Documentary Films

On Friday I met a woman, Lucie Faulknor, who makes documentary films at a conference for my department's Center for History of Print Culture. Co-producer Faulknor is part of a team working on a documentary, Free for All: Stories of the American Public Library (see their wonderful web site). On Saturday I was interviewed by the project director Dawn Logsdon. Who knows if I will end up in the final film but it was both exciting and informative to be a part of a real documentary film with an acclaimed group of filmmakers as I think about the documentary I want to make about Regina Andrews. Logsdon was the director of the recent film, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, and Faulknor co-produced the film--I film I saw a few months ago.

In a few weeks I will attend a workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California where I will make a short three-minute documentary film about Regina Andrews that I will post on this blog--like a trailer for the final documentary.

Re: Libraries in Botswana

I just returned from a week in Botswana where I visited three of our students who are doing internships in public libraries. Rachel and Ashley interned and lived with a chief in Molepolole and are pictured with me and Dr. Angelina Totolo from the University of Botswana library school program. I think the head librarian, Max Muzunga, took the picture so he is not shown. Student Cara lived in Mmangkodi and is pictured with me and head librarian Lucia. We also got to meet the newly appointed head of the Botswana National Library System.

The whole trip was very inspiring and made me excited to get back to revising the chapter on Regina's travels to libraries in Western Africa.

Going to Botswana

I am off to Botswana to visit three students from my department, the School of Library & Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The students are doing internships in Botswana. Regina was very interested in libraries throughout the world and visited libraries in the African nations of: Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, Ghana, Senegal and the Ivory Coast in the 1960s.

Re: Writing Group Presentation

On Monday, July 19, 2010, I was invited to discuss my Regina Andrews' project with an African American Genealogy Writing Group in Madison, WI. Besides describing my project, I discussed sources I used to tell Regina's story. The women in the writing group shared some of their stories too as they researched their own stories about their families. It was a very inspiring morning.

A presentation

I gave a talk about Regina Andrews on 23 June 2010 in the Royal Library (The Black Diamond) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The presentation was organized by Dr. Laura Skouvig of the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen. The audience included a mix of faculty, archivists and the director of the Danish Center for Information on Women and Gender.

Grant Funding

I recently found out that I was awarded a grant for this project from the University of Wisconsin - System's Institute on Race & Ethnicity (IRE). I plan to use the funds to return to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; a trip to the Beinecke Library at Yale University to examine the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters; and to take a class at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, CA to work on the documentary project.

Re: Writing Spaces & Places

I have found a variety of places in Copenhagen that provided writing spaces for my project. I just wanted to document some of these. In descending order: Lion's Book Cafe, my favorite, the most traditional cafe/bookstore. Luckily 90% of the books are in Danish which prevents me from getting distracted; the Christianshavn Bibliotek (the public library branch) is just around the corner from where I live. I was able to get a library card but only about 5% of their books are in English; Cafe Wilder (website doesn't work), Cafe Oven Vande, Cafe Luna, and Cafe Bizarro are actually restaurants but they don't mind people writing and using their laptops between breakfast, lunch and dinner service. Finally, Arnold Busck, a bookstore with a cafe and unfortunately an English language book section that includes a whole mystery section--my favorite.