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2007 SSP TMR

Interview 2: “Museums in Greater Service to Society and the Environment

Speaker: Emlyn Koster
Interviewer: Judy Luther

Liberty Science Center, located next to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty on the booming Hudson River waterfront in Jersey City, reopened this summer following a $109 million expansion and renewal. This project enables the nonprofit, 295,000 sq.ft. institution to function as a major resource for living, learning and working in, and caring for, the NJ-NYC region; as a unique stage for third-party events that increase society’s links with science and technology; and as a benchmark for the museum field that has recently been searching for new relevancy-focused models. Its President and CEO will talk about how he made this vision a reality.

Judy Luther of Informed Strategies, will then probe for lessons from this experience for scientific and scholarly publishers, and invite further audience discussion.

Speakers

Emlyn Koster
Emlyn Koster, a science museum CEO for the past two decades, is currently at the helm of one of the museum field’s most relevancy-minded renewal projects. Internationally experienced and dedicated to improving the links between science and society, he is a prominent writer and speaker about the external responsibilities of science museums as well as an active contributor to their main professional bodies.

President and CEO of Liberty Science Center since 1996, he is leading the institution in a demand-driven $110m capital project under the banner of Connections: Our Community, Our World. In partnership with the region’s public and private sectors, this encompasses major expansion and renovation as well as extensive exhibition and program enhancement. New Jersey’s most visited museum and one of the New York City metro region’s top-rated cultural destinations, Liberty Science Center is in Liberty State Park, Jersey City, next to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

Opened in 1993 and expanded by mid-2007, its innovative benchmarks for the science museum field feature inclusive approaches to audience, regional relevancy of onsite, offsite and online content, extensive involvement with preK -12 education and teacher professional development, and instructive applications of videoconferencing and cell phones.

Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Center assisted in a wide variety of emergency roles that went on to shape thinking in the museum field about different roles when disaster strikes.

Judy Luther
Judy created Informed Strategies in 1997 to apply a customer-oriented perspective to the design and development of electronic products and services. Her experience includes 12 years managing sales at the Institute for Scientific Information (now Thomson Reuters) and at Faxon, preceded by 13 years managing academic libraries.

With both an Executive MBA and an MLS, Judy is actively involved in industry initiatives in both the publisher and library communities. She was CoChair of the NISO Working Group that created SERU (Shared Electronic Resources Understanding) and led the creation of the Juried Product Development Forums within the Charleston Conference.

She serves on the Editorial Boards for the Journal of Electronic Publishing, UKSG Serials, Against the Grain and The Charleston Advisor. Judy is a Past President of (SSP) and has served on the boards of the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) and the Association for Information and Dissemination Centers (ASIDIC).