VISIT BY MIAMI SHORES BAPTIST ACADEMY STUDENTS

This morning we entertained twenty-three third to fifth graders and their teachers and monitors from the Miami Shores Baptist Academy in a library tour arranged by Claudia Caro Sullivan in our education department. The young students had come to the library for a presentation of the book as art object. The tables in the main library reading room were laid out with a variety of beautiful books ranging from oversized leather editions richly decorated in the art nouveau style complete with gold tooling; batik cloth bindings; upholstery and fabric sample books and decorative arts catalogs with a papier-mâché contoured cover stored in a silk cloth covered box; a batik vellum elephant portfolio holding one hundred year-old, poster-sized Rembrandt lithographic reproductions and another oversized portfolio containing pochoir illustrations of a Navajo War Ceremonial; and a unique binding made of bass and mother of pearl with hand-painted vellum pages done in the style of an illuminated medieval manuscript.

As delighted as the students and their escorts were with the beautiful books on the table, the real surprise was reserved for me, however, when I picked up a Dutch language children’s book on Snow White. As I began hesitantly to trip my tongue over the Dutch title, Sneeuwwitje, one of the precocious young girls in the group intervened, confidently pronouncing it with flawless ease and precision. Evidently her parents had moved to South Florida a number of years ago, and she had been raised bilingually. Here are some images from the work in question:

VISIT BY HIALEAH GARDENS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Since 1995, the Wolfsonian-FIU has been working with the Miami-Dade public school system on a collaborative project entitled: Page at a Time. Developed by the Wolfsonian’s education staff, this interdisciplinary program has provided language arts, social studies, and visual arts school teachers with a methodology designed to help their fifth and sixth grade students learn how to be more critical and discerning consumers of the visual images and messages with which they are increasingly bombarded. The students themselves come to the museum for three visits, participating in tours and workshops designed to inspire their own book-making projects. Working with their teachers, each student contributes one page of text and images to a book that is collectively created and bound by the class as a whole. The projects invariably revolve around the twin themes of “conflict and resolution,” but the teachers and students are free to decide whether they wish to focus on social, ecological, technological, military, political, or personal topics.

Today, this project included for the first time a visit by high school students who will serve as mentors for this year’s round of fifth graders. Twenty-three Hialeah Gardens High School students came to the library for an hour and a half presentation covering the history of the book, and an up-close look at some rare and unusual bindings in our collection, including: a Japanese scroll book and accordian-style book, an elephant portfolio of lithographs by Rembrandt, a papier-mâché contoured binding by the Wiener Werkstatte, several Futurist and Constructivist masterpieces, and some quirky sales catalogs and cookbooks. They also had the opportunity to look at some of the collaborative book projects produced by students participating in the program in years past.

Pictured above are a few of the unusual bindings they had the opportunity to review.

WOLFSONIAN PROFILE: LIBRARY VOLUNTEER, ARMANDO SUAREZ

Today I would like to feature one of several persons working in the Wolfsonian-FIU library in a volunteer capacity. With a full-time staff of two librarians and one digital library specialist, we are extremely dependent on student interns and volunteers to meet the reference needs of our many student and faculty visitors and to keep up with our daily work regime of preserving and making accessible to the public our vast library holdings. Fortunately, we have had a number of dedicated individuals willing to donate their time in return for some practical training and experience in special collections librarianship.

One such individual is Armando Suarez. A native of Madrid, Spain, Mr. Suarez has been working full-time for the Wolfsonian as a financial and administrative assistant since November 2007. Those duties have not deterred him from coming in on his free days to work with us here in our rare books and special collections library. Armando has provided us with invaluable assistance in processing and accessioning several recently-acquired collections, cataloging the same in MARC21, making Melinex enclosures for rare and delicate items using our ultrasonic polyester welding machine, and creating digital images of our ephemeral items and linking those images to the catalog records in our OPAC.

Armando has also been able to work directly alongside Dr. Laurence Miller, retired director of libraries at FIU and donor of a large collection of post-war materials promoting the cruise line industry. That collaboration has provided Mr. Suarez with a rare opportunity for knowledge acquisition and expertise in the field. “It has been a particularly wonderful experience to work hands-on with the donor of a large and varied collection,” says Suarez, and “particularly significant on a personal level, as it has awakened my interest in furthering my education in the field of library science.” Based on his dedication and outstanding performance here, we know that when he does leave us it will be to begin walking down the path to a fine career in the field.