Two WSU Libraries employees were recognized for their efforts in the university community this spring with President’s Awards at two separate events.

Graphic designer Amy Grey received the 2014-15 President’s Employee Excellence Award at the Celebrating Excellence Recognition Banquet on March 27, part of WSU’s annual Showcase celebration of faculty, staff and student achievement.

For Ying Lee, the yellowing newspaper clippings she scans for Washington State University Libraries unexpectedly opened the door to a conversation with a stranger on an airplane this past Christmas.

Lee, one of several WSU students working on the libraries’ online Kimble Northwest History Database, had been reading articles about Alaska—an intriguing state to the native of Taiwan. Coincidentally, seated next to her on the plane was a man headed for Anchorage. Lee and the stranger turned what could have been a dull connecting flight into a discussion on all things Alaska.

During the 1930s, proponents of the Grand Coulee Dam were quick to emphasize the progress the dam would bring to the country. Indeed, Grand Coulee provided thousands of jobs during the Great Depression, aided the American World War II effort and irrigated vast areas of central and western Washington. The dam remains the largest energy producer in the United States.

Before filmmaker Humphrey Leynse came to work at Washington State University in 1970, he made the movie of his dreams. The subject was a remote island 180 miles east of the Korean mainland in the Sea of Japan: Ulleung-Do.

“Out There, A Lone Island” and more than 50 other documentaries he filmed of Asian peoples, cultures and countries in the 1950s-60s are part of a collection in WSU’s Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC).

Study room reservations are now available at the Owen Library in addition to the Holland and Terrell Libraries.

The group study rooms can accommodate 4-6 people and have dry erase boards. To book a room, visit http://calendar.libraries.wsu.edu/booking/groupstudy_owen.

A rare 17th-century Bible at WSU is part of a discussion of Bible errors in a recent blog from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

The Folger is home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection and a primary repository for research material from the early modern period. This includes a 1610 Geneva Bible printed with the mother of all typos in John 6:67.

While one little girl in Boise, Idaho, mistook the pink van parked down her street for an ice cream truck in the 1970s, teenager Barb Stone of Benton City, Wash., was already an old pro of the bookmobile circuit. A July 1960 photo shows 4-year-old Stone holding a small stack of books, standing next to the librarian and driver of the Mid-Columbia Regional Library’s Bookmobile.

Delicate works of crochet are on display this month in the Terrell Atrium display case, organized by business and economics librarian Mary Gilles.

The craft has been practiced by both men and women in many countries for two centuries. According to the Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, “crochet is an outstandingly versatile technique whose applications have ranged from the most basic utilitarian to haute couture.”

April is National Poetry Month, and Washington State University Libraries is sponsoring three weeklong activities during the month to ramp up poetry mojo on the Pullman campus.

Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers and poets celebrating poetry’s vital place in our culture, according to the Poets.org website.

The published works of Washington State University authors will be recognized at the second annual “Crimson Reads: A Celebration of WSU Authors,” at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 24, in the Terrell Library atrium. Crimson Reads is part of WSU Showcase, the annual celebration of faculty, staff and student excellence.