Shelf Secrets / Regalgeheimnisse is an online exhibit created with students in my 2024-25 Berlin University Alliance book history research seminar. The exhibit profiles seven books housed in the Humboldt University library’s open stacks, showcasing how examining books as unique material artifacts reveals diverse histories of production, readership, and use, in and beyond Berlin. Permanently hosted by the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. In English and German.
Together with Neal D. Curtis and Samuel V. Lemley, I co-edit the Rotunda Library Online, an open-access online database of every book shelved in the University of Virginia’s Rotunda Library when it opened in 1826. Rotunda Planetarium, an accompanying co-curated multimedia project, appeared in the Rotunda dome room November 2019 through February 2020. Comprising a digital light installation, exhibit, and public programming, this project revisited proposed but abandoned nineteenth-century plans to turn the Rotunda building into what would have been the first planetarium in the United States, using this history as an occasion to reflect on the building’s entwined legacies of slavery, library history, and scientific education.
Madeline Zehnder 