INSTRUMENTS OF KNOWLEDGE: Celebrating the First Moon Landing through U-M Library Collections      OR: How 7 people used 1000 pushpins in 12 hours

I am Jamie Niehof, one of the Engineering Librarians on North Campus. This is my colleague on this project, Paul Grochowski, fellow Engineering Librarian. We were asked to talk a little bit about our exhibition around the corner on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. We called it “Instruments of Knowledge” after a portion of JFK’s “We choose to go to the moon” speech in 1962 at Rice University that was meant to persuade the American people to support the Apollo program. That quote is: 

We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Also, we used a lot of pushpins. We ran out of pushpins and had to buy more pushpins.

The North Campus librarians	, made up of Engineering, Art & Design, Architecture, Music and Comic Books decided in February 2018 to do an exhibit on Central Campus to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing using highlights from our collection. We reserved the space for 17 months in the future to be sure to install during the week of the anniversary, and to begin formal planning in January 2019. Then everyone forgot about it until May of 2019, five months after we should have started. So in June Paul and I took the lead on the project. Paul liaises to the Aerospace department, and we knew we would be consulting them. 

June was research and consults with other North Campus librarians to bring in unique items from Art, including a tunnel book with a moon-shaped cover you can look through, Music, including a list of songs astronauts listened to for their wake-up calls, and Video Games, a 1979 game called Lunar Lander where you guide the Lunar Module to land on a flat piece of the moon.

July was crunch time, where Paul and I created mock-ups of each of the 21 windows in Hatcher Lobby, and sent oversized books to the Digital Conversion unit to be scanned to so we could use the images. Installation began this past Tuesday, July 16, the day the astronauts launched 50 years ago. It took us seven people six hours each day over two days to install the exhibit. And now I’m going to show you what the process looked like.

Here are our window mock-ups. We used Butcher Paper from other Jamie the Art Librarian and drew a to-scale life-size window using the dimensions from the lobby. There’s an early mock-up for the Art window in the middle, and as we got more images from Digital Conversion we adjusted the mock-up, decided where shelves would go to display books, and printed captions.

We were lucky on North Campus to work across the hall from a conference room that wasn’t booked, and we took it over for the week. Many nights I brought my work home with me, mostly cutting out images and captions, and my one-eyed cat offered support and I figured he needed a call-out in this presentation. 

Our installation was aided by having the mock-ups done and measured correctly, so we could just remove the washi tape used to keep the images and captions in place and start tacking them up in the windows. All the north campus librarians helped with this part, getting the bulk of the work done in the first day. Here you can see Leena un-washi-taping, Jamie working on the Architecture window, and Paul putting up the Apollo 11 Launch and Landing window. After it was up, we found 16 misspellings, and two mislabeled astronauts that we had to fix. This is one of the downsides of using a graphic creation program that doesn’t highlight typing errors. 

And here is a picture of the exhibit introduction window highlighting the JFK speech at Rice, and missing the actual introduction, which I have here and will be putting up shortly.

Lessons Learned: Be careful when choosing a font for caption text. I used a new font called Gidole, and learned too late that it does not have opening quotes or italics. It does have closing quotes, so if you are quoting something they’re both closing quotes and you feel like you’re in the Upside Down. And italics are necessary for citations from journals, but we couldn’t use them and I didn’t want to retype a hundred captions by the time we realized it.

Check the captions of any streaming video. We were originally going to stream a documentary from Kanopy, but the screen in Hatcher doesn’t support that so we found the same clip on youtube with closed captions. Instead of captioning “Tranquility Base here the Eagle has landed” the captions said “Quality Beef here the moon has landed”. Whoops.

Start planning earlier, when we were told to begin planning in January 2019, we should have listened, the last three weeks were a lot of work. And don’t spellcheck alone. 

Here’s our exhibit By the Numbers: 940 pushpins by the time we were done, more than 200 work hours, 105 feet of butcher paper, 50 years of space history, 21 windows, 2 bags of Swedish fish (thank you Jamie for one of those) and 1 lego astronaut.

I would like to leave you with this quote from Archibald MacLeish, a pulitzer-prize winning poet and Librarian of Congress. He said this after Apollo 8 orbited the moon and saw the Earthrise for the first time and took this photograph: 

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers.