Digital Exhibits: Balloons Over Broadway

Melissa Sweet donated all of the original art, her research notes, the process art, manuscripts, and revisions from her award winning book Balloons Over Broadway to the Kerlan Collection.   

The materials were accessioned, special boxes were built for the three dimensional sculptures, and a finding aid was created and placed on-line so that researchers and scholars could see what was held in our collection.

Then what? We wait for students and teachers and parents and faculty to discover this materials? Then what?

As someone who was a teacher/librarian for Bank Street College of Education School For Children (prek-8th grade) for fifteen years, what would I have wanted? I wanted teachers and librarians to have access to primary source materials. 

Thus began our journey of digital access.

 

Balloons Over Broadway, Melissa Sweet, and the Engineering of a Picture Book

This exhibit shows the process of making a nonfiction biographical picture book, using Melissa Sweet’s Balloons Over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade as an example.

Research

We can follow Melissa Sweet’s research questions and her own notes.

And her artistic process. For example a draft of the cover.

Trial and Error

 Sweet’s process art to the final images.

 

We have provided curriculum suggestions and an author’s study to get classroom teachers started exploring these digital resources. Click here to see more.

Are there materials that you have explored at the Kerlan that spark a hands-on activity or you wish were part of a digital exhibit. Let me know.