Mary Galneder retires from Map Library
By Katie Gilbert
Library Communications
For 38 years, Mary Galneder has called the Robinson Map Library home. Now she is closing the doors on her lengthy library career as she looks ahead to retirement.
Galneder, who ends her career as a map librarian in the geography department,
began working at the map library in September, 1965. She received her
master’s degree at the Library School at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison by taking one course at a time. Prior
to that, Galneder received her undergraduate degree from Wayne State University
and a master’s degree in geography from Southern Illinois University.
Galneder did not originally intend to become a librarian, as her first
passion was geography.
“At one point in my life, I decided I wasn’t going to be a librarian, I was going to be a geographer,” Galneder says. She started her library career as a library page and junior clerk at the Detroit Public Library in high school and was offered a full-time position as a map librarian at Southern Illinois University in March of 1962.
“When I went to Southern Illinois, the first year I had a fellowship for graduate studies. The second year, they needed someone for their map collection, which at the time, was a part-time graduate assistantship. I was the only female graduate student in our group—that was in the days when there weren’t that many women going to graduate school—and I was also the only one with much library experience.” That assistantship later turned into a full-time job.
In 1965, she arrived in Madison and walked into Science Hall, where she has since remained. Throughout the years, Galneder witnessed many changes to the library, including the growth of UW-Madison’s aerial photograph collection and the double in room size (the library was originally located in another part of the building). The technology boom and Internet technology have also affected the library, although not as profoundly as other libraries. She still prefers print maps to digital maps but says online maps are easier to find and handle.
“I still much prefer the print versions [of maps] and that probably governs the way I think about them, but the thing that’s really changed … is what you can do on computers and the accessibility of information and, for us in the map field particularly, it’s having information about where you can obtain maps available online,” Galneder says. “[Online maps] have their purposes but I think for the long run, I still prefer the paper. If you’re looking for a map to put in a paper to illustrate a site, it’s nice to be able to pull that up on a computer screen at home. … They’re not as nice on the screen as I think they are on the paper version.”
Galneder has collected many pleasant memories from her time at Robinson. She has especially enjoyed working with patrons and receiving reference questions; one man sent her six roses after she assisted him in purchasing a map of his ancestors’ village; another man came in searching for aerial photos of his parents’ house in the 1930s and 1980s for a 50th wedding anniversary present. The Map Library has brought in some interesting patrons during Galneder’s time--environmentalists once sought topographic maps of Iowa to plot the locations of sightings of deformed frogs. An advertising agency filmed a commercial for a Madison pizza place in the library in the mid-1980s because the windows resembled those in Alexander Graham Bell’s laboratory, a commercial of which she has never seen enough.
“There are really interesting kinds of things people use maps for,” Galneder says.
So what are Galneder’s retirement plans? Naturally, she’s
going to travel. Her sister has a place in Arizona but that is merely
one of many places the geographer wishes to visit. London, Germany, Australia
and New Zealand are also on the list. Retirement will not just consist
of jet-setting, however, as Galneder has a few academic projects in mind.
She aims to complete an annotated bibliography of cartographic materials
in libraries as well as update an already-existing list of names of cities,
towns and villages in Wisconsin. She also collects map postcards and requests
them when people travel, a project that could turn into a pamphlet on
the postcards. The requests have paid off and Galneder has received postcards
from locales such as Lapland, Tierra del Fuego, Australia and Japan.
“It’s been a nice place to work for the most part,” Galneder says. What are her favorite aspects of her job? “People who use the library and, also, being able to do it all. I can decide which maps to order, I order them, I see them come in, I review everything; here we do our own cataloging, the reference work [and] whatever preservation work there is to be done.”