Dear Colleagues,

For many months I have been lurking on the list serve reading with
interest all the postings about the Enola Gay controversy.  I have also
been haunting bookstores, surfing the WWW, and generally trying to find
anything possible that I might use to try to determine if, and should, a
museum and/or library in this day and age of PC, reduced funding, etc.
attempt to try to serve as a community forum to explore controversial issues.

Then, as the finished product, develop a pathfinder to identify
conferences, organizations, literature and electronic resources that one
might access to gain a sense of some of the issues involved.  I am
interested in both library and museum resources, and in liberal and
conservative viewpoints.

One of the best insights I have seen so far, I found posted by Mike
Wallace on the WWW.  His article in Museum News was greatly expanded to
provide a much more comprehensive overview of the whole issue.  I
was especially interested in his suggestions for dealing with potential
stakeholders in advance, both those who are pro and con, when conceiving
controversial exhibits.

Along the same lines, I was also interested in his recounting of the
history of the Air and Space Museum.  I wonder how much of the
exhibit backlash had to do with the fact that the Museum
was founded originally by those who supported a strong military and wanted a
forum to celebrate America's technological advances in the aerospace industry?

I am also interested in contacting anyone who actually saw the
alternative exhibit at American University. I have found very few citations
to articles discussing it.  Was the associated forum held on July 16 as
advertised?

I was also very interested to see the Enola Gay webpage produced by the
Library School class at the University of Maryland.  The address is
http://www.glue.umd.edu~enola/muse/curators.html.

At the risk of opening this line of inquiry again, anyone interested
might want to contact me directly rather than posting to the
listserv.  I am interested in this line of inquiry, but I'm not sure how
many of the rest you, my colleagues, might be as well.

P.S. Hank Burchard, Gregory Scheib, Nigel Worden, Paul Richardson, Eric
Siegel, and Mike Wallace, etc. are you out there?

Judy Prosser-Armstrong
Collections and Information Manager (librarian/archivist)
Museum of Western Colorado
Grand Junction
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