Commerce conference; began a partnership with the Bravo 

 Group, a national Hispanic marketing group; and created 

 target bilingual publicity campaigns for several exhibitions. 

 The Visitor Information and Associates' Reception Center 

 (VIARC) reached potential visitors through La Cumbre, the 

 primary travel trade show for travel agents and tour operators 

 who send visitors to Washington from Latin America. 



A Lifetime of Learning 



People of all ages can find abundant learning opportunities 

 at the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian Associates, Smithsonian 

 magazine, and Smithsonian Press/Smithsonian Productions 

 bring education, enlightenment, and enjoyment to wide 

 audiences and strengthen the bond between the American 

 people and their national museums. 



The Smithsonian Associates (TSA) truly has something for 

 everyone. Consider some offerings on TSAs rich menu this 

 year: an eight-week Campus on the Mall course examining the 

 impact of Jackie Robinson's breaking the baseball color 

 barrier 50 years ago; a chance for families to meet Kermit, 

 Elmo, Miss Piggy, and other Muppets in an unprecedented 

 look at the late Jim Henson's genius; and the first 

 Smithsonian Associates voyage to the North Pole, on board a 

 nuclear-powered icebreaker. 



TSA took educational programs across the nation during 

 fiscal year 1997. Along with "Voices of Discovery," national 

 outreach initiatives included a new audiocassette series. 

 "Voices from The Smithsonian Associates" showcases popular 

 Resident Associate programs such as Microsoft's Bill Gates, 

 journalists David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite, historians 

 Stephen Ambrose and James McPherson, and writers P. D. 

 James and Pat Conroy. Art in Celebration!, an exhibition of 

 TSAs commissioned artworks organized in collaboration with 

 the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, 

 continued its three-year, 40-state tour on Artrain. The tour is 

 sponsored by Chrysler Corporation. Some 360 Smithsonian 

 Study Tours, in the United States and around the world, 

 included family-oriented trips to the Galapagos Islands and 

 Kenya. 



Many TSA programs have become signature Smithsonian 

 events and local traditions. Discovery Theater, the only 

 continuous live children's theater in the Washington area, 

 celebrated its twentieth season. Many of the 75,000 

 youngstets who delight in Discovery Theater performances 

 each year are experiencing theater for the first time. The 

 annual Smithsonian Kite Festival on the Mall, one of the 

 premier handmade kite competitions in the world, was again 

 sponsored jointly by The Smithsonian Associates, the 

 National Air and Space Museum, and participating 

 kite-flying clubs. At TSAs summer camp, some 450 

 youngsters ages 4 to 13 discovered the wonders of the sea, 

 learned about ancient Pompeii, took an imaginary trip to the 

 Moon, created their own Web pages, filmed their own science 

 fiction videos, and more. 



For design and decorative arts historians, TSA began 

 offering a two-year aster's degree program in the history of 

 nineteenth- and twentieth-century American decorative arts. 

 Created in cooperation with Cooper-Hewitt National 

 Museum of Design and Parsons School of Design, the 

 program gives students unique access to materials on 

 American art and design history contained in the 

 Smithsonian's unparalleled holdings. 



Smithsonian magazine, read by nearly 8 million people each 

 month, is a vital educational outreach vehicle. Academic 

 institutions, associations, and textbook publishers use its 

 articles as course material or for information. About 70 

 percent of the more than 500 reprint requests received this 

 year were from organizations with an educational purpose or 

 affiliation. Smithsonian took on a polished new look with the 

 July 1997 issue, the first redesign in the magazine's 27-year 

 history. Air & Space! Smithsonian magazine finished its eleventh 

 year of publication, providing 1.2 million readers with focused 

 editorial content relating to the collections of the National Air 

 and Space Museum and information of interest to the aerospace 

 community. Smithsonian Press/Smithsonian Productions 

 (SP/SP) reaches both popular and scholarly audiences 

 through a variety of media, publishing more than 100 books 

 and recordings each year. This year. SP/SP celebrated the 

 American musical with Red, Hot & Blue, written by curators 

 Amy Henderson and Dwight Blocker Bowers to accompany 

 the popular National Portrait Gallery-National Museum of 

 American History exhibition. A four-CD set, "Star-Spangled 

 Rhythm," showcased nearly 90 years of the musical's 

 recorded history and featured many rare, 

 never-before-released performances. 



New titles for a popular audience from SP/SP included 

 Snakes in Question and Bats in Question, part of the Smithsonian 

 Answer Book series. These inviting, easy-to-read books, written 

 by Smithsonian experts, satisfy the curiosity of both adults 

 and children. SP/SP also launched a major 16-volume popular 

 series in partnership with Random House Publishers, the 

 Smithsonian Guides for Natural America. 



SP/SP's notable contributions to scholarly literature this 

 year included The Origin and Early Diversification of Land 

 Plants: A Cladistic Study, by Paul Kenrick and Peter R. Crane, 

 considered one of the most important books on the assembly 

 of terrestrial ecosystems. Another new publication, the second 

 volume in Tom D. Dillehay's Monte Verde; A Late Pleistocene 

 Settlement in Chile, received national attention for rewriting the 

 chronology of the peopling of the Americas. The 13-part radio 

 series from SP/SP, "Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was," won 

 prestigious radio honors in the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia 

 University Awards and the George Foster Peabody Awards. 

 The series has run on nearly 200 radio stations around the 

 country. Major production began on the television project 

 "River of Song: Music along the Mississippi," as PBS 

 announced its intention to broadcast the three-hour series 

 nationally in 1998—99. A companion radio series, funded by 

 the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, will air on public 



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