In a newsletter last Fri, the Wisconsin Film Festival announced a partnership with the Madison Public Library. Beginning later “this summer,” library titles featured in festival programs past will be earmarked with a special collection sticker and housed at the Pinney Branch Library.
The festival’s full announcement reads as follows:
We’re excited about a new project we’ve started in collaboration with Madison Public Library (MPL). Later this summer, films in MPL’s collection that have screened at previous Wisconsin Film Festivals will be marked with a sticker (pictured above). With the help of these labels, you can relive your favorite Film Fest experiences or discover new gems that you may have had to pass up before. Films can be checked out by anyone who has a card in the South Central Library system, and will live at the MPL Pinney branch. We hope you’ll check out some of these titles, including The Dance of Reality, Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, The German Doctor, and Why Don’t You Play in Hell?
The news also means the library will be adding more Wisconsin Film Festival titles to its catalogue, all of which will eventually be searchable via the LINKCat system, according to a follow-up email from Pinney Branch Library’s Steve Winnicki. “We plan to add ‘Wisconsin Film Festival’ as a related subject so that, in theory, all the titles we are purchasing with grant funds will be a click away if one follows the related subjects link in LINKcat,” Winnicki wrote.
Those grant funds, by the way, are courtesy of the “Beyond the Page” project. The grant project supported a string of festival pop-ins at various Dane County libraries earlier this year, where festival staffers were made available to library patrons and previewed selections with trailers. A number of additional collaborations between the Wisconsin Film Festival and Dane County’s libraries are in the works for August and September, including screenings of Food Patriots and Timbuktu. “[Madison Public Library] and the Festival have been partners since 2014,” Winnicki added. “The Sneak Peeks we’ve done the past 2 years and the Pinney Mini Film Fest are both run in partnership w/WFF, and we are now adding the DVD/blu ray component and doing the pop up screenings.”
It’s worth noting that Madison Public Library’s move is in line with Four Star Video Cooperative’s revised search feature, which currently lets customers hone their browsing for festival-specific titles.