Workshops planned in setting up events for state's centennial

The Oklahoma Museums Association, in collaboration with the state Libraries Department and Oklahoma Centennial Commission, will offer four regional workshops in April and May.

The workshops about the state's 2007 centennial are targeted to museums, historical societies, libraries, archives, historic sites, zoos and botanical gardens, historic houses, living history museums, tribal cultural centers and other museum-related institutions.

The same information will be presented at each workshop.

Each workshop will be from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and preregistration is required.

The registration fee, which includes lunch and handouts, is $25 for Oklahoma Museums Association and Oklahoma Library Association members and $30 for nonmembers.

A limited number of scholarships are available for the workshop series.

Six instructors will teach how centennial celebrations can take many forms in the museum setting and will concentrate on how cultural institutions can use their collections and resources for their own centennial projects.

Other topics will include the centennial resources Web site, developing community support, marketing, fund raising, how to have a project recognized by the Centennial Commission, how to mount small-scale exhibits and traveling exhibits and using oral-history collections to organize and tell the stories of a county, community, school, church, industry and family.

The series is supported, in part, by the Oklahoma Museums Association, state Libraries Department, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Oklahoma Centennial Commission, state Arts Council, Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, Oklahoma Historical Society, Kerr Foundation Inc., ConocoPhillips, Anne and Henry Zarrow Foundation and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.

For more information or to register, call 424-7757, or go to www.okmuseums.org.