Read This Book!

We are welcoming back Emily Beck and her pumpkin-carving talents to the Wangensteen Historical Library as she brings us underwater adventures in jack o’lantern form.

What: Historical Pumpkin Carving by Emily Beck, Assistant Curator, Wangensteen Historical Library

When: Monday, October 30

Where: Wangensteen Historical Library, 5th Floor, Diehl Hall (Directions)

An Underwater Halloween

This year’s carving is inspired by the Wangensteen Historical Library’s current exhibit, Underwater, which explores humans, health, and science in watery spaces. We have selected a few of our favorite images from the exhibit and have made stencils so you can create your own underwater-inspired carving. 

Pumpkin Stencils

* Squid

* Octopus

* Lobsters

* Fish Monster

* Sea Creature Battle

Share your #UnderwaterPumpkin

We invite you to share photos of your final jack o’lantern made from our stensils. Just tweet an image of your carved pumpkin to @umnbiomedlib using #UnderwaterPumpkin.

Pumpkin Carving Process

Science Librarian Carolyn Bishoff and host Lisa Von Drasek discussed the Lev Grossman fantasy novel series, which started in 2009 with The Magicians on this episode of Read This Book! from the University of Minnesota Libraries. The series has been adapted on television and currently airs on Syfy.

The Magicians tells the story of Quentin Coldwater, a young man who discovers and attends a college of magic in New York. The novel received critical acclaim, and was followed by The Magician King in 2011 and 2014’s The Magician’s Land. 

Find the books

* The Magicians by Lev Grossman

* From University of Minnesota Libraries

* From Hennepin County Library

* Saint Paul Public Library

* The Magician King by Lev Grossman

* From Hennepin County Library

* Saint Paul Public Library

* The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman

* From Hennepin County Library

* Saint Paul Public Library

About Lisa Von Drasek and Carolyn Bishoff

Lisa Von Drasek is the Curator of the Children’s Literature Research Collections at the University of Minnesota Libraries. Carolyn Bishoff is the Physics, Astronomy, and Earth Sciences Librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries. 

About Read This Book!

Read This Book! is a video podcast produced by the University of Minnesota Libraries. It is available on YouTube and iTunes.

By Rebecca Toov

You are listening to U of M on your Historic Dial!

From 1938-1979, the Minnesota School of the Air brought educational programs into the classrooms of Minnesota and beyond over radio airwaves and through tape transcription. During the 1977-1978 season, School of the Air produced a series of radio "field trips" called Look What We Found, a program that introduced students to people and places in Minnesota. Join us this season as we revisit these radio field trips. Today's episode takes listeners to the U.S. Weather Service branch at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport with hosts Walter Brody, Patty Goodwin, and Bill Golfus of KUOM radio.

Season 2: Episode 1: Look What We Found! The U.S. Weather Bureau

You are listening to U of M on your Historic Dial podcast.  Welcome to Season 2: Episode 1: Look What We Found!

Hello, this is Rebecca, Collections Archivist at University Archives. This season on the podcast we are going on a radio field trip.  Let me explain…

Forty years ago, in the fall of 1977, the producers, engineers, and announcers at University radio station KUOM were well into the start of the 1977-1978 season of the Minnesota School of the Air.  From 1938-1979, the School of the Air brought educational programs into the classrooms of Minnesota and beyond over radio airwaves and through tape transcription.

This year we’re going on a field trip in sound and time to the 1977-1978 season of the Minnesota School of the Air to look at what we found after these recordings were digitized and we were finally able to listen.

Beginning on Friday, September 22, 1977, from 10:50 to 11:00 a.m. KUOM broadcasted the series Look What We Found, a program that introduced students to people and places in Minnesota.

A printed guide with program descriptions and suggestions for before and after broadcast discussions were provided to interested schoolteachers. In a letter printed at the beginning of the guide, Walter Brody, Assistant Director and Producer, described Look What We Found as a “radio field trip,” that took “listeners out of the classroom and to places they may have never been.”

Brody outlined 3 effects the program could have on students:

* “… we would hope that these short journeys by sound augment the dwindling number of field trips caused by dwindling budgets.”

* “… by stimulating your student’s imaginations, perhaps they will want to explore interesting people and places on their own.”

* “Perhaps young imaginations, sated with TV images, can practice imagining where they are, who they are… using their minds to see where sound takes them.”

So where did KUOM take students over the air that season? They toured local radio and television stations KUOM and WCCO, rode the Lake Harriet trolley, toured the grounds of Metropolitan Stadium, and visited the Como Zoo, to name a few.

Join University Archives during the 2017-2018 school year as we take occasional field trips in sound and time to the 1977-1978 season to listen to recordings of the original broadcasts of Look What We Found.

Today on the program you’ll hear the September 29, 1977 broadcast titled, “The U.S. Weather Bureau.”

Join hosts Walter Brody, Patty Goodwin, and Bill Golfus on a field trip in sound to the U.S. Weather Service branch at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport. Patty asks,

By Rebecca Toov

You are listening to U of M on your Historic Dial! 

From 1938-1979, the Minnesota School of the Air brought educational programs into the classrooms of Minnesota and beyond over radio airwaves and through tape transcription. During the 1977-1978 season, School of the Air produced a series of radio “field trips” called Look What We Found, a program that introduced students to people and places in Minnesota. Join us this season as we revisit these radio field trips. Today’s episode takes listeners to the U.S. Weather Service branch at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport with hosts Walter Brody, Patty Goodwin, and Bill Golfus of KUOM radio. 

Season 2: Episode 1: Look What We Found! The U.S. Weather Bureau

You are listening to U of M on your Historic Dial podcast.  Welcome to Season 2: Episode 1: Look What We Found!

Hello, this is Rebecca, Collections Archivist at University Archives. This season on the podcast we are going on a radio field trip.  Let me explain…

Forty years ago, in the fall of 1977, the producers, engineers, and announcers at University radio station KUOM were well into the start of the 1977-1978 season of the Minnesota School of the Air.  From 1938-1979, the School of the Air brought educational programs into the classrooms of Minnesota and beyond over radio airwaves and through tape transcription.

This year we’re going on a field trip in sound and time to the 1977-1978 season of the Minnesota School of the Air to look at what we found after these recordings were digitized and we were finally able to listen.

Beginning on Friday, September 22, 1977, from 10:50 to 11:00 a.m. KUOM broadcasted the series Look What We Found, a program that introduced students to people and places in Minnesota.

A printed guide with program descriptions and suggestions for before and after broadcast discussions were provided to interested schoolteachers. In a letter printed at the beginning of the guide, Walter Brody, Assistant Director and Producer, described Look What We Found as a “radio field trip,” that took “listeners out of the classroom and to places they may have never been.”

Brody outlined 3 effects the program could have on students:

* “… we would hope that these short journeys by sound augment the dwindling number of field trips caused by dwindling budgets.”

* “… by stimulating your student’s imaginations, perhaps they will want to explore interesting people and places on their own.”

* “Perhaps young imaginations, sated with TV images, can practice imagining where they are, who they are… using their minds to see where sound takes them.”

So where did KUOM take students over the air that season? They toured local radio and television stations KUOM and WCCO, rode the Lake Harriet trolley, toured the grounds of Metropolitan Stadium, and visited the Como Zoo, to name a few.

Join University Archives during the 2017-2018 school year as we take occasional field trips in sound and time to the 1977-1978 season to listen to recordings of the original broadcasts of Look What We Found.

Today on the program you’ll hear the September 29, 1977 broadcast titled, “The U.S. Weather Bureau.”

Join hosts Walter Brody, Patty Goodwin, and Bill Golfus on a field trip in sound to the U.S. Weather Service branch at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport. Patty asks, “Did you guys ever wonder where all the radio and T.V. announcers get their weather information?”  She interviews forecaster Ron Willis to get the answer.

Broadcast transcript

[Music]

Various voices: It’s fabulous! [unintelligible] I don’t know.

[Group exclamation] Look What We Found!

Announcer: Come on you’ve been sitting there far too long.

Less than two weeks remain to see the exhibit, Luther and the World Turned Upside Down: Prophecy, Revolution, and the End of Time.

The exhibit examines a side of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation that is often overshadowed by more standard images of Luther as heroic reformer or revolutionary theologian. Luther worked in an apocalyptic age, and his efforts to transform the religious culture of the day reflected these intellectual currents. The exhibit highlights these aspects of Luther and his world.

View the main exhibition at Elmer L. Anderson Library through September 29. Additional materials are on exhibit at the T.R. Anderson Gallery on the fourth floor of Wilson Library.

Tim Johnson and Cheryll Fong were co-curators of the exhibit and Darren Terpstra was the exhibit designer. 

Hours: During business hours at Elmer L. Andersen Library and Wilson Library (T.R. Anderson Gallery)

Less than two weeks remain to see the exhibit, Luther and the World Turned Upside Down: Prophecy, Revolution, and the End of Time.

The exhibit examines a side of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation that is often overshadowed by more standard images of Luther as heroic reformer or revolutionary theologian. Luther worked in an apocalyptic age, and his efforts to transform the religious culture of the day reflected these intellectual currents. The exhibit highlights these aspects of Luther and his world.

View the main exhibition at Elmer L. Anderson Library through September 29. Additional materials are on exhibit at the T.R. Anderson Gallery on the fourth floor of Wilson Library.

Tim Johnson and Cheryll Fong were co-curators of the exhibit and Darren Terpstra was the exhibit designer. 

Hours: During business hours at Elmer L. Andersen Library and Wilson Library (T.R. Anderson Gallery)

Incoming students capped off Welcome Week this year by touring Magrath Library in St. Paul and learning about all of the ways that the Libraries can help them achieve academic success. 

Incoming students capped off Welcome Week this year by touring Magrath Library in St. Paul and learning about all of the ways that the Libraries can help them achieve academic success. 

By Hannah O'Neill & Carissa Hansen

Welcome back to U of M Radio on Your Historic Dial!

In addition to our day to day work, there are always a number of fascinating projects underway in the University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections. One of them, formally known as  “Preservation of Minnesota’s Radio History,” is the Radio KUOM project that produces this podcast. In this program, we will hear about another project based in the University’s Upper Midwest Literary Archives, with a focus on the poet Margaret Hasse.

You can listen to the episode here in the browser and read the script below.

Episode 12: Of Poets and Podcasts

Hello! This is Hannah over in University Archives, and this U of M Radio on Your Historic Dial, Episode 12: Of Poets and Podcasts. You’ve likely noticed the outro that accompanies the end of each podcast episode, which states that funding for this project comes from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund administered by the Minnesota Historical Society. This grant has enabled numerous projects here at University Archives and within the University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections, as well as at other Minnesota cultural institutions.

While there is always regular staff to carry out day to day operations related to the collection, maintenance, and promotion of our materials, grant funded projects allow us to focus on one collection or area in particular, singling it out for detailed processing and description, as well as unique promotional activities such as this podcast. The project featured in this episode focuses on Minnesota’s literary heritage, embodied in the personal collections of poets Robert Bly, Bill Holm, and Margaret Hasse, as well as the papers of Milkweed Editions. Now I’m going to pass the mic to the project manager, Carissa Hansen.

Hi, this is Carissa from the Upper Midwest Literary Archives. Thanks to Hannah for inviting me to join her for this podcast! Margaret Hasse is one of three Minnesota poets’ collections I am working with as part of a grant project titled “Prairie Poets and Press: Literary Lives of the Upper Midwest.”

Photograph of Margaret Hasse from the Milkweed Editions records in the Upper Midwest Literary Archives

Margaret Hasse was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1950, and has spent much of her adult life in Minneapolis. She’s well-known for being a poet, but Hasse is also a teacher, arts administrator, and arts consultant.

This installment of the KUOM program Minnesota Issues features Hasse in her role as Executive Director for the Minnesota Alliance for Arts in Education. The year was 1984 and plans were underway for the establishment of an arts high school in Minnesota. Governor Rudy Perpich had implemented a task force to conduct a feasibility study for the establishment of the school.

Can you guess what school this would become? That’s right, Minnesota was already laying the groundwork for the Perpich Center for Arts Education that operates today in Golden Valley. Not everyone was in favor of establishing a school that would centralize funding for arts education in the state. Margaret Hasse and the Minnesota Alliance for Arts in Education had concerns about the establishment of the school.

There was a great need for more arts education of all kinds in schools across the state of Minnesota. The establishment of an arts high school was certainly an exciting proposition, and one that would represent a commitment to the arts and youth in the state, but the question of proper disbursement of funding remained. Should the state’s resources be focused on one school, or should they be spread out, encompassing more grade levels and areas of Minnesota?