Today, the unveiling of hard work put in by a Ball State immersive learning group will take place at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis, a project that sheds light on the life and work of the famous artist and author.
The project was initiated by Rai Peterson, an associate professor of English, after taking a group of students to visit the library during its grand opening in January 2011.
"We went and we were disappointed, I'll say, by the content because it reports to be a library but the books in it weren't Kurt Vonnegut's," she said. "We felt like it could be improved as a library without requiring a lot of expense."
Peterson said historical libraries dedicated to artists and authors such as Indianapolis native Kurt Vonnegut usually contain original documents pertaining to them. In this case, the Lilly Library of Indiana University had already obtained most of those documents.
The Vonnegut Library is also in a small space that doesn't meet humidity requirements to keep precious papers and doesn't meet security requirements, Peterson said. The visit inspired an idea.
"After I visited, I felt like Ball State could do a lot for the Vonnegut Library and that while it's impractical for them to be a true research library about Vonnegut, there were some things that with electronics, we could make possible," she said.
The idea became the immersive learning project which consisted of five projects: a manuscript archive, a film archive, a traveling exhibit, a product team and a marketing team. Russ Wahlers, an associate professor of marketing, contributing to leading the team along with Peterson.
The team, consisting of 11 students from the colleges of business, communications and science humanities, conducted a survey to understand whom this project would affect and how it would effect them.
"It was an online survey and we got roughly 500 different responses from all over the place, about half in state and about half out of state," he said.
There were 26 states and about 23 countries represented in the survey. The survey asked respondents how they learned about the library, would they visit it, were they satisfied by their visit and how the library could be improved according to Wahlers.
The immersive learning project took place during two semesters, consisting of interviews with friends and family members, collecting photos and archival data from the Lilly Library, discovering footage and oral interviews as well as obtaining permission, designing products that would appeal to library users and creating the traveling exhibit. The execution was impressive to Wahlers.
"I have never been so impressed with a group of students in my life," he said. "I marveled all the way through the project [at] the way the students interacted."
While the project will benefit the 11 students involved, the Vonnegut Library itself might have been the major benefactor at the end of the day.
Executive director and library founder Julia Whitehead said the project has added a vast amount of information to the library that it previously didn't have and would have been hard to obtain with its limited staff and budget.
"It would have been years down the road before we would have been able to accomplish the projects and programs that Ball State has put together for us," she said. "Even then, I don't know that they would have been created with that much value and quality as Ball State has contributed to this project."
The unveiling of the film and oral history archive, traveling exhibition, iPad exhibits and gift shop will take place today at 11 a.m. at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis on 340 N. Senate Ave., and Whitehead said anyone is encouraged to go.
"There's something for everyone in Vonnegut's work," she said.
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