So glorious would be its final issue that so god would judge me i dare not say then it is not to be desired. At the New York Historical society, james legacy of the sixth president. For our complete American History tv schedule, go to cspan. Org. The Richard Nixon president ial library and museum in california completed a major renovation last month. The museums designer sat down to talk about how they revised the exhibits to tell a more complete story about president nixon and his administration. This is just over 90 minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new Richard Nixon president ial library and museum. Todays program will be introduced by ronald a. Walker and david farial. The arcavist of the United States. [ applause ]. Thank you and good morning, everyone. Over the last four daek cades Richard Nixons career and Public Service was talking about many new nixons. But this museum, which opened yesterday, most of you were here, is truly the newest and i think youll agree with us, its the best of nixon, all. This morning well be hearing from the think well group which were really pleased with and the cortina productions who designed and executed the new library and museum. The creators of our new web site, how many of you got our web site there are many without whom, people whose involvement and contribution were vital to the in every way to the success of this completion. Unquestionably, the new Nixon Library, most importantly without whom is my friend and very dear partner in the planning and building of this new Nixon Library museum. And now as my distinct pleasure to introduce the arcavist of the United States of america. [ applause ] thank you, and good morning. Yesterday, when we were on the podium, i reminded folks of fdrs vision when he created the president ial library system, his faith in the capacity of the citizen ri to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment to create their own future. One of the most important ways we do that continue to fulfill that mission is through our exhibit programs across the president ial library. I would like to describe our goals as to educate, to enlighten, to entertain and to inspire. And am i not so secret agenda is to inspire young folks to devote their lives to Public Service and the exhibits provide a way for us to celebrate Public Service. A lot has changed since 1990 when this library opened and more papers have been processed and declassified resulting in new scholarship, eric and his book who owns history writes about history as a process not casts in stone, but rewritten each new generation and that is based on this discovery and rediscovery which president nixon himself talked about when opening this library and museum. Technological innovations have transformed the experience, that provided opportunities to share and reuse content in new and innovative ways and most importantly, visitor expectations have changed. We now have limited attention spans. We reject over texted exhibits and the expectation of interactive opportunities have revolutionized the business of exhibition design. All of these factors help shape our design and redesign of president ial library exhibits and each time we do one, we learn. Each new project raises the bar, lbj, fdr, bush 43 build on the successes of the past, very much a collaborative process, cracker jack consultants on the technology and exhibit design, stellar historian and foundation and National Archive staff and not to be overlooked generous supporters who believe in the mission and have invested in the future. It really does take a village, my thanks and deep appreciate for all of you who have made this possible and helped us invest in the future. Please welcome, chief executive officer and craig hanna, chief creative officer. Good morning. Thank you all for coming out today on a nice cool saturday. Its great when the National Archivist steals all of your morning material. Literally, the first thing i was talking about this morning is how audiences have changed and how its harder than ever to communicate with them and whether you have one or not, most everyone has some sort of mobile device with them, their noses are in it all the time, theyre taking pictures with it, theyre looking up things, i dont know what might im going to sound like an old guy. I dont know what my kids are up to on these darn devices. But it really creates a whole different mindset for all we need to communicate with audiences and the job use to be a lot easier once upon a time we could ptd get out as much as a people, just getting to europe, it was 7, 8 days it was easy to be able to present objects that no one had or could see and be amazed by them, right. So back in the day you put stuff on display and everyone appreciated it because they had no other way to see it. Today, we have a plethora of opportunity to get information. Whether its seeing it in his home location. And we utilize technologies today to engage people in a different way and allow them to go deeper. Whats going to happen tomorrow and, you know, we look at this image and we say, oh my gosh its science fiction, but wednesday night of this last week at 9 00 p. M. , a Major Company sold for the first time at major retail outlets a home version of this device that is going to really be in a few more years and virge yule reality will allow us the opportunity to explore anything and everywhere as if we were really there. What does that mean for museums, well, we contend that it means primarily two things, one we all crave to do things socially together, so regardless of sitting at home and being able to see the greatest movie we could ever see on the nicest display with the best surround sound, i still want to come out with my friends and say, oh my gosh, wasnt that amaze. And the other thing is, the more we can do online, on our computers and see virge yulely, things, the more we contend you want to see the real thing and it makes the real more important. So, the importance of Something Like the Richard Nixon president ial library and museum, is we can see these amazing items from the National Archive, on display up close, things that the president himself touched and used. Were able to tell stories in new ways that, socially, we can do together, hey, come take a look at this, did you know this about the president. And that kind of engagement changes the way we look at things now, and it makes our jobs harder, dont get me wrong, but it also forces us to look at things in a new way. So if you cant beat them, join them. You cant get the device out of their hands, so lets encourage its use and whether its an app like the brand new mobile app that is here at the museum or whether its other technologies to create a connection between that device and the thing theyre looking at in the museum is one tool at our disposal. She said we do three things we social media, we say, i am here. Here is this thing, and i am here with this thing. And nothing else and i thought about it and went, oh my gosh, shes right. So we have to make sure that in todays age, we provide photo ops, seems ridiculous, but we do. As you go through the exhibition today, youll see a few, some selfie moments that you can do on your own and others that youll hang your camera over to somebody that knows how to use it and they can take a picture of you, as well. Hopefully we can bring those moments from nixons life to life in a whole way that allows us to engage with a whole new audience in another way. Last but certainly not least, being able to talk to different audience segments is really important as well. Now, i would like to turn it over to joe who is going introduce the rest of our team that worked on this project and our partner, as well. Thanks, greg. Well, were honored to have been a selected to work on this project, weve been working on it for nearly three years and its a long journey and a very complex process that requires the efforts of dozens of people. But, today, were going to have the lead creative who is are involved in creating the exhibit here and well kind of deconstruct it and talk about some of the moments and how it came together. First, i would like to introduce kate mcconnell, she was our creative director, a project like this needs a deep diver, somebody who can get in and understand everything, we would like to approach all of our projects by putting ourselves in the shoes with the guests that will be coming in. How do we get the next generation and people to care and want to be involved. And kate is that generation we want to talk to, she knows as much about nixon, as i think anybody in this room does, now, and shell go one and one with any of you, did a great job. Then, if kate is the words in the concepts and the presentation, just like a film that needs a production designer of how it all comes together, chuck robert who is is our art director. [ applause ] put them in a pleasing way, what the topic is or how you want to tell the story, that is chucks job. I would also like to bring up our partner for all the video and media. We partnered with productions and we would like to say in our exhibits, we try to create emotional souvenirs. You want somebody to feel something. As craig said, putting out information is not enough. Having the emotional power was really important. Amys principle and partner of cortina productions. How many president ial library ris have you done . This is our seventh. The stores and interactives is phenomenal. I also need to have a shout out for the rest of our team who was not here, but we also have and this was the producer project manager, thats the conductor of the train, a little bit about think well, when we got hired from this job, Richard Nixon foundation. Richard nixon loved cutting edge thinking. If clients that come to us want something a different way than telling the story, we work not just in museums but we work in entertainment. We work in corporate environments. We do buildings and urban development. But its always about connecting a guest with sintellectual property. We have about 200 employees. They range from being architects and master planners and Story Tellers and feeder designers, technicia technicians, video editors and all of that kind of comes together for these project that is we work on. We have an office in beijing and dubai. You may have seen some of the projects we have done. Hoar they had a puppet theater. They wanted to be repository of puppets and the stories that go behind these. This is an ancient art form and our job is to engage children and creativity and tell the stories of these collections. Its situated on the forest and our gold air, how do you connect kids with nature, again, when we did our study of the demographics, in atlanta there are two types of kids, there are the inner city kids who are scare today go out in the forest or there were the privileged kids who came in and they parents didnt want them to go out and get dirty. The way i grew up learning from nature by exploring it and playing and moving things and adjusting water and all of that, kids were getting that experience. So we created a 7,000 square foot exhibit where you did that in doors worked with Warner Brothers at the studio where harry potter was made. This is about 150,000 square foot factory tour, if you will, of where the films were made, but its a very mer zif way of telling the story of the craftsman, the ten years of film making that went on there, how you make the film. If you get to go see and touch all the real sets and costumes and see behind the scenes how the magic came off. Weve been working for the last number of years in dubai on the world expo in 2020. An expo is a museum, how big is the site there. 500 acres. 500acre city theyre basically building. We were involved in the content and entertainment master planner. Youll have an architect thats master planning the place, what do people do, how do they engage with it, what are all the different entertainment opportunities and cultural opportunities within this space. How do you engage a younger audience to want to dive deeper and want to learn. Were a media design and Production Company located in virginia, classic American Dream story, three of us started in a basement. And our the bulk of our work is for museums and Cultural Heritage spaces, thats what we focused our attention on the last 15 years and ill run you through a couple of our projects. Were really honored to have been a part of the new Smithsonian Museum of africanamerican museum and culture that opened last month. We produced 25 exhibits for that, combination of films, interactive and audio scapes. My particular favorite is join the show now and you participate in a stepping, im not going to do it for you, but you can travel to do d. C. And do it. Its widely popular. And a fun way to celebrate the culture of africanAmerican History. They use football to teach science, technology, engineering and math in an Interactive Lab and they take 60,000 students a year through this program at the 49ers stadium and we just love using technology and story telling to open up young peoples minds to new ideas and new careers possibly. Next is the Muhammad Ali Center in louisville, kentucky. The focus of this project is to use muhammads life to teach concepts such as dedication and confident speaking up. Another one of our successful partnerships. Carter, clin top. I was raised by two journalists during the hay day of print journal licism and they were al very politically involved and grew up at the dinner table hearing about the office of presidency. And weve been its been so important to us to work on these, now our seventh president ial library to reach out to young people to use technologies that joe and craig talked about to open up young peoples minds to the history of our culture and our country. Lastly, ill talk to you about mobile ap that we did that i think, is perhaps, the most visited exhibition and we have the nixons to thank for that. Its the pandas that have made this project so popular and well ill leave you with a shot of mrs. Nixon with the pandas in china and then in our wonderful zoo in washington, d. C. So, im going to turn it over to chuck. Youll hear a lot about partnerships today and chuck is going to introduce us to a couple of partners that helped us create this immersive museum. Thank you. Plaus plau [ applause ]. I want to talk to you about eis. Studio eis is a company in brooklyn and they did the original figures for the hall of leaders here at the library in 1990. And they ive wanted to work with these guys for 30 years, i think. Maybe 25 years. And they do i think, the best Museum Figures that ive ever seen likeness is good but its usually very kind of stiff. On the life and natural. You sort of feel like you understand the character and feeling of who this person is. It was just a no brain tore go with these guys. Well talk here for a moment about the fab bring karters for our exhibits. And in case you sl not comple completely clear on how all of this work they did a beautiful job on this building, the it was the facility contractor, most of the walls, a lot of what you see in the exhibit was done by them and then that sort of gets carried over by our who did the exhibits. I, as a art director, do not always get to choose, who are we going to go with and i didnt know these guys well. I newsome of their work, we finally get into the room as were getting close to production and theyre sitting there and we start to sort of eyeball each other, were hope you guys know how to build stuff, if you can draw it all, well probably be okay. And its just, you know, it became a partnership and theres a couple of people i point out, lynn who was the plo jekt manager got under the hood on me on everything and we worked out the details. I have eve got to tell you from point of view, nothing in this museum is arbitrary. Its all carefully thought through and planned. Lynn stuck with me on all of this and theres things that i wanted that i thought do it this way and he thought im not doing it that way. He was right. So he was awesome. I want you to imagine this for a moment. He was hired to do the site install here. And he had, you know, help, obviously. But just all of the exhibits are arriving from new jersey and from toronto, stuff, you know, coming in huge crates and boxes. Hes opening this stuff up. Its organized, but it is such a challenge to figure out how to build a museum when its just coming in box after box after box and he managed to put it all together, things that were missing, he put in place, he built them himself. It was an amazing sort of heroic effort. I just want to point him out, as well. A project like this is so challenging. And it has to be heard. So the team now is going to go through the exhibit itself and kind of peak behind the scenes on how some of this came together. Thanks, jim. So peak behind the scenes is polite turn for lets do a little sausage making. One of the things when we started this project was to understand the times and the world he lived in and take another look at the president. And we always start our process by putting ourselves in our in our visitors shoes and thinking what did they bring to the table when they come to any experience we create. In this case we said as we started off, everyone has a kind of a one dimensional notion of Richard Nixon, including all of us, which was water gate, resignation, the end. And ill admit, that was where i started personally from this. And we cant ignore it. We dont want to ignore it. Its not fair to ignore it. Its not honest to ignore it. We chose instead to hit the nail on the head. When we sat down and had our initial brainstorming. We said, all right, lets think about the baggage we bring as visitors. Lets think about the things you would expect to see and the things you would see surprised to learn. In the course of discover we did we found some kind of key things that came out of it. The first that we said, and we imagine the visitors could say coming to a new exhibition, is, i didnt know he did so much and we were astonished to see the breath and depth of things that the president had done during his tenure in office. Next we said we thought our visitors would say, i didnt know he was so interesting, first of all, the man had hobbies and passions and sports and other interests, including and outside of his role in office. We thought, well, that really shows the human being behind this at the time, one dimensional person and that will really help open him up into a three dimensional person for all of us to see and appreciate much the same way the people who knew him and his family knew him and last but certainly not least on our long list of expectations, was i didnt know he did so many important things and this is something that i think was a turning point for us in our understanding of this man was all of the other incredible amazing achievements, all the initiatives, all the other things that started. And that is one key audience segment. We had nay sayiers. We had president ial buffs. But think wells perspective. We really define audiences in three other ways as waiters, swimmers and divers. A casual person who is going to come here on president s day is going to be like, oh, yeah, Richard Nixon, i heard about him or whatever. The swimmer is somebody who maybe lived through his presidency. Somebody who went to college and studied history as a young adult and has a deeper appreciation or understanding or interest in the president and those times and so theyre going to have a different approach youre going to look at every object its easy to sort of scratch the service, its hard to make sure you appeal and get enough for the diver and thats where i think a lot of the interactives come in. But, also, and the woo well talk about this in a little bit, thats where the web site comes in and the ap comes in and well talk more about that, too. So the sausage making begins with knowing who your audience is, understanding the different audience segments and the different types of audiences that you have to deal with and that really sets the stage for us to begin to explore how were going i have the feeling that there are some in this audience as well. They go really deep. So i just wanted to talk a little bit about think wells process and kind of how we worked on figuring out this story. We start with the audience. We start with the guest expectations what we want guest to come away with, what we think theyre interested in. Were digging into the man, into his life, reading books, watching documentaries. Kind of trying to discover who this man is, and were seeing 1913 when he was born feels really far away, right, it feels really distant to us, but when hes elected president in 1968 and theres all of this kind of turmoil happening in the country, theres this i can i dont say, action and excitement and passion, that is both dista distant, you know, its something that a lot of people forget about, a lot of Young Audiences havent lived through. Its also something that can really grab you. That can really excite you, we thought thats where we need to start. We need to start in that moment when hes about to be elected. Of course we have a problem, now we started in the middle of things how do you get back to the beginning. You know, weve got our planners working on this, and weve got our artists and researchers and art directors that are coming together and brainstorming. Were thinking, wait a second, here at the Nixon Library they have a unique treasure. They have nixons actual birthplace right outside and you can go and you can walk in it. We thought. What if they fall in the exhibit right there so you can look at those windows and see the birthplace and youll be encouraged to go outside and go visit it. We had our beginning point and we knew where we had to get back to the beginning. We had kind of those two points. That gave us enough we can form the structure of the exhibit. So, then, were starting to make our concept art, were starting to create some of our models and our sketch up to kind of flesh out those in between, that take us from the 60s through this vast this is a little bit of magic for me. Im surprised when i see even though weve done this before and weve seen this happen. Its always really cool to me. To start with, this is a early concept sketch. We thought about, all right, in the vietnam gallery, we wanted to capture kind of the emotion of the difficulty of that war, the soldiers on the ground, the men and in danger on the ground in action in combat. And we wanted to capture the turmoil at home, the protests against the war, the conversation that was going on and we wanted to put them together. So you see this early concept sketch and then we have our artist and designers, theyre using the program calling sketch up. Were saying, okay, how would we integrate media, where would we put our artifacts. Theyre creating that space around it. And then you have work in progress installation photo of now its actually coming to life. Its getting built and put into space and you guys can go in there and see now that that concept has come to life. Another aspect of the process that we all engage in is really integration. Visitors today are very sawvy. We have, perhaps, the savviest visitor weve ever experienced and theyre growing so more right now as i speak. Theyre getting smarter than we are. And so we hope that you notice that its part of our approach, that media and the fabrication, objects are so its rare. We have two stand alone theaters, really we have one big theater and theres a smaller theater we see domestic policy video. Everything else is integrated using all of the skills that we can bring to bear on this story. Well hope you see that as you move through. And this when you get to lincoln sitting room, youll notice it has everything in it. Well talk more about that later. But first, this is really in the making, you know what, im not going to apologize for it because its so critical and its called research. As soon as request for proposal comes into our email inbox, we are already starting our Research Process because we love story telling what shows up for you may dimensionality to it. It first has to all be rooted in story and stories must be rooted in research. And so we begin our Research Process by reading every book that we can find and some authors are in this room right now that we pulled heavily from and read your work. We read books that the client would love us to read and we read some books, that perhaps, they wished we had not. We think its important to look at the entire story, cross reference facts and dates and get multiple sources. We also look at hours and hours of raw video. Documentaries. And very very important, in case you dont know it, were in a National Archive. The nixon papers and documents are housed here. We go to those primary sources during the Research Process. We also rely very heavily on our cue raters here, some of which are in the room to help us tease out this story and then lastly, i want to make sure that you all know that with we did not write the exhibition alone, or in a vacuum. Were happy to say that all the content was rigorously vetted with four independent historians. Were proud that they went through this rigorous level of vetting. We we discovered this as a team and we were ri vetted by this information. We were allowed to read them. We were thrilled to be reading them. It engages them and it inspires them to go learn more. We dont want this exhibition to be the beginning sorry, the end of the visitors discovery. We want it to be the beginning. And youll see with the yellow note pads, we pepper it, we use it throughout the exhibition, starting in the orientation film, there are interactive stations the visitors may use the yellow note pads. In the lincoln sitting room where nixon himself wrote on these yellow note pads. This is a way that we use research to bring it forward for the visitors so that they are able to see an authentic element of this particular manner Richard Nixon. You can join me too. Great. When we decide, we said, how do we establish the context of the time. Well talk a little bit about the introphysical space and how we do it there. We decided the best way to immerse people in understanding the time to get their heads around the context of all of the things, the chaos and tunnel that was going on in the country was to do a film, and the music, the sound, the visuals, that talk about everything that was going on here and in vietnam really help establish all of that and really set the stage and that became kind of the opening volley, that before you even step your feet in the door of the exhibition itself. We needed to set the stage in a way where we could focus you and deliver. We wanted to lay out all of the information, all of the different points of view, all the pieces of content, the primary sources and place guests kind of into the moment for themselves and that will allow them to come through their own conclusions that way. We really felt this was in the spirit of what Richard Nixon i himself, wanted for this library. When he opened the library here in 1990 he said this quote, they can be passive, dry repositories of books and documents, i hope that the Nixon Library and birthplace will be different. A vital place of discovery and redisrovr of investigation and contemplation of study, debate and analysis. And thats really what we wanted to do. We wanted to kind of that active engagement. We never wanted to put a period on things. It was all about back and forth, conversation between the guests and the piece itself, whether its a film, text, whether its an interactive theyre playing with. So into that theater itself, as craig said, we really wanted to set the stage and introduce, kind of, the sort of exhibit that they were going to be going into. To do that, we couldnt have a typical theater like this. You guys are so far away. Theres a big gulf in between us. Theres a big screen here and its talking kind of down at you. And we wanted to create a smaller more intimate space, kind of really wrap that screen around you, kind of immerse you in that space. So to do that, we need today create a whole new theater. Now, the Nixon Library had this beautiful big atrium space and we took it away from them. But we gave them a very lovely theater in its place, so amy you want to talk a little bit about the content in there. Sure, so back to this thing called research. As we were learning about presidency, there was a particular quote that left out of this and ill paraphrase it. He said that Richard Nixon had many facets. And this really interested us because of something craig said in the beginning which was that many of our visitors are going to come with one, maybe as many as three things that they think they know about this topic. And when we heard that he was multi facetted, we thought, really, lets just go see. We started talking about it, cross referencing the things that we were reading, looking back at documentaries, looking more at scholarship that authors had used when they had come to the archives and learned more about Richard Nixon. And what we found is that indeed, Richard Nixon is multi facetted. And we wanted to convey that to the visitor because we saw things like, and we heard and read things, he would a fighter and he was empathetic. He could be tough, but he had compassion. So there are these. We wanted the visitor go get a sense of that, ill give you an example, in terms of empathy. Richard nixon, as many of you know passed legislation to return lands to native americans. This is because he empathizes with the loss of their land and he believes theyve been treated unfairly. This is something that comes from Richard Nixons heart. That was very interesting to us. Why did he pass legislation, lets go see. And we and so we developed the story arch around that. You want to talk about the why we chose i think it goes back to thinking about the divide and you think about your typical museum film narration, and thats the single voice. Theyre telling you this is what happened, here is how it was and here is the interpretation of it. We didnt want that. There were too many discussions. There were too many disagreements about history and its interpretation. I use to amuse myself while i was researching by going and reading all of the amazon reviews of Richard Nixon, if you want to see the extent of disagreement and the many opinions that people have just read those reviews. Its fascinating. So we thought instead of a single narrater, lets have a lot of them and kor tina did this amazing work finding these Story Tellers. Here it goes to young people. If you have a young person in your life, and i do, he has very little interest in what i have to say as an authoritarian. I had to learn a new way and we have had to learn a new way as film makers. So we went out and found people come Story Tellers, theres a combination of them. Some of which were in the nixon white house, people who knew Richard Nixon and then we have scholars and historians who have studied Richard Nixon in the United States and then we went all the way to oxford to get a lady who had a particular interest in the nixon mile story. The other thing that these Story Tellers helped us do which is very important to audiences, is to context liez the time. We didnt ask question about Richard Nixon and presidency. We asked about the time and we asked our Story Tellers to share with the audience what was going on in that time in our history so that our visitors had a larger view and could put the presidency in the context. We need if were going to work presentation in our concept for this. We said, well, you know, it would be pretty audacious to do the unexpected and visitor coming here might think youre going to sweet watt sweep water gait under the carpet. We said lets not do that. Lets sort of push the plunger on a big bowl out there and blow up and lets start with water gait and from there we have shown you exactly what you didnt think you would see and move on to talk about the legacy and the man. And not sweeping it under the rug at all and that started for the introfilm and as craig would remind us in meetings, we what is the primary thing that they think they know, well, everybody and our average age and our company of everyone who worked on this job, their average age is 32. So, yeah they knew about water gate or they knew about nixon and pop culture, and by starting with water gate we acknowledged the one thing that they know and then were able to move from there and putting that inside the presidency. And building a greater complex for you. So we have our orientation film, you step outside and before you head into the exhibits you might pause and download the ap on your phone. Yes, and so the app on your phone and mine is in my bag, we all have one, but here at the Nixon Library, your app can do these things for you, there are your typical visitor information, there are two things i really want to highlight for you, one and it connects to the web, which youll hear more about, as you move through the galleries, if there is a particular topic that your most interested in, for me its title nine, i love title nine, i am able to end the title nine area whats important about this aside from giving that visitor the deeper dive, visitors today want to continue their and the app allows our visitors to do that. Secondly i want to point out to you, the app is in three languages, english, spanish and mandarin. And what is so important to us about that is that it har kins back to the authentic story and part of the nixon legacy, which is our relations with chie that. This is about the 60s, the turmoil and the chaos we wanted to create a space that was little bit of an assault on census. Check with you and talk with you a little bit about that. This is one of the original concept pieces that we did. The walls are a little wavy. Its jagged and fractured, you know, weve got problems and so that really accounts for the shapes of the walls that youre seeing. The library itself is very si met tri cal and very aligned and then as you step into this gallery, everything starts to just be a little fractured so, you know, and then the color, you pop the color, took us youll notice if youre in there too, the bands of color, the way we use the images theyre to one side or the other, the place has a little, you know, it feels unstable and as you wander through here and, especially the visuals that amy has brought in here and the sound the sound is brilliant it leads you through the space the way its been designed, you look at everything thats going on in there. By the time you get to the ends of the hall, youre just wondering why would anyone want to be president , i mean, its just crazy, and so so let us walk you through in case you dont recall, all the thing that is were going on, three assassinations, president kennedy, dr. Martin luther king, bobby kennedy, those are covered in the gallery. The march on washington for jobs and then, of course, we have vietnam, fuel it thank you, vietnam, soldiers in vietnam and protests going on here. We also have the draft. Were coming aware that were damaging our environment, what are we going to do about that. And then let me just say, the democrats were this a mess in 68 and we cover chicago and as chuck says, into the phrase, Richard Nixon. So you come to the end of that corridor and im going to allow chuck to get off the stool again, you see the inauguration and you step into oval office. Now, the original library didnt have an oval office and we thought it was a really important piece as a guest expectation, guests want to go in there, they want to wander around. They want to sit down at the desk. It was really important that we create that space. There we are. All right. Ill show you the spots here in a second. So, what i want to tell you about oval office so, who were talking about earlier, this is largely their work, all the walls and everything youre seeing here, this is a highly accurate recreation of nixons oval office. This, to me, looks like, you know, historical photo. Its not. Its our room and theres just so much weve gotten in here that, you know, is accurate to the original office. Yeah, from the blue and gold colors, the carpet, the rug was designed by pat nixon, the california blue and gold. Let me tell you how hard it is to find that kind of gold upholstery fabric these days. Not to mention, we started to look at this and like, is this going to work, i dont know. And we got it in there oh, this is nice. Its minimal. Its sort of lovely. The other thing i want to point out, too, is that the light, the windows, the view, the way the room is handled. It has life just because of, you know, how, you know, we picked the time of day, its Late Afternoon and it just feels live. We have our lighting designer, davidson is certified genius, theres i mean, everything in this exhibit would not look, i mean, chucks work is amazing, it wouldnt look as good it was. I think the other great thing about oval office and really unique part of it, is that you can go and walk through the whole office, you can see and any chair and i think for a child, particularly, you know, youre all parents, you said, some day you might grow up to be president. Now your kid can go and sit behind the president s desk, get their picture, post to social media. Want to consider doing this in my life. What a great opportunity for young people. So then moving into the other galleries, the china gallery was a really important one for us, of course, one of the landmark pieces of nixons presidency truly changed the Global Landscape and so we wanted to create a space that really honored that, do you want to talk about that. Sure. All right. Some of you probably have seen the opera nixon and china. If you have, you may have recognized the big plane and the hand shake, its pretty iconic. They stole it from history. And were just stealing it back, okay. No, we were inspired i keep forgetting. We were inspired by but there was really its as you go through that moon door, how to set this up, how to tell that story in just a blink, this just felt like the right way to do it. You use those as a backdrop to be able to put the elements on and tell the story of the trip. Here the plane and of this thing that happened, it would never occur to me to take those banners and use them to create a space. To create kind of the structural forms that organize that space and allow us to organize the information within it. Its just a really beautiful thing that he took this historical photo and turned it into, you know, the thing that i can put my text on and ruin it. Thank you. Thats great. One of the things that were, again, for the visitor, that were so happy about, is that the visitor gets transported in this museum to many places. And this is one of the places that they go. That one of the spaces that they get to visit. Yeah, literally a portal. And take the picture on the great wall of china. Yeah. So, in the gallery outside of that, one of our presidency galleries, we have one of the moments that is has already become one of the most photographed spots in the exhibits. Great selfie opportunity as craig mentioned earlier. And i love this because its another one of chucks audacious ideas. Okay. So its a fun idea but i just want to point out some things here. The main inspiration for me was when i saw the space suits at the library originally, they had please dont touch signs on their chests and i just thought, i love nasa, i love the show, the missions. Lets not do that, lets find a way to display these better. Putting them on the wall was a fun idea but i want you to understand for a second what it took and what this the level of integration that has to occur to do something simple like this. Theres many examples throughout the museum where all sorts of integration has happened. But the architect needs to agree that were going to do this and that hes willing to do the engineering to get the steel in the wall to support the space suits then really where do you want those plates and so forth to hold those feet . I dont know, you want the normal space suit distance apart, right . You know, its just something youll, well just do that and no one understands what that is. We scenically had to get some sort of panel on the wall that wouldnt deflect. The folks from nara had to clean the suits and then they dusted them again with moon dust so that they both felt like they were, you know, part of the scene. The mount maker had to do this thing so theyre not just hanging in gravity but they feel like guys grounded on the moon and its natural. Nick lit this and found positions where we could have these single shadows. All of this came together really nicely and it just it took a lot of people and it just kept happening over and over at this place and im just it was really fun to get to do this. Yeah. Yeah. Related to that right. Related to space, weve talked about it. This is one of the opportunities for visitors to have access to content thats here at the archive. There are listening in stations throughout the president ial galleries and this is one of them on space where visitors touch the ipad, pick up the phone and listen to president nixon speak to, or speak about one of the apollo 10 through 17 missions. And this isnt the only i have to tell this, one story that i love. There are other listening ins and one of them is over at equal and expanding rights. And i told you that we got to listen to hours of material and in listening of materials, one of the things that came up was a story, a busing, around desegregation. And its julie nixon calling Richard Nixon, her father and it goes Something Like this. Daddy . Yeah . Are you terribly busy . No. Listen. Then they go on to have this conversation about how she should answer a question regarding busing. And shes asking for her fathers advice. I have to tell you people, aside from the interesting fact that under Richard Nixon, it was 80 of schools were desegregated in the south in four years, the story that left out for me that created one of those moments where i saw this president as a man and as a father is in this Telephone Exchange and i hope you go listen to it because when he answers her, you know, are you terribly busy, no. If you are a working parent like i am and youve ever gotten the phone call from your child, when the world is blowing up around you. Or so you think. I was really touched by this and its another opportunity for the visitors to come here and listen to this, themselves. Now, how they walk away, their emotion may be very different than my own. Whats important for us is that we provide an opportunity. And this goes back to something that craig was talking about earlier that theres always going to be a place in museums for the real because thats what people want. They want to come and have that authentic connection to the real thing and the national after kifs have this incredible thousands of hours of these phone recordings and audio recordings and, you know, anybody can come in here. You can go downstairs and get your researcher card and you can dig through the archives and find all of this stuff and thats a lot of works so weve done some of that work for you and put a lot of it in the exhibit and the team here at the archives, the archivists and curators were so amazing because they know their collection and they would come to us and say do you know about this document . Do you know about this photo . Have you heard about bunny . This is one of my favorite. We dont show this in here. So ill just say bunny is this great artifact. We never heard about it. When nixon was running for senator, they were creating an ad and they asked his daughter to say vote for nixon and she had this little stuffed bunny. Instead she said vote for bunny. So we have bunny in the exhibit. That makes me really happy. So its that real authentic thing that people can then engage with and come away with however they feel. Yeah, that reminds me about another big change that we have in museum collections. Craig talked about it. When museums first started, they were objects and i went to a museum and i saw an object. An artifact. Today, and its been going on for about 60 years now, maybe a little more, one of our primary objects in todays world are media. Video. Audio. And im happy to say that of the hour and 45 minutes of content that is in the museum, about 80 of it, 80 , is media as artifact. So its like looking at a vase thats original. Yeah, absolutely. So, the nixon, inside the presidency area. Ill tell you, i was a little resistant at first to kind of having a space that was just about pat nixon and thats because you see this in other president ial libraries. Heres the president ial library then heres the first ladys space. And i wanted to integrate her throughout the exhibit and thats really what weve done because she was so present and active as a first lady. So many firsts to her name. Traveling to war zones. Traveling as a good will ambassador, as a representative of the president. So we did end up creating this space and i love it. I came around. To really kind of focus on, create this sort of intimate moment where people can interact. Weve got some incredible artifacts in there. There will be a rotating collection of apparel on display. I love these notepads, or these stationary pieces. She was an invedrate note writer, always wanting to respond to people personally so we have some of her stationary in there. Then we have this incredible interactive. Yeah, thanks. Well, first, im going to point out to you that i think you are the first to have an interactive inside a suitcase. And from what im seeing, the visitor loves it because they walk up to it and they say, oh, i had a suitcase like this or my mother had a suitcase like this. So now the visitor is connected to this story. And theyre connected to this suitcase and so now theyre connected to mrs. Nixon and thats what we want them to do. In this particular exhibit, you pick up a puck thats off to the side. It has an rfid signal on it. You set it in the suitcase and it activates content for that particular visit. Mrs. Nixon went to peru, africa, the National Parks tour. You put the puck down and it activates the interactive screen and brings up content on that particular visit. Youre able to peruse through a photo album. My personal favorite, you can see mrs. Nixons passport. Above that is a mirror with video in it, and i hope that you stop and look at it because looking at hours of footage of mrs. Nixon, she is so loved and she radiates love as she goes out and meets with people around the world. And it was one of the things we didnt know. We did not know, and i discovered it. And now i tell everybody about it. Because im a discoverer. So, one of the things we discovered, of course, during our Research Process was the incredible amount of domestic achievements. The epa, title 9, desegregation, the war on cancer. I mean, just so many things that kind of blew my mind when i realized that they happened, you know, during this period under Richard Nixon was really incredible, but, of course, he was most well known as a Foreign Policy president. Well really wanted to create these great spaces that told that story especially because when you think about the cold war, its really hard to communicate for an audience that might be really distant from that, you know, what was the threat, what was the feeling of that time . You think of duckandcover drills, you think of the threat of imminent nuclear disaster. So we needed to create these spaces that told that story. So we started with, chuck put a giant missile in there. That kind of communicates pretty well. Its looming over you this kind of threat of possibility and were establishing heres the cold war, heres whats at risk. But then we move on right next to it to the signing of the s. A. L. T. Treaty, the treaty nixon negotiated, himself. A Nuclear Arms Treaty with russia and thats the first step in detaun, tt, breaking down th barriers of the cold war and thats why immediately next to it we have the berlin wall. We have this kind of corner on our Foreign Policy area that really takes us through that journey that all happened during those years of nixons presidency then carried forward after him to finally end the cold war. And one of the pieces that tells the overall Foreign Policy story is this really cool interactive that i love. Yeah, the interactive, so we talked about waders, skimmers and divers, so if you engage with this interactive just on the main menu, you can see all the dots and right away, these are all the places president nixon went. I dont even have to go any further to get that primary message. This guy was on the move around the world. When i do dig down deeper, i can touch all the locations, get photographs, dates, find out what the objective was of that particular journey that the president went on and so it begins to paint an overall picture of nixons Foreign Policy then, of course, we talked about the yoellyellow no pads. You can explore these throughout the galleries. One forimportant part of the guests can explore these personal papers of nixon you wouldnt have been able to see before, but, of course, the handwriting not necessarily the easiest thing in the world to parse. Cortina has done a lot of work with the archivists here to translate that handwriting and theres a handy little transskrip btran transcribe button so you can actually read those and not struggle through. So you leave the presidency area, we head into the watergate gallery. Now, the watergate gallery had been redone a few years ago before we were brought onboard. The lifetime of a museum exhibit, thats not very long, four years or so. So we thought rather than kind of spending the kind of resources redoing that space, lets keep that exhibit as it is and we can move it wherever it needs to be within the exhibit especially since now were doing this new structure of things. In the old space, the watergate exhibit came at the very end. You went through the watergate exhibit. You came out and you went to the eagles nest to the study, then you were at the funeral and that was it. You were sort of left with this, that was it . And if thats all you know of the story, you know, thats kind of what you come away with. So i never realized walking through that first exhibit that there were 20 years of work after that watergate exhibit ended. And this incredible contribution as an elder statesman and nine books written. So when we created this structure that had a flashback in it and started in the middle of things, it enabled us to put the watergate exhibit into the context of the full life. So by physically moving it, it kind of exists within a larger context rather than kind of being the period at the end of the life. So that was one of the changes that happened with watergate exhibit. Then the other was as we got closer to the end of design, we were looking at the older exhibit and realizing all the content is fantastic, its the single largest exhibit space within the whole galleries thats dedicated to one topic. But it doesnt look like anything else that weve done. Its you step out of it and hey, were in a different world, then we step back into our exhibits. So we reskinned it, basically. We took all the existing words and media and images exactly as they were and we added our own sort of fonts and colors and graphic layout to make it look like the rest of the exhibits. And that takes us to one of the spaces that is one of our personal favorites. When nixon opened this library, as we said, he didnt have an oval office. What he did have was a replica of the lincoln sitting room because it was a space that was so important to him. So this is truly my favorite part of the whole exhibition because it combines all of our work into one integrated and seamless moment, but it also brings to life, like, so many thing. The president has resigned and you have to sit and ask yourself, what was going through his head . What must have he been feeling . And so we wanted to create a moment of contemplation where we could sort of try to put ourselves in his shoes a little bit. We also wanted to bring this notion of the yellow pads to life in a different way than the interactives do. So as the president is sitting in his favorite chair in the lincoln sitting room, writing notes on a yellow pad, those notes come to life in his own handwriting as projection on the wall, sort of magically coming off the page for us to read. And we hear nixons voice going through these various thauought and as we hear his voice, the images out the window change to correspond with those thoughts. Its sort of a little contempla contemplative space, for a brief moment, you feel like youre stepping into what must have been going on perhaps inside of him at that time. Yeah, and i think its really exciting for that for a couple reasons. One is thinking about the sort of outside journey that weve taken when were in the presidency galleries, were really looking at what did he decide, what were the actions he took, what were the challenges he was facing, that sort of public voice. Once we hit our flashback and were going back into his past and through this journey that ends with the lincoln sitting room, we get to go a little bit inside his head and inside kind of that inner journey of the man, himself, less than the public persona. So i think that really captures that. And the other reason that this space is really inspiring to me is we talked a lot about integration and collaboration between the teams and in this space, you see every single partner that we worked with, every Single Person on the team. Weve got a studio figure. We got cortinas beautiful media in the windows and projections on the wall and audio overhead. Weve got Graphic Design on our wall pa wallpaper. We have amazing fabric from nick. The walls and the environment. This is sort of everything coming together. In that teamwork. And we have an interactive moment for the visitor. We are seeing a lot of people taking photos. Of themselves with the president. Yeah. So, of course, as we said, nixon went on after his resignation for 20 more years of work and service to his country. Right. So you leave lincoln sitting room, we find out that after the resignation, it was the darkest time of the president s life, but what is so remarkable to us from the human story, and something that we think people can relate to, or if they choose, i certainly have chosen to relate to it. Nixon in that quote tells us its his darkest time and if a person doesnt have something to live for, he dies, im paraphrasing, spiritually, emotionally and physically. And this is a man and you see this in the last 20 years of his life, who chooses just like it starts in the film, he had his he would win. He would lose and he would come back up. He was the consummate fighter. And in the last 20 years, we see that he makes a conscious decision to be of service in the way that he can be in that elder statesman role. And we think that on this last part of the galleries, you come up to epilogue and the president tells us, i believe in the American Dream because its happened in my life. And i want it to happen in your life. And he talks about the highs and lows of life. About his life. That there have been victories and defeats. And that he chooses to come back up and he ends by telling us thats the story of my life. This up and this down and this up. And thats where we wanted to end the story because we think its such a remarkable multifaceted story about this president. Thank you, amy. So we gathered our information and had our own discoveries and learned about this man and changed our perceptions. And hopefully that other people coming here will be able to make their own decisions as kate said about president nixon. For thinkwell, i will speak for cortina for a moment, it has been a real honor to have had the opportunity to work on this exhibition. We were thrilled when we found out that we were going to do it and it has been truly an amazing collaboration in the anals of 15 years of thinkwell work, we have worked with wonderful clients and terrible clients and weve wrestled with some and weve wrestled here, too, but in the end the experience working with the National Archives and working with the Richard Nixon foundation has been nothing but extraordinary. And were really honored to have had a chance to be here today. So thank you to the thinkwell and cortina team. Thank you, all. And thank you guys. So as i said at the very beginning, connecting with visitors isnt just about engaging them in the physical space. We have to extend that visit through the app and through an Online Presence so you can begin your journey before coming to yorba linda and that journey can continue and that exploration and learning can continue after. To talk more about the website, heres al herrera and David Bushnell from the woo. Everyone. First off, thank you, guys, so much, and a big thank you to the Richard Nixon foundation for inviting us to this very prestigious event. Were so honored to be here. To really celebrate the life and the legacy of president nixon. Im al herrera. Im the account supervisor and Program Director at the woo, beteak Design Agency in california. We specialize in creating digital experiences that really create Lasting Bonds with people and brands. And so when the Nixon Foundation approached us about the website, we were honored and really eager to get the project started. So the challenge that we face was we had to create a website that was interactive and welcoming to a new generation of users that have a pretty finite idea of who Richard Nixon was and what his legacy is. But also we had to remain cognizant of an older generation of people that were very familiar with the president and his life, both inside and outside of the white house. So we partnered with cortina, thinkwell and the Richard Nixon foundation to create a website that was both visually stunning, interactive, and really brought the best elements of the life in the arena exhibit youll see here today. The key strategy for us we had to create a website that was mobile first, so as you see on the tablet and the phone, its optimized to be viewed on moeshl devices and especially because 50 of all Internet Users access the internet only on their phones. So thats it was a really interesting fact that we had to come up with. So basically the site now acts as an aggregator of information and research that most importantly can be accessed by anyone of any age, generation, and most importantly from anywhere around the globe. So it speak about the research and how it has the global reach, we pass it over to dave. Great. Thank you very much, al. I do want to echo what al said that it really was an honor to work with the foundation and on a personal note, it was a real pleasure to work with those personnel. So i really personally want to thank you guys for working with us and for bringing us here today. So like thinkwell, for us, it was a real journey of discovery, and a journey that was full of surprises. And in addition to the circumstances, the details of history, i learned two very surprising things. And i just want to share those with you right now. And i just have to share this because this happened literally last night. I turned on the television. A comedian was making the point that students today dont retain anything about history. Its all just a big gray blur to them. Heres what he said. He said, this is verbatim, he said a fish crawled up on land, some stuff happened, nixon, then here we are today. This happened last night. But he was making a very important point that even for people to whom history is a big gray blur, that one name stands out above everybody else. And its the truth. That was one of the surprises for me is that there is this huge fascination with the man. Not just here in the United States, but globally. So we, with this website, are addressing a global audience of people fascinated by that man. The second thing is that probably because of the first thing is that there is a wealth of information out there, tons and tons of data exist out there. Now, just like thinkwell, we had to address the three different stages of swimmers. We have the waders. These are the people that just need the topline information. The eighth grader who needs to write a paper on nixon, lets say. We have the swimmers, the journalists, the people that need to write maybe a little different, more indepth paper. And then you have the divers. These are the historians. The professors that need to create their class syllabuses, okay . So, how did we satisfy these people . First of all, theres a challenge. All these people, they go to google first, google is kind of a deadend journey, you google nixon in china, you get a list of results, you go to the first result and its an end point. You land on an article, theres nowhere to go from there. Now youre on an archive newspaper somewhere. Now you have to go back to your results and have to google the next thing and go to the next result and like this. What weve done is we have crawled a number of authorized reputable sources on data for nixon. Im talking about news articles, im talking about blog posts. Im talking about videos. How many of your children and grandchildren prefer video to reading . Just a show of hands. Yeah . Okay. I would say probably most of you. Sound files. A wealth. Thousands and thousands of hours of actual oval Office Conversations among who at the time were the most powerful people in the world. We have cataloged all those on this website and using the worlds most popular content management software, we have put them all under one umbrella. So now they all participate in the same taxonmy. So the website you see today is, were very proud of it, it is a work in progress because now the foundation has a strong foundation. To continue into the future, building content, adding content to the website, and categorizing, okay. So what you saw in the video here is that these people who know nothing about history except that nixon did something about watergate, maybe thats their end to tin to the website. Theyll come to the website, land on an article on watergate. Over on the side, theyll see, heres some key words touched on in this article, heres some similar articles. Now the journey of discovery begins so they click on these key words and find white house tapes where they discuss these topics. They watch videos of an actual event happening. So weve really presented a wealth of research to these people. In addition, the interface to this website is designed to be welcoming of research. As you visit nixonfoundation. Org, you will see that its hard to go very hard without having a search bar sort of thrust in your face. And when you search, you get categorized results. Things like historical articles. Nixons impact today. And just as amy said, media as artifacts. You will land on a section of artifa artifacts. Thousands and thousands of pieces of media. These are white house tapes. These are videos. These are documents. And these are historical articles. So thats in a very, very brief whirlwind tour what weve created for nixonfoundation. Org. As we say, we extend this discovery of research and wealth of surprises into a global audience. So i want to i dont want to gloss over this quote here, so lets just take a quick look at this. The Richard Nixon foundation believes the more you learn about Richard Nixons leadership and policies the greater the opportunities there will be to carry his lessons. We want to leave you with a couple of case studies of typical users who are now able to access this wealth of information. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. I am talking to you from madrid, spain, where i live. I have just finished high school. And now im in the university studying mechanical engineering. Im always interested about all the things of debates, american politics. So i was checking on the internet, something about the debate between trump and clinton, and it was when i found the web page of nixons library. Im going to find you the favorite part of the web page. All these videos and information is available for all kind of students. Students in america, east spain like me, or all over the world. So its my favorite part because of that we have a lot of articles with insight. And young people, me, love to see videos and learn with that kind of material. I wish i was there in person and i cant wait until november when i come back to california. Everyone, enjoy the rest of the events and the opening of the National President ial library. And now i turn you over to martin in china. Have fun. Hello, everyone. My name is martin. Im from beijing, china. Im right now an intern in the Company China star, and i used to study in the beijing institute of fashion technology. I majored in english. Ive always been fascinated about the politics between china and america. And thats why ive been exploring a little bit in the websites of the new Nixon Library. First of all, it has a very good frontal page. Ive studied design and art a little bit, so i really like the design of the website. And then when i go in, you can see a lot of different stuff. The Resource Center is very useful, i think. It has a lot of historical articles. An the Little Details of the historic trip of nixon to china. I think its very important for all the people to see this because it is, indeed, one of the very major events for both of our countries to get connected. Im very excited that this Resource Center is online right now. I believe the center can bring Chinese People and people from the u. S. Much closer. I cant wait to visit Nixon Library in person. I hope all of you enjoy it and have a great day. Byebye. Now, please welcome president of the Richard Nixon foundation and mike ellzey, director of the Richard Nixon president ial library. You think our producers and collaborators deserve a shoutout . Thinkwell. Cortina. The woo. Great organizations. I think you also can see how excited we are about being able to take this story about Richard Nixons life and times. To yorba linda, to the world, via the internet and via a new exhibit. You all have something to be very proud of from that. Lastly, id like to repeat what our chairman and the archivists said about the collaboration and cooperation between nara and the foundation. Its that collaboration that made all this possible and we appreciate it very much. Mike . Well, this has just been a real special morning, and a very special presentation. I wanted to thank and acknowledge our creative partners, the foundation for selecting such outstanding and Outstanding Partnership team. Ive been involved in a number of public projects like this and i think this team is absolutely the finest. And so to you folks, congratulations. Youve done outstanding work. But whats most exciting here is that the special opportunity to hear and see how this whole thing came together pales, quite frankly, in comparison to being able to go next door and see it alive. I mean, i think thats what everybody is telling us this morning is this is how it was done. Okay, this is a great presentation and it really gives an idea of how this thing came together. But now we get to go next door and our visitors get to go next door and enjoy this in an extraordinary way. But i did want to close before i announce our next event, i wanted to close by sharing a special appreciation to the Creative Team because having had a lot of experience working with Creative Teams on Public Private partnerships, i really do appreciate the Creative Energy that this team brought to the teenage. I really love that kind of dynamism. I really appreciate that. The commitment to the mission, i think, bill, i think mr. Walker and the Foundation Board as client and the National Archives as partner really appreciates that commitment to mission and i think that thats been fully satisfied. And also something that might go unnoticed and thats the responsiveness. The team has always shown a level of responsiveness to the demands of not only the content managers, if you will, but also to the National Archives piece of this puzzle and the executive review we brought to the table. Thank withdryou for that. That responsiveness is real key. Im also supposed to announce the next program which is the 12 00 noon lunch in the east room where theres a discussion with the authors for recent books about Richard Nixon. Theyre here today and its going to be just a very outstanding opportunity to see whats going on out there in the literary world about the 37th president. Irwin gelman is going to be here. Luke nectar i see here. Evan thomas and doug showen. My colleague, mark uptergrove, director of the lbj library in austin, texas, will moderate. So please join us for that. Thank you very much and good morning