Cindy, Sounds like you have done an exemplary job involving your stakeholders. Your designers may need to develop a better framework for their questions about the past 40 years. From your description, the last four decades seem to lack thematic focus and have devolved into generalities, rather than particularities. That can eviscerate an interpretive exhibit. One approach to develop focus is to ask your advisory committees and historians what they think are the most important trends, events, or people in the last 40 years. You might also survey your target audiences, not necessarily the same thing as your stakeholder committees. What has made Mississippi distinctive in the past 40 years? What are the commonalities about living in Mississippi, as well as the things that separate people? What has happened in the past 40 years to change, reinforce, or modify sense of place in Mississippi--environmentally or socially? You could approach the remainder of the exhibit by using the traditional anthropological investigative categories of work, family, and community. Individual people should be integral to all of these stories, and opportunities for oral history are abundant when the recent past is the subject. As others have suggested, doing rotating temporary exhibits in this space, focusing on different communities or themes, is also a good approach and the process of changing exhibits will help you build a collection and develop historical resources for the recent past. Good luck. Tom Tom Woods, Ph.D. President, Making Sense of Place, Inc. 1521 Grandview Ave. Oconomowoc, WI 53066 [log in to unmask] Phone: 262-569-1698 Fax: same ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).