While we could do so much more, our main focus at the moment is consuming less. We think this is a great way to ease the entire institution into more eco-friendly practices. This applies to everything from office supplies, to electricity, to water and anything else we can think of. While the entire staff is trying to use less paper over-all by going digital as much as possible, the Curatorial staff is going one step further and reusing paper that has only been printed on one side. One drawer in our printer is dedicated to holding this paper for use on non-confidential things that have to be printed but don't need to be printed on a virgin piece of paper. This small step will save us reams of paper a year! We hope to introduce it to the wider staff as time goes on.

Another area we are truly dedicated to consuming less, is with electricity. As a non-profit institution we need to closely watch all of our unnecessary spending. One thing we can easily do is use less electricity by turning off the lights in our offices when we're not in them. A step further is to turn off the lights in the exhibition spaces when no one is in them! This we'd like to achieve by using motion sensors to detect when a visitor is viewing the exhibits, turning on especially for them and then turn off when they leave. The trick is to not leave anyone in the dark! With some tweaking, we think we can achieve this and cut our energy usage in half!

Our final area of interest at the moment, is exhibit building materials. New sustainable building materials are available, such as Wheatboard in place of formaldehyde-laden MDF, canvas instead of vinyl banners, and zero VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) paint. Some of these are more costly than their counterparts, but if it makes the Museum a healthier place to visit and work, then we are dedicated to delivering that.

We are excited to see the new eco-friendly products available to us, and we hope that in the future they are no longer considered speciality items, but instead, standard practice. Are you making earth-friendly choices at home or at work? Tell us about it! Give us more ideas where we can improve ourselves!

Have you ever seen a culture?

Once in awhile - sometimes a very long while - we see signs of success. We find little bits of evidence that what we do as museum workers might really make a difference.

One such little bit of evidence recently turned up on a low-tech interactive component in our current exhibition A Yemeni Community: Photographs from the 1970s by Milton Rogovin. This is a warm and rich collection of black and white images that documents life in an immigrant community in Lackawanna, New York. Milton Rogovin strategically omits the use of titles for his photographs of "the forgotten ones" to prod the viewer to look more carefully and reflect on their content of the pictures. So, we have included a panel in our exhibit that invites our visitors to write their own titles or captions for some of the images.

Kids (and adults) continue to stick their notes on our interactive wall (we are saving all of them). Of course, some make no sense (to us), but many have brief personal reflections and comments that indicate our visitors are really connecting with the exhibit. One of these notes is shown here. It says "I've never seen a culture before." I believe this to be a marvelous bit of evidence that we may have had a profound impact on one our young visitors - perhaps for the first time he or she became aware of something we too often take for granted, our "culture" and all that potent little word stands for. If this is so, our visitor has made a giant leap toward understanding his or her world.

Of course, this is just a beginning, and we have much more work to do. But it made my day when I saw that little note!