JANE COLLABORATIVE: BRINGING SCIENTIFIC DEBATE TO RURAL AMERICA

One fifth of the American population is rural. Newspaper readership has decreased to 54% of Americans reading a newspaper daily (62% on Sunday). The number of newspapers has also declined about 1% a year for the last 20 years to 1,457 dailies in 2002. One study found 70% of the papers publish science articles with 10% or fewer articles including actual terms and /or quasi-scientific explanations. With such conditions, Burpee Museum of Natural History of Rockford, Illinois completed a two year Institute for Museum and Library Services grant, the Jane Collaborative, which served 64 libraries in Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin. The Jane Collaborative created a learning community and serves as a model for small, rural libraries/ museum partnerships, utilizing a high impact specimen to create awareness of both library and museum resources and a means for introducing science into communities. Prior to the Jane Collaborative 45% of the libraries had sponsored scientific or technology programming in the past year, mostly computer classes and 50% of participating library staff read a daily newspaper. Burpee provided two training programs at the museum for library staff and a series of four outreach paleontology programs centered on Jane, their juvenile T rex. Libraries also received $400 of paleontology materials and a bus trip to the museum. After participating in the Jane Collaborative, library staff increased their comfort level in assisting patrons with science questions in general from an average of 6.3 to 7.0 (on a scale of 0 no comfort to 10 very comfortable) and dinosaurs particularly from 5.7 to 7.6 and their perceived knowledge of dinosaurs from 4.6 to 6.1. Two thirds of the participants believed their experiences in the collaborative will help them develop future programs. They rated their publics' reaction to Burpee's outreach programs a 9 on a 0 not at all interested-10 very interested scale. Here we present the results of this model collaborative between a museum and libraries for organizing and distributing scientific information to small, rural communities