Lectures, edible books part of National Library Week

By Michael Worringer

The Edible Book Festival that kicks off National Library Week at the UW–Madison Libraries is just the first of many treats offered during the week, including a presentation by the director of the world’s largest digital library, a lecture by the chief of rare books for the Library of Congress and distribution of Alando Tucker posters and color-changing “Ask a Librarian” pencils.

National Library Week is April 15–21, but the festivities kick off Thursday, April 12, with the Edible Book Festival. From 3–5 p.m. in 460 Memorial Library, come and vote on your favorite book- and literature-themed food items and enjoy some of the entries. Food critic Raphael Kadushin, a contributing editor at Bon Appétit magazine and senior acquisitions editor at the UW Press, will also be judging the entries.

On Tuesday, April 17, the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and the UW–Madison Libraries welcome Douglas Greenberg, executive director of the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California. At 12:30 p.m. in Room 126 Memorial Library, Greenberg will talk about the Shoah Foundation Digital Library, the world’s largest digital library, which contains 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses — about 120,000 hours of interviews in 32 languages.

On Wednesday, April 18, the Friends of the UW–Madison Library host Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress. Dimunation will present “Forged in Fire: Building the Nation’s Rare Book Collection” at 5:30 p.m. in the Phillips Auditorium, Room L160, at the Chazen Museum of Art.

The Library of Congress has one of the largest collections of rare books in North America. Dimunation will discuss how that collection has been rebuilt from the ashes of a fire from when the British occupied Washington, D.C., in August 1814 and burned the Capitol, destroying much of the Library of Congress’ collection. Congress replaced the loss by purchasing the personal library of Thomas Jefferson.

In addition to these events, library staff will promote both reference services and information literacy throughout the week. Visitors to the more than 40 campus libraries can try the Ask a Librarian instant-message reference services and meet the librarians who answer your questions by instant message, chat, e-mail, phone and at the reference desk. They can also pick up an Ask a Librarian color-changing “mood” pencil, paid for by private contributions, and play some library word games. Look for the Ask a Librarian banners in campus libraries during the week.

Libraries will also have READ posters available that feature Alando Tucker, the all-time leading scorer in UW men’s basketball history and candidate for the university’s top student-athlete award. The poster was created in late February in the Ethnic Studies room in College Library. Tucker, an avid reader of comic books, commented he should visit the campus libraries more often when staff showed him some of its collection of graphic novels.

Two exhibits are also on display, one in Special Collections in Memorial (social sciences and humanities) Library, another in Ebling Library. “Making Maps, Mapping History,” continues through June 29 in the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library. The exhibit includes original maps of Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region from 17th-century drawings concocted from travelers’ accounts to 21st-century images captured by satellites.

“Reclaiming Midwives: Stills from All My Babies,” continues through June 30 in Ebling Library. The lives and experiences of black midwives in Georgia in the early 1950s is the focus of the traveling exhibition of photographs by Robert Galbraith. Galbraith was a cameraman for George C. Stoney’s 1953 film “All My Babies.”