Pages

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Photos from my Visit to the Wisconsin Historical Society Library in Madison WI

...
On Day 11 of the Seaver Family History Mystery Tour, I visited the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin.  I wrote about Finding Material in the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, which are on the fourth floor of the building. 

In addition to the Archives, the Society also has a Library on the second floor.  After lunch, I did some research here, as described in my Day 11 post.  Here are some photos from this visit:

1)  The reading room is on the second floor.  The photo below shows the room.  My wife, Linda, is in the blue sweatshirt sitting on the right.  The guy asleep in the first row of comfortable seats was there the whole two hours I was there.  There are government publications around the periphery of this room. 


2)  A user can go up or down to the eight levels of library stacks via stairs or an elevator.  On Level 2, here is a photo of the sign denoting the holdings on each floor, and another list of where books from each state are located:


3)  Of course, for the area that I was interested in (Dodge and Dane Counties, Wisconsin), Google was filming the books on the shelf and they were unavailable:



4)  I ordered several local history manuscripts using the call desk on the second floor, and wanted to copy some of the pages.  Their copy machines are designed to not damage the book spines when they are placed on the copy machine.  The copy machine scans them face up rather than face down:


Of course, copying books this way creates distortion in the output.  I had to scan them by holding down the pages with my fingers.  The copy machine uses a pre-paid card.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing. My 3rd great-grandfather was from Madison, so I took an interest in your trip there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Those are incredible copy machines. I never thought of a copy machine that accepts a prepaid card. Anyway, I'm pretty sure you got a readable copy of the book.

    ReplyDelete