed the first phase of the move of its collections by the end of 1998.Completion of the second phase of the move of NMNH collections, as well as the move ofcollections of the National Museum of American History (NMAH), is projected for the endof 2001 at which time the Museum Support Center will be filled to capacity.
Question 104: How many new objects have been acquired through acquisition ordonation during the past two years?Answer: The Museum of Natural History acquired 931,336 objects during FY 1993and FY 1994. These new acquisitions are incorporated into the appropriate collections,usually according to taxonomic or cultural groupings. The new acquisitions may be housedwith related collections in the Museum Support Center, or housed with related collectionshoused within the Natural History Building.
Question 105: What has been the cost of these acquisitions?Answer: The total purchase cost of new collections acquired by the Museum inFY 1993 and FY 1994 was $301,991.
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Question 106: Are these items that the Museum does not currently own?Answer: Yes, these are collection items for which the Museum does not haverepresentatives.
Question 107: Specifically, how do they differ from the current collection?Answer: The new acquisitions complement and fill important gaps in the existingcollections, increasing the collection's overall value as a national and international researchand educational resource. For example,A very rare lunar meteorite was transferred from the National Science Foundation tothe Department of Mineral Sciences as part of the U. S. Antarctic Meteorite Program.This specimen is the only meteorite of its kind in NMNH's collections.NMNH now holds the world's finest specimen of Betekhtinite, a copper iron leadsulfide from Kazahkstan. This specimen is unique for its overall size, crystal size, andcrystal habit. The specimen is NMNH's only sample suitable for display.The donation of the Hooker Diamonds, a splendid set consisting of earrings,necklace and matching ring will be displayed in the upcoming gems and mineralsexhibit hall. The gemstones are extraordinary for their size, color, clarity, and theunusually fine match among the individual stones in addition to their aestheticqualities.NMNH's coral collections have been greatly upgraded by the acquisition of 300-400specimen lots from New Guinea. This particular collection is notable because itincludes molecular and tissue samples. The collection was made in conjunction withmulti-disciplinary biodiversity studies conducted at NMNH.
Redirection of FundingQuestion 108: When FTE's and base funding is increased, does the Smithsonian lookfor offsetting decreases in areas that are not as high a priority? If not why not?Answer: During its budget process, Institution management reviews not only newrequests for funds, but also existing uses of funds. Where necessary, decisions are made tofund needs with offsetting decreases in other areas. For example, the Office of theRegistrar's funds and FTEs were reduced in FY 1993 and realigned as part of the Archivesoffice. A system of chargebacks was developed for exhibit and program support and basefunds transferred to help establish the Institution-wide Information Resource Management andResearch Equipment pools.
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Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Salaries & ExpensesQuestion 109: The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York budgetfor FY 1996 requests two new positions and a base increase of $249,000. These increasesare for custodial positions and replacement of the museum's telephone system, as well asincreased utility costs and physical plant support associated with one of the three structures.How did this museum come to be part of the Smithsonian Institution?Answer: In 1967 the Board of Regents agreed to accept from the Trustees of theCooper Union the collection which is preeminent in the field of design and decorative arts.Subsequently, the Carnegie Corporation of New York transferred title to the CarnegieMansion on upper Fifth Avenue to the Institution for the Museum.
Question 110: Is this particular collection central to the mission of the Smithsonian?Answer: The Cooper-Hewitt collection is the most extensive assembly of design-related material in the United States, and is entirely consistent with the mission of theSmithsonian.
Question 111: How would this museum rank in priority order of significance ascompared with the other New York and Washington museums and galleries?Answer: The Smithsonian does not attempt to rank its museums which are unique, aswell as diverse. It should be noted, however, that the Cooper-Hewitt collection, whichincludes prints, drawings, and sculpture; textiles, wallpaper, metals, glass, and ceramics; andarchival materials related to design and the decorative arts, is the largest art collection in theInstitution.
Question 112: Has any thought been given to donating the buildings and collectionsto New York City?Answer: Before deciding to move forward with renovation work proposed for theCooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian management reviewed the Museum's current operations. It alsoconsidered the possibility of shifting control of the Museum to another organization. Theresult of the review was reaffirmation of the Institution's commitment to this very popularMuseum and its well-respected staff. The Secretary is working with the Board to increase itsaccountability for fund-raising capacity and involve its Board more fully in its activities.That effort has already proven effective. Since January 1995, the Board has raised morethan $2.5 million and is committed to raising more than $8 million to support the renovationthat will bring the Museum into conformance with prevailing safety and accessibilitystandards.
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Question 113: If you were asked to prioritize, how would this increase fare ascompared to the increases you have asked for your new info highway/public access program,the grasslands construction project at the National Zoo, the NMAI?Answer: Because of their differing objectives, it is difficult to rank priorities betweenoperating and construction accounts. The Cooper-Hewitt is one of the six art museumsparticipating in ARTCIS, a public access program for which funding is requested inFY 1996. The Museum's requested increase for custodial and facilities support is thoroughlyintegrated with the public program because of the need to adequately house the collection andimprove the telephone system which is crucial to imaging of, and access to, that collection.
Traveling Exhibitions Service Salaries & ExpensesQuestion 114: Although no additional base funding is requested for the Smithsonian'sTraveling Exhibition Service, you are planning an active program in FY 1996 as well asbeginning a new initiative to bring the Smithsonian programs to public libraries across thecountry. Can you tell the committee about some of your traveling exhibits in FY 1996?Answer: Because more than 100 different exhibitions travel annually under SITES'auspices, and because each of these exhibitions involve topics and technical formats tailoredto different museum or exhibit center settings, it is difficult to single out one project overanother as being more representative of SITES' FY 1996 program. During that fiscal yearalone, SITES will circulate exhibitions large and small on subjects as varied as AbrahamLincoln, gospel music, contemporary art by Vietnamese Americans, prairie school houses,and scientific book illustration.To gain a more specific idea of SITES' FY 1996 exhibition offerings, one may takenote of Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy and Beyond Category: The Musical Genius ofDuke Ellington, two large-scale projects that utilize Smithsonian music history collections toexplore the rich legacy of America's jazz heritage. Two other large format exhibitions,Ocean Planet and Spiders'., rely on collections from the National Museum of Natural Historyto illustrate lesser-known wonders of the natural world. Museums unable physically toaccommodate exhibitions of these sizes have their pick of a wide range of other, moremodest presentations, including Saynday was Coming Along, which surveys Kiowa Indianchildren's stories and illustrations, and Produce for Victory, an exhibition of World War nvictory posters from the National Museum of American History.
Question 115: How do you determine where the exhibits will go?Answer: Museums and exhibit centers nationwide determine where SITES exhibitionswill be shown, by requesting them on a first-come, first-served basis. SITES maintains amailing list of 12,000 museums and other exhibiting institutions across the country. Everyyear, these institutions receive information about SITES programs through exhibit-specificmailings, an annual program catalogue called Update, and a quarterly newsletter, Siteline.Museums then call SITES to reserve booking slots on individual exhibition itineraries.
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Competition for SITES exhibitions is stiff, because host museum requests for specificshows almost always exceed the availability of programs. Sometimes, museums interested inscheduling a booking slot that already has been filled by another institution attempt to exertpressure to revise an exhibition's itinerary through trustee members or community civicleaders. For this reason, SITES is especially vigilant about its first-come, first-servedbooking policy, which over the years has guaranteed that exhibition scheduling is basedsquarely on a fair response to museum requests.
Question 116: Do you primarily select large cities or do small rural areas benefitfrom the traveling exhibits? Can you give us some examples?Answer: SITES has been providing traveling exhibitions for more than forty years.Up until 1989, however, virtually all of these exhibitions were created for well-establishedmuseums in large urban areas within the United States and abroad. When the Smithsonianset out seven years ago to reverse that trend, by also providing exhibitions to peoples andplaces that rarely had benefitted from the Institution's presence beyond Washington, it askedSITES to expand its service capabilities among under-served museums, and among exhibitcenters in rural areas.Today SITES has an extremely strong exhibit presence in rural communities. Byteaming up with State Humanities Councils across the country, SITES has been able todevelop installation-easy traveling exhibitions and related public programs for rural
"museums" with exhibit spaces as small as 500 sq. ft., budgets as limited as $l,000/year and
"staff resources so constrained as to involve volunteer support alone.
In FY 1996, SITES, in partnership with State Humanities Councils, will circulateProduce for Wc/ory-which explores World War n victory posters-to twenty-five ruralcommunities, and Bam Againl?which looks at historic and revitalized bam architecture inAmerica-to thirty more. This initiative does not represent a cost increase to either SITES orHumanities Council base budgets, because it depends on extant staff resources and theimplementation of programs that both organizations already are set up to provide.
Question 117: Tell us about the new initiative involving public libraries?Answer: Like SITES' efforts to reach rural communities, its public libraries initiativedates back to 1989, when the Smithsonian set out to expand its national audience amongpeoples and places that rarely had benefitted from the Institution's presence beyondWashington. As SITES began to identify under-served audiences, it looked to a variety ofinstitutions known for providing public program services to visitors unaffiliated withmainstream museums.
Libraries emerged early on as settings tailor-made for increased audience outreach.They resided in many cities and towns across the nation that did not house museums orother cultural centers. They catered to unusually broad cross-sections of the Americanpublic. They routinely provided services for large numbers of school children and theelderly, and they often were the setting for community programs related to national
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commemorative holidays and events. For SITES, public libraries provided especially strongopportunities to reach new audiences.SITES approached the American Library Association (ALA) about thoseopportunities in 1992, and the two organizations began to map out myriad technical, financialand program requirements needed to make an exhibition partnership feasible. Together theyraised funds to support a pilot exhibition, devised installation-easy exhibit formats that wouldnot require the involvement of trained museum professionals, investigated exhibit themesassociated with specific commemorative events, and developed community-based publicprograms that could supplement core exhibit information.The pilot project, a small-format version of Seeds of Change, the Smithsonian's majorQuincentennial exhibition, circulated to public libraries in the capital cities of all fifty states.Public response was immediate and enthusiastic, leading SITES and ALA to conclude thattogether they could make available a far greater range of public programs than eitherorganization ever would be able to provide independently.
In FY 1996, SITES and ALA will parlay their respective expertise in exhibitiondevelopment and community library programming by circulating multiple copies of a small-format version of Beyond Category: The Musical Genius ofDuke Ellington and BeforeFreedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South. The national tours of theseexhibitions, which mark the beginning of a long-term SITES/ALA partnership, will for thefirst time extend Smithsonian resources to libraries beyond state capitals alone. Thisinitiative does not represent a cost increase to either organization's base budget, because itrelies on extant staff resources and the implementation of programs that both SITES andALA routinely have provided to their own constituencies.
Question 118: How many cities and towns will benefit from this tour?Answer: At least 200 cities and towns will benefit from this tour. The actualitineraries for Beyond Category and Before Freedom Came are only now being developed.Because both exhibitions are being produced in multiple copies, however, SITES will havethe long-term capability of increasing the total number of booking slots as public demandwarrants.
Question 1 19: Since your budget is not recommended for an increase, what programsdid you eliminate in order to fund this new initiative?Answer: SITES did not need to eliminate programs in order to introduce newprogram initiatives in FY 1996, because the new program services it will be providing arebased on partnership alliances that utilize extant staff, budgetary resources and professionalknow-how.
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Office of Design & Construction Salaries & ExpensesQuestion 120: The Office of Design and Construction requests an increase of$1.5 million and 15 new positions. This office administers architectural engineering andconstruction contracts, reviews exhibit installations and supervises new construction projects.Normally, about 400 projects are in progress each year.For fiscal year 1996 how many of these projects involve new, major constructionprojects such as the National Museum of the American Indian, the Air and Space Museum orother new major construction projects either in the planning or construction stage?Answer: The Office of Design and Construction normally supervises approximately400 projects in any given year. In FY 1996 four projects may involve new majorconstruction.
Question 121: If these new projects were delayed, how would you adjust theFY 1996 request?Answer: If new major construction projects are delayed, the FY 1996 request forODC staff increases would remain the same. New major construction projects are supportedfrom funds specifically requested for that purpose. The staff increases proposed for FY 1996would support annual Repair and Restoration projects. Nine positions are needed to assureappropriate oversight for the current $24 million level of work and six additional positionsare needed at the $34 million level.
National Zoological Park - Construction & Front Royal: ConstructionQuestion 122: The FY 96 budget request includes an additional $1.7 million tocomplete construction of Phase I, the Panda Plaza and Bison Grasslands area. $3.2 millionhas been appropriated to date during fiscal years 1993, 1994 and 1995 for the design of allthree phases of the project and the construction specifications for Phase I. What will be thetotal construction costs for each separate phase of thethree exhibits?Answer: The costs for each phase of construction are the following:Phases Title Cost
First American Grasslands $1,584 millionSecond African Grasslands $4,467 millionThird Domestication Area $1,565 millionFarm Option $1.215 million *Total $8,831 million
* If the Farm option is included in the Domestication Area, it will not befunded with Federal appropriations.
307 f?9& ,/?&??/ht&vteQuestion 123: I understand from your budget that these three exhibits depict threeseparate and distinct grassland habitats and each segment will be self-contained. I wouldassume then, that the first exhibit could be completed and the other exhibits could bedelayed, is this correct?Answer: Yes; One project could be completed, and the others deferred. However,the total design and infrastructure for the entire project would have to be in place in order tobuild phase I. Deferring completion of construction will dislocate visitor access and increasethe cost due to inflation.
Question 124: What would be the increase in operating costs for each of theseexhibits?Answer: The American and African Grasslands exhibits are being designed tooperate with no additional staff or support dollars above our current base funding level.Contingent upon additional funding, the Domestication Area would include a farmdemonstration option with an estimated one-time cost of $1,215,000 for construction andrecurring costs of $1,215,000 for annual salaries for one farm manager and three keepers.
Question 125: Is there a plan to raise private dollars or use trust fund dollars for thisproject?Answer: If the Institution were to include the Farm option as part of theDomestication Area, an amount of $1,215,000 would be needed from nonappropriated funds.
Question 126: Your budget proposes $2.3 million for the Rock Creek facility and$950,000 for the Research Center in Front Royal. These costs appear to continue ongoing,routine repair and preventive and basic maintenance. Can you give the committee some ideaof what types of projects are involved?Answer: The following are examples of routine repair and preventive and basicmaintenance projects.Rock Creek: HVAC maintenanceTree maintenanceFire alarm maintenanceUpgrade HVAC systemRoof replacementsPerimeter fence repairsRoad repairsFiltration system replacementsQuarantine buildings renovationsRecycle area constructionSignage and graphic replacementGlass replacement
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Front Royal: Upgrade electric service to buildingsClean and paint building exteriorsProvide on-site quarantine facilitiesInstall ungulate shedsInstall composite flooring in animal holding areasUpgrade doors in buildings
Question 127: Do you have a backlog of critical maintenance projects? If so, howmany and what are the costs associated with those projects?Answer: We have a backlog of maintenance which is reflected in our plannedrequests for appropriations in the period 1996-2000 (see table on page 100 of the FY 1996Budget Justification). These are critical in the sense that if not funded during that time theconsequences could be wide-ranging. Additionally we have found that some maintenanceproblems arise unpredictably so that we need to transfer funds from routine plannedmaintenance. For instance, road subsidence has occurred on our non-public complex ofwork access roads. Major maintenance projects at Rock Creek and Front Royal anticipatedin the next five years average up to six per year; 40+ minor ones are typical.
Question 128: Are the new construction projects costs resulting in the delay of anycritical maintenance projects?Answer: If R&R funding levels in the years 1996-2000 are from$3.3 to $3.8 million, there should be no delay resulting from new construction projects.
Question 129: The Committee has appropriated, in recent years, funds to design andconstruct both the new Amazonia Gallery and Living in Water exhibits. Your budget forFY 1996 requests an increase of $390,000 for operations of both exhibits and states that bothprojects are very labor intensive to maintain. Can you explain for the new members of theCommittee what the total costs have been to date for both the Amazonia Gallery and theLiving in Water exhibits?Answer: The Zoo has received $15.2 million of appropriated funds for the aquaticand forest part of Amazonia ($7.7 million), Amazonia Gallery ($4.6 million), and theAquatic Trail - Living in Water ($2.9 million). The Institution anticipates requesting$2.1 million to complete the Living in Water exhibit.
Question 130: How many new buildings were involved and what is the squarefootage?Answer: In Amazonia there are two connected buildings - the Aquatic Habitat andRainforest exhibit, and the connected Gallery building. These total approximately28,000 square feet. The Living in Water will have a minimalist building and incorporatelarge out-door exhibit experiences.
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Question 131: Are both projects completed, or are there additional phases planned?Answer: The Gallery building is completed but the exhibit contents had to becompletely redesigned to cope with staff shortages. There are additional phases of AquaticTrail planned for the outyears.
Question 132: Were there any private funds or trust funds used for these twoprojects?Answer: No private or trust funds were used for these two projects.
Repair and Restoration of Buildings AccountQuestion 133: The request for this account includes a $10 million increase. Yourbudget justification strongly states that funding for maintenance and repair of the Institution'sfacilities has not kept pace with the need and as a result serious deterioration has occurred inthe 5.5 million square feet of building space owned by the Smithsonian. As of April 1994,the estimated unfunded facilities renewal requirements had increased to $250 milhon.Given the fact that the Smithsonian has 16 museums and galleries in Washington andNew York, restoration and storage buildings, and Centers for research and education inPanama, Maryland, Massachusetts and Arizona, why have there been a steady stream offunding requests for new, major construction of both buildings and exhibits when you have acritical backlog of projects in excess of $250 million?Answer: The Institution carefully balances the need to repair and renew existingbuildings with the need to provide new space essential to the long term preservation of thecollections that it holds in trust and the fulfillment of legal mandates. The high priorityplaced on maintaining the Institution's most valuable assets - facilities and collections - andon meeting legal responsibilities is reflected in the annual budget requests and in theSmithsonian's long range plans. The projects now in the major construction program allmeet one or more of these criteria. The Air and Space Extension, American Indian CulturalResources Center and the Suitland Collection Center are all key components of theInstitution's plan to provide adequate and appropriate space in which to house, care for, andstudy the collections. The Natural History East Court Building will help alleviate spaceneeds in the long range, and will directly impact the Smithsonian's ability to completeurgent renewal of the HVAC systems in the National Museum of Natural History in the shortterm. The American Indian Cultural Resources Center and the Mall Museum will satisfylegislative mandates, as well as legal responsibilities accepted by the government when thecollections were transferred to the Institution. Several of these new facilities will alsocontribute to the Institution's ability to present exhibitions and other programs directly to thepublic. The Air and Space Extension, American Indian Mall Museum, and the NMNH EastCourt Building projects will contribute to this key aspect of the Smithsonian's mission.
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Question 134. Why aren't the repair and restoration requests higher and more of aneffort made to slow the pace of new museums, storage, collections acquisitions, and majornew exhibits or raise private dollars and use trust fund monies?Answer: As mentioned in the previous answer, the Institution continually balancescompeting needs for funding to care for its facilities and its collections. The fundingrequests for Repair and Restoration (R&R) and Construction reflect that balance. If morewere requested in R&R. it would be at the expense of funding for essential space in which tostore and care for existing collections.For years, Smithsonian museums have limited collections acquisitions, because of thelack of space, to those artifacts that represent important facets of, or complements to,existing collections. They have also actively promoted long term loans to other museumsand deaccessioning of objects to relieve the overcrowding in storage facilities. However,acquisitions are a vital pan of being a museum, and collecting cannot stop altogether.
It has been the Institution's experience that fund raising possibilities are extremelylimited for provision of basic operational requirements such as collections storage or facilitiesrepair. The Smithsonian's available trust revenues currently support essential operatingrequirements, and cannot be diverted to support repair needs without seriously eroding theInstitution's infrastructure.
Question 135: This committee has strongly supported the East Court project at theNational History Building which opened in 1910. The total cost of the seven year effort is$30 million. Appropriations to date have been S21.3 million and the FY % request of$8.7 million will complete the project which involves replacement of all the major utilitysystems. This is by far the largest facility, however, since some of your structures arenearly 140 years old. what is the condition of your other major museum buildings, could webe facing similar costs at the other facilities?Answer: The East Court project will not replace all major utility systems in theNatural History Building which opened in 1910. The East Court project was requested in theConstruction program to provide additional, long-term permanent space to accommodatecurrently overcrowded research laboratories, offices, collection areas, and to provideadditional space for public exhibit, education and other outreach activities. In the short-term, the new East Court building will provide temporary swing space' for relocation ofoffices, laboratories, and collections in order to implement the project that replaces all majorutility systems throughout the entire Natural History building. This Major Capital Renewalproject is currently requested in the Repair and Restoration section of the Smithsonian budgetrequest. This project is anticipated to require S93 million in future appropriations and willtake up to ten years to complete, at the S34 million level of R & R funding support. The$7 million requested for Major Capital Renewal in FY 1996 will continue this project.The Smithsonian does face significant costs in the next decade, to repair other majormuseum buildings. The general condition of other major museum buildings, such as theAmerican Art and Portrait Gallery, the Arts and Industries, and the Smithsonian InstitutionCastle, is portrayed in charts 1 through 5 on pages 102 through 107 of the Institution's
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FY 1996 request to Congress. The estimated cost to renew these three buildings isapproximately $100 million. With the renewal work required at the Museum of NaturalHistory, this constitutes the majority of the $250 million current total in unfunded facilitiesdeficiencies. Other buildings will require significant system replacement in the comingyears, notably the Air and Space Museum and the Hirshhom Museum.
Question 136: Does your master plan provide a specific timetable for major repairsand replacements by facility and the estimated costs associated with the projects in priorityorder? Answer: Yes, the Institution has a five-year plan that lists major repair costs byfacility and fiscal year. The relative priority is indicated by the fiscal year in which fundingis proposed.
Question 137: Assuming that the federal discretionary budget will continue todramatically decline in the foreseeable future, would you agree that caring for the existingcollection and buildings becomes a higher priority than new construction projects?Answer: Providing adequate and appropriate space for our collections emergesrepeatedly as the most critical collections management priority for the Institution. Therefore,much of our major new construction is directly related to caring for our existing collections.The legislatively mandated collections conservation center at Suitland for the NationalMuseum of the American Indian and the Air and Space extension at Dulles are primeexamples.
Question 138: If adequate funds were not made available for major renovation/replacement projects, would it result in the closure of the buildings to the general public?This certainly would have been the case with the Natural History Museum. Please bespecific.Answer: Inadequate funding for repairs and major system replacements would notresult in the closure of any Museum building except in the event of some major, unexpectedsystem(s) failure. The Institution will continue to repair building systems and equipment aslong as funds and parts are available.A recent incident illustrates the potential for problems, however. At the NaturalHistory Building's east wing basement a network closing motor on one of three transformersoverheated and bumed out. The limits on the control of the motor did not function causingthe motor to continue to operate. The device that should have stopped the motor when itstarted overheating was installed in 1962, and replacement parts are no longer available. Themotor had to be removed and repaired. This process took ten days. Fortunately, the othertwo transformers could carry the load. However, smoke from the burn-out caused thebuilding to be evacuated. Although the effect on the building was minimal, if currentfunding levels continue, we could expect occurrence of such incidents to increase infrequency and severity.
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Question 139: Your budget admits that given the serious deterioration of at least fourmuseum buildings, the Institution's goal is annual funding at the $50 million level asopposed to the $34 million requested in the FY 96 budget. Given the almost alarmingcondition of some of the most popular museums and galleries, why did you decide to ask forless in repair and restoration and continue to request funds for new museums and galleries?Answer: The $34 million request reflects the amount allowed by the Office ofManagement and Budget for R&R in FY 1996. It is the Institution's intention to build theannual funding level in this account to $50 million in FY 1997. Although it might appearthat the Smithsonian has chosen to request less for R&R and more for construction of newfacilities, the request for Construction funding represents an urgent need to accommodatestorage and care requirements of existing collections, including those of the Museum of theAmerican Indian, and the fulfillment of legislated and other legal commitments to provide anappropriate museum for the NMAI collections. The Institution continually balances thesecompeting needs for funds to care for our existing collections and facilities.
Question 140: Is it not easier to raise private funds for new construction and newexhibits than it is to raise non-federal funds for repairs and renovations?Answer: It is not easy to raise funds, for any purpose, given the significantcompetition nationally for non-Federal support. Often, private funding is more available for
"new initiatives" because donors have an opportunity to help develop the case for support.On occasion, however, magnificent "repair and renovation" projects can result from fundraising, financing, state/local government funding, or a combination of the three. Examplesof such projects include the George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of theAmerican Indian, and the Union Station and National Building Museum, both located inWashington, D.C.
Question 141: Is the public at risk in any of the Smithsonian buildings?Answer: Although there are cases in Smithsonian buildings where the Institution isplanning for but not yet in full compliance with current codes and laws, we do not considerthe public to be at risk. The Institution would close a building before risking public or staffsafety, and occasionally has done so for very short periods. The Institution places life safetyas its highest priority in the Repair and Restoration program.
Question 142: Are the collections at risk due to deteriorating structures, insufficientfire detection and suppression or security deficiencies?Answer: Collections are under a certain amount of risk in any building. Older roofscan leak and pipes sometimes break; heating, cooling and humidity control systems fail.These events cannot be predicted, but the likelihood of their occurrence and the length oftime required to fix the problem increases with age.
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The Smithsonian has done much to improve the protection of its collections from fire.The Smithsonian's fire protection master plan work is well underway, but is not complete.In comparison with other museums, Institution collections are probably better protected thanmost. However, we have not yet attained our goal of complete fire detection andsuppression systems for all buildings.The Smithsonian has prioritized the work required to lessen and remove the risk tocollections and the buildings themselves. At this time, however, it takes the entire$24 million annual funding to keep up with emergency repairs and risk reduction work. Thisleaves little funding to make improvements to the facilities that would result in morepermanent solutions.
Major Construction AccountQuestion 143: This account's primary function is to meet the requirements ofphysical plant expansion and modifications to support program needs ? particularly in thearea of collection storage and care. Your justification states that providing adequate spaceand care for the collections (138 million objects) is the most critical collections managementpriority. Your FY 1996 budget requests $38.7 million, a $9.5 million increase over FY 1995enacted.$24.5 million would support the final construction dollars for the American Indiancollection ($21.5 million) and $3 million to complete the engineering and design of theproposed Mall facility. Construction of the Customs House facility in New York was jointlyfunded by New York City, the State New York and Federal appropriations. Why is there nocost sharing component to the Suitland collections facility?Answer: The legislation which established the National Museum of the AmericanIndian (S.978, January, 1989) specifically called for the joint funding of the Customs Housefacility in New York City. This was the basis of the agreement reached with the City andState of New York which resulted in the transfer of the Heye Foundation collection to theSmithsonian Institution and the maintenance of a museum presence in the City of New York.
Question 144: Since protection of the Heye collection, totalling over 1 millionartifacts, is of primary importance why can't the Mall facility be delayed and private fundsbe raised to help pay for the Suitland Cultural Resources Center?Answer: The establishing legislation for the National Museum of the AmericanIndian (S.978) specifies that the Board of Regents shall pay not more than 2/3 of the totalcost of planning, designing, and constructing the facility on the Mall from funds appropriatedto the Board of Regents. The remainder of the costs shall be paid from non-federal sources.Since 1991 there has been a National Campaign to raise funds specifically for this purpose.This effort is scheduled through 1997. This Campaign has been specifically addressing theneed for funds from private donors for the Mall museum. It would be extremely difficultfrom a public relations aspect to: (1) put on hold this effort prior to the attainment of ourpublished goals, and (2) to be forced to approach the same population of potential donors for
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additional donations for another facility (Cultural Resources Center). This has already beenpresented as a part of the Mall campaign as a federally funded facility in support of the over-all Smithsonian commitment to the National Museum of the American Indian.
Question 1 45 : Some may conclude that the design of the collections storage facilityin Suitland was more elaborate than necessary given fact that the federal allocation for thisbill has declined in recent years and that three facilities were authorized for this onecollection. Had a more modest facility been envisioned from the beginning, what wouldhave been the estimated savings in planning, design and construction?Answer: The Institution might have saved as much as $10 million by designing asimpler storage structure, but even a more basic building would require comparablecollections storage equipment, security, fire protection, and climate control. TheSmithsonian has an obligation to provide a facility that the American Indians will considersuitable for the artifacts, many of which are treasured and have religious and profoundhistorical significance. This commitment is reflected in the collaborative process used todevelop the design of the building. At this stage in the process, however, $5.5 million hasbeen spent on the design of the Suitland facility. A redesign would add another $4 million tothe cost of the facility.
Question 146: The budget calls for an additional $250,000 to construct a fiber opticlocal area network to provide an on-line data-link between New York and Washington. Canyou explain the need for this system? Where will the actual installation of equipment,cabling and modifications to the HVAC system be placed? What would be the impact of notreceiving these funds?Answer: The objective of this project is to provide a data communications link at theNational Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Research Branch in the Bronx fortransmitting information about artifacts to the NMAI offices in Washington and to the GeorgeGustav Heye Center in Manhattan. Most of the equipment and wiring for this project will beinstalled at the Research Branch in the Bronx where the NMAI collection is currentlyhoused The data base of information, including digitized images, on objects in thecollection will be made available on-line in Washington, DC, where the exhibit design staffhas its offices. The Washington staff needs on-line access to this information to designexhibits for the Heye Center and the Mall Museum in Washington and to track artifacts asthey are moved from the Research Branch to the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland,Maryland. With modifications to existing systems, the Heye Center will access the databaseto provide a resource for staff and public needing information about the collection. If thesefunds are not received, this information will have to be transmitted by hand, making exhibitdesign and move coordination more cumbersome and limiting public access to informationabout the collection.
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Question 147: The Budget requests $3 million to complete the planning and design ofthe proposed American Indian Mall museum. Currently the plan for construction totals$1 10 million, $73.3 million federal and $36.7 million non-federal. How much non-federalmonies have been raised to date?Answer: As of March 31, 1995. $27,855,152 has been raised in cash and pledgestoward the construction fund goal of $36.7 million. Overall, the National Campaign for theNational Museum of the American Indian has raised a total of $32,410,908.
Question 148: Are there plans to use Trust Fund dollars for this construction? If so,how much?Answer: All funds raised by the National Campaign for the NMAI are Trust funds.The current plan is to raise and subsequently to expend $36.7 million ? the one-thirdmatching requirement on which the Campaign has been built - toward construction of theMall Museum.
Question 149: Because of a shortage of federal dollars, would you attempt to raiseprivate dollars to build the Mall Museum if federal funds were not appropriated in the nextseveral years?Answer: We would continue to try to raise private funds to build the Mall Museum ifthe Congress were to:
? authorize the Smithsonian to begin construction (thereby helping us to minimize theimpact of inflation on the cost of the Museum) in advance of receipt of appropriatedfunds, and
? provide the Smithsonian with assurances which could be widely publicized amongpotential donors that appropriations will be forthcoming, if not by October 1, 1996, ina timely fashion.
Question 150: Have any American Indian Tribes contributed to date? Are thereplans for additional fundraising, particularly from Tribes who have verysuccessful casino operations?Answer: Yes, American Indian Tribes have contributed to the NMAI constructionfund. Plans are in development to continue to seek financial support from Tribes, includingthose which maintain gaming operations.
Question 151: I don't believe that any other collections at the Smithsonian has thebenefits of three separate facilities. Given the deficit situation, do you believe alternativefunding sources should be examined prior to additional Federal dollars being appropriated?
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Answer: There are several storage facilities provided for various museums to housecollections that cannot be housed in the museum buildings themselves. Smithsonian-ownedfacilities such as the Museum Support Center, the Garber facility and Silver Hill in Marylandprovide storage space for Smithsonian collections. In addition the Institution rents space inFullerton, Virginia and Columbia, Maryland to house collections or portions of collections.With specific reference to the National Museum of the American Indian, Public Law101-185 directs the Institution to construct three facilities, including the collections facility atSuitland, the Museum on the Mall and the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City.Given the limited building capacity of the Mall Museum and its high number of projectedannual visitors, early planning discussions assigned most museum staff, collections andsupport services to the Suitland facility. Additionally, due to the limited size of the Mallfacility, the Suitland facility must assume a role beyond the vital service of providingcollections care. Specifically, Suitland will serve as a staging area for all of the Museum'sexhibitions and public programs in Washington and New York.As the functions of the three facilities are interdependent upon one another, theInstitution must find a way to fund each. The legislation mandates that we raise one third ofthe funds for the Mall museum, but does not speak to the issue of raising funds for the othertwo facilities.
Question 152: The Air and Space Museum Extension project is recommended for$2 million in FY 1996 and $2 million in FY 1997 bringing the total Federal investment,excepting operations, to $8 milbon. The balance of $177 million will be privately raised.Since the Commonwealth of Virginia is a major source of funding for this project canyou tell the committee exacting what specific funding has been made available for this projectfrom the state?Answer: The Commonwealth of Virginia has made the following commitments:
1
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To provide infrastructure at the site commensurate with the Air and SpaceMuseum's estimated requirements to the year 2015. The cost of theinfrastructure is estimated to be in the range of $27-40 million.
2. To provide $6 million in cash toward construction of the Extension. Inaddition, the Commonwealth will help the Smithsonian raise a matching$6 million from private industry in the Commonwealth.3 A $3 million interest-free loan to help in the planning and design of theExtension. The loan must be repaid by 1998.
4. To issue up to $100 million in bonds toward construction of the Extension onbehalf of the Smithsonian.
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Question 153: Are all the funds made available now, or are some of funds to beappropriated in future years by the State of Virginia?Answer: Currently, master planning for the project is under way. The funds for the$3 million interest-free loan for planning and design are in the 1995 Appropriations Act.The funds for infrastructure development and construction of the Extension will be madeavailable in future years.
Question 154: The justification mentions a unique partnership including Federal,State, regional business community, and private sponsors around the nation. I am interestedin what specific funds have been raised from regional business communities and privatesponsors?Answer: The Air and Space Museum is currently doing studies to determine the fundraising strategy for construction of the Extension. Fund raising will not officially begin untilthese studies and master planning are completed.
Question 155: Another component of your construction budget includes $350,000 toimprove storage conditions at the Garber Facility. Since you plan on constructing the Dullesfacility in the near future, why would renovation funds be necessary at Garber?Answer: Storage space at the Garber Facility is shared among several Smithsonianorganizations. The planned renovation is for a building used by the National Museum ofAmerican History.
Question 156: There is $8.7 million included for the completion of the NaturalHistory East Court project. The major reason for the project was renovation andreplacement of the major utility systems. The second reason given was relieving the severeovercrowding problem.Since the three Museum Support Center pods in Suitland were constructed to alleviatethe collections storage problem, why is the extra 77,000 net square footage involved withthe East Court project necessary?Answer: The East Court Building project is necessary because the Major CapitalRenewal Project (primarily mechanical renovation) cannot proceed without "swing space" forthe temporary housing of staff and collections while the space they permanently occupy isundergoing renovation. The Museum considered several alternatives before choosing theEast Court Building to accommodate the substantial temporary relocations required for themechanical (HVAC) renovation. One alternative, off-site leased space, would have beenprohibitively expensive in direct costs and in the toll that the relocation would take on thestaff, the collections, and on the public services of the Museum. Another alternative, on-siterelocation, would have required that many public exhibition halls be closed to serve as swingspace.
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The staff and the collections of the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) arehoused at two different locations: the Natural History Building (NHB) on the Mall and theMuseum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland. Parallel activities occur at both locations.The Museum Support Center (MSC) was constructed in the early 1980s primarily to alleviatethe severe collections storage problems of the NMNH on the Mall. The MSC Move staffcontinues to actively relocate collections from the Mall and other locations to MSC. TheMuseum projects that once these pods at MSC are filled, the NMNH will once again face amajor storage problem for its collections.
Question 157: Once the East Court project is complete providing the additional spacerequirements and given the additional space at the Suitland Support Center, can you estimate,based on your current new acquisitions rate, when this new storage capacity will be filled?Answer: As noted in the answer to question 156, the primary purpose of the EastCourt Building was to provide "swing space" for the temporary housing of staff andcollections during the Major Capital Renewal Project, rather than to provide storage capacityfor the long-term growth of the collections.Once the East Court Building is completed, a variety of functions will be housedwithin it, including: (1) a large portion of the Department of Entomology, consisting of staff,research laboratories, office, and collections areas; (2) Office of Education staff offices;(3) public classrooms for educational programs; (4) Natural History Rare Book Library;(5) much needed, very large public restrooms accessible immediately off the Rotunda; and(6) other NMNH and Institution offices, laboratories, and conference rooms that will providespace for a variety of Institutional research, outreach, and support activities. Entomologywill store some of its collections in the East Court Building. When Entomology moves intothe East Court Building, the space allocated for collections storage is projected to be full.
New PlanningQuestion 158: There is a request for $500,000 to support future planning for long-range capital improvement projects. What future new major construction projects will beplanned for with these funds?Answer: Planning funds are essential to the Institution's ability to define and projectthe facilities implications of proposed changes in program direction ? including
"downsizing." The Institution uses these funds to research and provide basic data to defineand evaluate future potential construction requirements prior to seeking Congressionalauthorization. Such funds were used to begin the NASM Extension, and to define researchfacilities at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and requirements for collectionsstorage facilities at Suitland. The Institution will use future funding to research issues suchas consolidation of administrative space in an owned facility to reduce dependence onexpensive long-term leased space and free public space in museums on the Mall. Additionalwork will be done to define collections storage requirements. Additional projects will beresearched as they are defined.
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Question 159: If priorities had to be made, which projects would you consideressential to the current operations of the Smithsonian museums and galleries?Answer: The Institution would consider planning for storage facilities, and forreplacement of administrative space to be the most urgent projects to be funded from thisaccount.
Alterations and ModificationsQuestion 160: This account involves minor construction projects under$1 million. The FY 1996 request is for $3 million dollars. How much of this $3 millionwould be used to complete ongoing projects funded in previous appropriations bills?Answer: Of the $3 million requested for Alterations and Modifications in FY 1996,$1,425 million will be used to complete ongoing projects initiated with prior yearappropriations.
Question 161: How many new projects would be initiated with these funds?Answer: Seven new projects would be initiated with these funds.
Question 162: Can you prioritize these new projects?Answer: The new projects are prioritized in the following order:An uninterrupted power source for Smithsonian's main computerMiscellaneous space modifications at the Smithsonian InstitutionBuildingFunds for advanced planning and design of Alterations andModifications projectsNew staff housing at Barro Colorado Island at the Tropical ResearchCenter in PanamaA new photographic film storage cold room at American HistoryBuildingA new piping system for laboratory grade purified water at theMuseum Support CenterDesign for building renovations at the American Art and PortraitGallery building
American History BuildingQuestion 163: There is a request for $275,000 for the American History Building tomove a number of collections from the basement to leased space in Newington, Virginia, the
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Museum Support Center in Suitland, and other areas of the building. Does the Museumlease space in any other facility, if so where?Answer: The Museum does not lease any space other than that at Newington, VA.
Question 164: If funding is not provided for this purpose, and the collectionscontinue to be subject to inadequate storage conditions, will the Smithsonian considerdeaccessioning any of the collection?Answer: The Museum would have no choice but to consider what to do withparticular collections, including whether to deaccession, as part of its regular cycle ofcollection planning.
Environmental Research CenterQuestion 165: The Center (SERC) located in Maryland, has been receivingappropriated funds since FY 1991 to construct four laboratory modules to provide laboratoryand support space for several research programs. Two modules have been built and$750,000 was provided in FY 1995 to construct the final two modules.Your budget states that despite the FY 1995 funds being made available, it is unlikelythat the funds provided can be redirected to allow the project to proceed. What do you meanby this statement?Answer: In its FY 1995 request to Congress for Minor Construction, Alterations andModifications, the Institution listed projects totaling $5 million while the funding requestitself was only $3 million. Page 193 of the FY 1995 request contains the statement "the$3 million request for FY 1995 accommodates all of the projects listed above. TheInstitution seeks the approval of the remaining projects listed below for the possiblesubstitution and redirection of funds." The SERC laboratory modules are included in thoseprojects listed below the line (see page 194 of the request).While we had hoped that we might be able to redirect a portion of the $3 million tocomplete the SERC laboratory modules in FY 1995, it now appears unlikely. The Institutionis therefore requesting funding in FY 1996 for this project.
Question 166: You are also requesting $800,000 in FY 1996 to cover escalated costsof the final two modules. What caused the increase in costs?Answer: The design for the requested modules was completed in April 1993. At thattime the estimate was $729,000. Escalating the cost by only 3% (which is the inflation rate)per year increases the cost to $797,000 (assuming the midpoint of construction in April1996).
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Question 167: Have the designs for the modules been enhanced? If so how?Answer: The designs for the laboratory modules have not been enhanced. Thesemodules were part of a larger package designed in April 1993. Only minor changes will bemade to that design to incorporate changes made during construction of the earlier modules,but the cost impact will be less than 2 % of the estimated construction cost for the project.
Question 168: Why are these new units needed?Answer: SERC has senior scientists who do not have adequate research laboratoryspace. They are presently housed in deteriorating house trailers in which it is difficult tomeet safety standards or to work efficiently.
Question 169: What type of research will be conducted at the modules?Answer: SERC will use one module for studies of zooplankton in the ChesapeakeBay. These studies include the factors that affect the formation of undesirable dinoflagellateblooms. The second module will be used for studies of the introduction into Chesapeake Bayof dangerous exotic biota via ship ballast water. These biota include shellfish parasites andnew species of shellfish such as the Zebra Mussel that disrupt and adversely affect naturalbiotic communities.
Question 170: What will the practical effect be if additional funds are not providedfor this purpose?Answer: These important research programs will be seriously impaired with respectto efficiency and productivity. The operating costs will also be higher due to inadequate andinefficient utilities, hoods, etc. in the currently used house trailers.
Tropical Research InstituteQuestion 171: The Smithsonian has recently completed construction projects at theInstitute that added 95,000 square feet of space to facilities in Panama. This was done withfederal funds. More federal funds were appropriated in FY 1985 and 1991 ($1.3 million) tocomplete construction of seven buildings and a laundry/lounge building. Now, the FY 1996request includes $470,000 for construction of additional housing for scientists and staffsupporting research programs of Barro Colorado Island. An additional request will beforwarded in the FY 1997 request of $300,000 to complete the units. Also included in theFY 1996 request is $175,000 for additional housing for game wardens patrolling BarroIsland. Given the poor state of collections storage, the age and serious deterioration of theexisting museums and galleries in New York, Washington, Massachusetts and Arizona, thehigh priority major construction projects involving the Museum of the American Indian, and
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the Air and Space Extension, how can you continue to justify the major expansion efforts atthe Tropical Research Institute?Answer: STRI is the leading Tropical Biological Research Institute in the world. Itis the only unit of the Smithsonian Institution based in, and focussed on, the Tropics. TheTropics contain most of the world's plants and animals. The Tropics also have the fewestresources to study the effects that human populations will have on the future quality of life inthe temperate zone. Thus, support for the research at STRI remains a high priority for theSmithsonian Institution and for the scientific information needs of the United States.STRI's scientific activities require reliable utilities, trained technicians and specializedequipment, housed in properly air conditioned and maintained facilities. STRI providesessential services to governmental organizations, academic institutions, and scientists in theUnited States and from around the world. The requested increase of $128,000 for FY 1996is a very modest price to pay to keep the United States in the forefront of scientificdevelopment in tropical biology.
Museum Support CenterQuestion 172: There is a separate request of $55,000 to install a deionized watersystem at the Museum Support Center. You state that approval of this request will avoiddisruption of conservation and research tasks.Over $30 million has been spent to date on the Museum Support Center, why wassuch an important item not included in the original design and equipping of the center?Answer: A deionized water system was installed and has been operational at theMuseum Support Center for over 10 years. This request is for funding to replace thatsystem. The original installation has fulfilled the needs of the programs well, but now hasaged to a point where it needs major overhaul. Already, the Institution is replacing thedelivery system which, due to aging of the polyethylene pipes, has developed frequent andmajor leaks over the last few years. The technology, especially in materials, has changedsignificantly during these past 10 years, and the new polypropylene delivery system can beexpected to serve dependably for a much longer period. The requested funds would allowthe replacement of the actual purification plant. Without replacement or major rebuilding ofthat system, uninterrupted delivery of deionized water will be in serious jeopardy.
Question 173: How critical is this water system?Answer: High purity deionized water is essential for chemical research programs atthe Conservation Analytical Laboratory (CAL) and the Laboratory for Molecular Systematics(LMS) . Research and collection activities in laboratories of departments of the NationalMuseum of Natural History, especially the Botany department, also depend on the deliveryof deionized water. In addition, conservation activities at CAL, the AnthropologicalConservation Laboratory's operations at MSC, and the branch conservation laboratory of theNational Museum of American History require significant amounts of such high quality water
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for treatments of objects in the national collections. All laboratories at MSC are connectedto the delivery system for the centrally produced deionized water. The total use per yearaverages around 17,000 gallons.
Question 174: Can it be funded with Trust Fund dollars?Answer: The Conservation Analytical Laboratory, which has the responsibility forthe operation and maintenance of the deionized water system, does not have trust funds tofinance the replacement of the system.
ResearchQuestion 175: The winter issue of "Quest" details some of the scientificachievements of the Natural History museum scientists. Some examples include botanists'discovery of threats to Pacific Coral Reefs and the Study of Worldwide Amphibian declines.Can you describe other significant examples of research successes that improved the qualityof life for the average American citizens?Answer: We can describe many significant examples of research successes thatdirectly improved the quality of life for the average American citizen, but it is important toremember that we cannot always predict in advance what will be of practical use to humans.Several of the examples, in fact, illustrate how basic research leads to unexpected benefits bylaying the essential groundwork for breakthroughs in agricultural technology, pharmaceuticalapplications, and medical advances. For example, ongoing research by an NMNHEntomologist on a group of small, inconspicuous moths that are known pests in Europe andRussia unexpectedly revealed the "Cereal Stem Moth" as an accidental import to our countryand now is recognized as an important threat to the winter wheat crop.As demonstrated by the examples given in response to Questions Numbers 33 and 34,the collections-based research at NMNH contributes to the well-being of the averageAmerican by providing information on human disease and health issues, human impact andthe sustainability of natural ecosystems and resources, cultural history, and a myriad of otherpractical outcomes of work done by the museum's research staff and by outside scholars. Thefollowing examples further illustrate this critical role of the museum in our society.
Fishing families in New England are in trouble because of failing resources in theirtraditional fishing grounds. Government assistance is possible for those who canpropose worthy alternative fishery activities. Museum scientists are being asked aboutthe identity, abundance, biology, and distribution of potential alternatives such assnow crabs in the northwestern Atlantic; such information is available in museumrecords and is given out routinely by our scientists. The high quality of thisinformation depends ultimately on the state of the NMNH collections, the attendantdata, the library, and the expertise of scientists who know how to use these resources.Nuclear waste is a major concern of our society - and learning how to dispose of itsafely is critical to the future of nuclear energy. Near the proposed Yucca Mountain
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waste site in Nevada, there are volcanic areas that erupted in the recent geologicalpast. Obviously, we need to know the risk of a volcanic eruption that might spreadthe stored nuclear waste around the globe, and scientists in the NMNH Department ofMineral Sciences currently are assessing this risk through study of long-term patternsof volcanism in the Yucca Mt. area. Specimens of volcanic rocks that bear on thisproblem are a permanent record of the research results and are stored in NMNHcollections; they are available for further study by anyone who might have otherquestions to answer about volcanic hazards at the site. The whole issue of nuclearwaste disposal is politically charged, and the NMNH Department of Mineral Sciencesis relied upon to provide results that are both strictly objective and of highestscientific quality. This underlines the value of highly credible, public-sponsoredresearchers who can advise on controversial issues for the benefit of society as awhole.
Pest control is an essential component of our agricultural technology and success; togrow rice effectively, one must learn to control weevils. Weevils that live in ricefields were for a long time considered to be one species. Careful research on largecollections of weevils showed that they were, in fact, two species, only one of whichwas a serious pest of rice crops. When this was clarified, it was possible to focuseffective control measures on this pest species. This advance was only possiblebecause of earlier systematic research illuminating the various species of weevils.The Simian Immunodeficiency Virus has turned up in African monkey specimensfrom the collections at the National Museum of Natural History, specimens that werecollected between 1896 and 1971, long before the spread of AIDS among humans.This strengthens the case for the recent evolution of HTV from the monkey virus, andprovides an essential historical perspective on the disease. An NMNH zoologist andhis colleagues pioneered this use of museum specimens in basic medical research.Some songbird species are disappearing, and the cause or causes are subject to muchspeculation and debate as well as concern among conservationists. One hypothesis fortheir decline is that their wintering grounds are being affected by deforestation. Inorder to test this idea we need to be able to trace where birds that breed in NorthAmerica spend their winters. Now this can be done by analyzing the chemistry offeathers from specimens in the museum's collections. Preliminary results indicatethat some populations of the Black-throated Blue Warbler winter on several differentislands of the Caribbean. Linking declining species to specific winter sites will becritically important for conservation planning.
Biologists working with the commercial deep-sea red crab, Geryon quinquedens ,noticed a high proportion of lesions on the carapace and tentatively attributed these topollution resulting from dumping of chemical waste in their habitat off the coast ofNew York. When biologists were able to study the incidence of lesions on crabs inthe NMNH collections, which were taken by the U.S. Fish Commission in the late19th century, they found that the number of lesions were comparable to those of thepresent-day crabs. Since the incidence of lesions had not changed over a hundredyears, increased levels of chemical waste could be ruled out as a causal factor. Thishelps society by providing information that saves time and money, which might
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otherwise be spent on investigations on the supposed effects of chemical waste onthese crab populations, and it can also help to distinguish any actual effects of recentpollution on crabs and other aquatic organisms.
In the early 1980's, there was a controversy concerning "yellow rain" in SE Asia. Itwas thought by some that a chemical poison was being disseminated from airplaneswith yellow pollen as a carrier. By chance, a museum researcher had been doing
"pure research" on pollen from the group of plants that were implicated in the yellowrain controversy. When it became important to be able to identify the species ofplants involved in the yellow rain, this researcher was able to draw upon her researchand knowledge, and the museum's collections to make positive identifications in ashort time. This helped greatly in resolving the issue; eventually it was determinedthat the yellow spots observed on foliage and human habitations were actuallyharmless and the result of mass cleansing flights of honeybees, during which theyexcrete large amounts of pollen-bearing feces.Living organisms can be the best indicators of something wrong in the environmentthat can be harmful to humans, e.g., the proverbial canaries in coal mines. Twobooks published in the 1970's by an NMNH invertebrate zoologist, Pollution EcologyofFreshwater Invertebrates and Pollution Ecology ofEstuarine Invertebrates,provided impetus for learning about the small animals such as crayfish and what theytell us about aquatic ecology. The idea that there are "all-purpose aquatic canaries"among these species is supported by research using collections at NMNH.NMNH also increases the quality of life by providing intellectual stimulation,education and enjoyment for a broad sector of the public, primarily through exhibitions andother outreach efforts that educate and inspire over 6 million visitors annually. The museumallows all visitors to explore aspects of the natural world around us and how we,as humansare part of that natural world. The impact of the "electronic museum" now planned to bringsuch educational experiences into homes and schools through the Internet will greatly expandthe impact of this role. We also provide training in museum curation and specimen-basedresearch directly to students, teachers, and professionals from the United States and manydifferent countries.These are only a few of the many other examples of research "successes" and
"products" based on the NMNH collections and research.
326QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY REPRESENTATIVE TOM BEVILLEnola Gay ExhibitQuestion 176: Questions from Congressman Tom Bevill for Mr. I. Michael Heyman,Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, before the House Interior AppropriationsSubcommittee, March 10, 1995.As a World War n Veteran, I was shocked at the Smithsonian's original plans for theEnola Gay Exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum. I still do not understand howsuch a fine museum could even consider rewriting history. We were not the aggressors inWorld War n, and, anyone who remembers Pearl Harbor knows that. I would like to knowif you have completed your internal management review of this fiasco. What are yourfindings?Answer: The Institution has not completed its process of "an internal managementreview" of the Enola Gay exhibition, but is in the process of asking the National Academy ofPublic Administration to conduct a full management review of the National Air and SpaceMuseum. It is hoped that this review will be completed in the next few months, and aReport submitted to the Secretary. At the same time, a senior Smithsonian manager isconducting an internal study of the Smithsonian's processes for developing exhibitions at ourvarious museums and research centers. This report should be completed by the end of April.On a third front, the Institution is working with the University of Michigan to hold aconference in Ann Arbor entitled "Presenting History: Museums in a Democratic Society"that will include one section dealing with the Enola Gay exhibition, and the lessons that canbe drawn from this experience. (As the Secretary said in his January 1995 statement, hebelieves there was a fundamental flaw in the concept of the exhibition and that he has takenpersonal responsibility for replacing that exhibition with a much simpler display of the EnolaGay. He has put in place several initiatives through which the Institution can learn from thisexperience.)
Question 177: What steps are being taken to prevent something like this fromhappening again.Answer: The Institution is putting in place an extensive review of the Institution'sexhibition processes as well as a full management study on the National Air and SpaceMuseum. From these studies will come a series of recommendations that will be consideredfor implementation to prevent similar occurrences.

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