Libraries abroad: The Benjamin Franklin exhibition

Mountain Home (Idaho, USA) is one of only 40 cities in the nation where the travelling exhibition celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin will appear. All the other locations are in or near major cities in the United States. Mountain Home is the smallest community to have earned the right to display the celebration of the remarkable and varied life of one of the nation’s most colorful and influential Founding Fathers of the USA.

The “Friends of the Library”, a group of volunteers who work to support the library, agreed to take on the project.

Franklin is the first of the Founding Fathers to turn "300." He was born on Jan. 6, 1706, under the Julian calendar. But when Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, an 11-day adjustment was required, meaning Franklin wound up with two different birth dates. A dutiful subject of Great Britain, however, he changed his birth date to Jan. 17, 1706, the date most biographies list today. More than 20,000 people attended his funeral after he died on April 17, 1790.

He is one of only six men whose signature appears on both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Franklin was a tradesman, a fireman, a musician, an inventor, a scientist, an author, a politician, a diplomat, a statesman and a philosopher. He created the first lending library in the United States.

Franklin was one of the leading scientists of his time, was one of the founders of the theory of electricity, and his list of inventions is lengthy and wide-ranging. Many are still used today, including lightning rods to protect homes and bifocal lenses. Replicas of many of his inventions will be on display as part of the exhibit, along with interactive demonstrations of his scientific achievements that are being organized by the “Friends of the Library”.

The traveling library exhibit, "Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World," gives public audiences the opportunity to explore and to talk about Franklin's life, his contributions to the founding of this country, and his high standards for work, citizenship and contribution to community. It shows Franklin in the context of the 18th century and as a brilliant and rather unconventional product of his times, rather than the venerable bespectacled and grandfatherly figure with whom most Americans today are familiar.

The American Library Association Public Programs Office, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, is sponsoring the traveling exhibition.