Girls and Boys in Storyland

An Exeter event for local readers: while in town yesterday, I had a quick glance at the current Exeter Central Library exhibition, Girls and Boys in Storyland, which runs until April 31st.

Girls and Boys in Storyland is the name of two exhibitions taking place at Exeter Central Library and the University of Exeter Special Collections, in April 2012. This joint project, to showcase the collections of early children's literature at both libraries, has been funded by the South West Regional Library Service (SWRLS).

The exhibition is well supported with web material (a good example of how to integrate an exhibition with web presence): see girlsandboysinstoryland.wordpress.com, which has details of talks and tours;  featured blog posts on topics such as the works of Edith Nesbit, 'Mrs Arthur Gaskin', and Rider Haggard; and links for sites such as the Devon Collection of Children's Books and the Flickr exhibit of Rare Books & Special Collections at Exeter Central Library.

Addendum

A couple of spinoffs from this:

Following a few links led rapidly into new territory (at least for me); I never knew of the University of Exeter Blog. It's a WordPress-hosted collective blogging service for postgraduate students and university staff, and a quick skim finds quite a few interesting subsections and posts, such as the Science and Culture post on gender segregation and Hamley's toy store, the Web team's "Sense of humour failure" about an xckd cartoon; and The 4th Domain: An introductory guide to synthetic biology on the web.

On a different tack entirely, check out this Google Books search: "Girls and Boys in Storyland". I tried it because I wondered if it was a quotation (it isn't). I'm finding that it returns one hit for the University of Exeter Library News blog post about the exhibition, and two book hits for Edith Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It. The phrase occurs in neither of these books; this is an example of the kind of false hits you get with Google's current system that second-guesses what it thinks are relevant hits.

- Ray