agsl

The AGSL Guided Tour: An Interview with Georgia Brown

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Interview conducted by Lauren Maddox

This week, I sat down with Graduate Student Intern Georgia Brown to discuss one of her recent projects for the AGSL. Georgia is part of the School of Information Studies coordinated degree program working to receive her Master’s in both Library and Information Science and History. She has been a key member of the AGSL staff since 2018, contributing to many projects for the library. Recently, she designed a guided tour of the AGSL to make our collections more accessible to visitors exploring the library. To learn more about the tour and how you can take it, read on:

So, we’ve started giving visitors your Self-Guided Tour of the AGSL to help them navigate the library—could you talk a little about what the Guided Tour is and your process for creating it? 

The guided tour helps people get into the space of the AGSL and really see more of the collection than is just out by the display cases. The process actually took a few months–I made a lesson plan last semester that had middle schoolers exploring the AGSL while also learning about the parts of a map. The lesson itself is a map of the library that the students use to figure out a different part of a map at each stop. After I made this, I realized that this would be an awesome way to have people just come visit the AGSL.  

How would a visitor go about a Guided tour? Could you describe the process of getting a Guided Tour and what visitors see on it? 

As soon as you walk into the AGSL, on the table to your right will be a stack of the guided tours. Someone on the library staff will ask if you need any help and if you are just there to look around, we’ll offer you the guided tour as a way to check out the library. 

  • The Guided Tour, available at the front table in the AGSL
  • Map of the Library

Why was this a necessary project? Has it made the AGSL more accessible to visitors? 

Lots of people come in to see the AGSL, and some will take the time to walk around and see everything. But one of my biggest frustrations is seeing visitors come in, spin once in a circle, and then leave. I realized there was probably more they wanted to see, but something about the space made it seem scary or hard to approach. Now that the guided tour is being handed to patrons and visitors, I feel like they are seeing more of what is on display.

What patrons benefit the most? What impact has this had on visitors’ experiences in the library? 

In the two weeks that I have been handing out the guided tour, I feel like only a third of the people who start it actually finish it in its entirety. The other two thirds, however, keep getting distracted by all of our other awesome materials on display. My goal with the tour was to get people into our space, and in just a short time, I have seen people just as interested in globes and maps that aren’t on the tour as the ones that are on the tour.

Did working on this project teach you anything about the AGS Library or about libraries in general?

One cool thing about putting this together was the amount of collaboration that went into it. After I made the first version, I gave a copy to five staff members and interns, and they each gave me their notes on the project.

Thank you Georgia for joining me for this interview. To take the tour yourself and see our amazing collection in person, visit the AGSL and take the guided tour! You can find us on the third floor of UWM’s Golda Meir Library, Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. We look forward to seeing you!   

This entry was posted in Exhibits, Georgia Brown, Lauren's blog, Map Collection and tagged , , , , .

The Harrison Forman Photo Collection

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By Susan Dykes

I was recently asked what my favorite image is in the Harrison Forman Collection.  Having become intimately familiar with tens of thousands of images Harrison Forman took, it was an overwhelming and almost impossible request to say the least.  There are so many!  Harrison Forman, photojournalist and adventurer, travelled the world from the 1930s through the 1970s.  He was prolific, wielding his camera to capture major historical events, and the economies, infrastructures, politics, societies, educational systems, and cultures of the places he visited.

By far my favorite kinds of images Forman took are of the people living in many of these places, asking them to take a moment from their daily lives practicing their trades, spending time with their families, and simply enjoying life, to pose for a photo.  Of the thousands of portraits and group photos he took, I found those of the Berber people living in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco among the most striking and beautiful in the collection.

My favorite image, taken in the 1960s, shows a Berber woman in the foreground, eyes closed, wearing a delicate lace veil and coin jewelry, two Berber men behind her in traditional clothing wearing turbans, and another man in the background, photo bombing the shot.

Morocco__Berber_people_from_Atlas_Mountains____AGSL_Digital_Photo_Archive_–_Africa
Morocco, Berber people from Atlas Mountains http://collections.lib.uwm.edu/cdm/ref/collection/agsafrica/id/5286

There’s something very serene about the woman.  Perhaps she just blinked, but I choose to think she was soaking up the sun on her face and possibly the moment.  The two men, eager to be a part of the photograph, looking directly at the camera and the man in the back with a look of wonder, curious about the activity.

Forman’s enthusiasm about documenting people and cultures outside of the Western world is evident in this photograph.  He wanted to share the beauty of people in places unfamiliar to us at the time of his work, which in an historical context, makes a much richer scholarly endeavor today.

While this image is in black and white, as well as the other images of the Berbers in the UWM Libraries Digital Collections online, the Harrison Forman Collection includes over 50,000 color slides that have yet to be digitized, some of which Forman took of the Berber people.  It is our hope that we will be able to obtain the funding to digitize the slides in the near future and make them accessible online, in all their full color glory!

In the meantime, check out the rest of Forman’s images of the Berber people in Morocco:

http://collections.lib.uwm.edu/cdm/search/searchterm/forman%20berber/mode/all/order/nosort/page/2

And, explore images of the other people around the world Forman photographed:

http://collections.lib.uwm.edu/cdm/search/searchterm/forman%20people/order/nosort

If you have questions about the Harrison Forman Collection, or would like to know more about the color slides, please contact Susan Peschel at the American Geographical Society Library.

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