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By Amanda N. Wegner
Contributing writer
Jim Danky is a collector of the printed word. Whether it’s a union newsletter printed in 1850 or an underground feminist newsletter, he wants it in his collection.
 Jim Danky |
In September, Danky will retire after 35 years as a librarian at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and 15 years as director of UW-Madison’s Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America.
Danky is a member of WEAC Council #1. While some people think WEAC’s membership is made up entirely of K-12 teachers and education support professionals, WEAC’s membership includes Council #1, which represents 750 education and information professionals employed by the state who work in the Department of Public Instruction, Wisconsin Technical College System, State Historical Society, at state schools and libraries, and in state prisons and other institutions, such as the centers for the developmentally disabled.
A union member for 45 years, Danky and his fellow State Historical Society co-workers affiliated with WEAC in 1989.
On being in the organization’s minority, Danky said it can be “a real challenge.”
“We’re the tidbits of the tidbits: librarians, curators, archivists,” Danky said.
The collection he has amassed, however, is anything but tidbits. Danky has gained an international reputation in the area of “alternative,” or “oppositional,” press. Over the years he has added about 30,000 new titles to the library’s holdings, with particular focuses on the print culture of the African-American press, marginalized ethnic groups, feminist and other women’s publishing, gay and lesbian press, political groups and the literary “underground.”
As a result of his work, for instance, Danky has created the largest collection of African-American newspapers in the United States.
“History starts today … these are the primary resources historians use to interpret the past,” Danky said of the materials he collects. “My job has been to gather those materials and ferret them out. The great challenge of my job is that you don’t go to a bookstore or have a list to do this. Whether it’s a Neo-Nazi magazine or a little ‘zine’ called ‘Rad Dad’ on radical fatherhood, you have to really seek these materials out.”
Danky currently receives about 9,000 titles a year.
He also is a faculty associate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, where he appropriately teaches a course on mass media and minorities. Danky will continue to teach after his retirement from the State Historical Society.
Danky is extremely proud of the work he has done for the State Historical Society. He said his ambition to amass such an important collection mirrors the ambition of both the state of Wisconsin and the Historical Society itself.
“The Historical Society reflects this quiet but outside ambition that Wisconsin has: We are this middling state. We aren’t the largest, but we try to be the best. And we’ve done that with the Historical Society.
“I am intensely proud of what I’ve done, and I certainly it see as work done in the public sphere,” Danky said. “What I do grows out of a long, proud tradition.”
Posted May 25, 2007