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Gateway to Knowledge Guest Post #14

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This is the 14th in a series of guest posts by Abigail Van Gelder (from a stop Nov. 9–10 in Mankato, Minn.), who with her husband, Josh, is journeying across the country on the Library’s “Gateway to Knowledge” traveling exhibition:

Our hopes were high for a great turnout after we did a piece for KEYC, the local Fox news station, before the event.  We had a young reporter come by on our set-up day to film a piece that would air the evening before our event on a few local news channels.

We enjoyed talking with her about the area and learning some of the tricks and pitfalls of being a one-person news crew in the field.  We were glad to help out though, and I even got to play cameraman for a few shots.  Josh and I will be anxiously waiting for our Emmy nomination in the mail.

The piece aired that night on the news, and it definitely worked; we were packed with guests throughout our two-day visit to Mankato East Junior High School.  More than 1,000 junior high and high school students took part in tours and scavenger hunts, keeping us on our toes with questions.  It was inspiring to see how wide of a variety of classes could find something inside the exhibit to connect to current lessons.  The computer science students stopped in to talk about the digitized resources at loc.gov and its mission to make the collection easy accessible.

We had some incredible weather in Mankato with temps in the mid 60’s.  We certainly were not expecting that for November in Minnesota.  We had quite a few guests who broke out their shorts and summer clothes one more time in honor of the Indian summer.  The unseasonably pleasant weather didn’t last though, and the cold returned as we finished our event.

Comments (2)

  1. Looks like a great time. Sounds like it was well worth visiting.

  2. Gate way to knowledge proved library is growing organism

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