San Francisco Public Library

Like I want to do a grant and... do a part of the film that I didn't get to finish and also collect, get more archival footage of California archival video footage of African-Americans in California.

But I want to collect these stories and maybe partner with the San Francisco public library about just with these stories about like how their families came here.

And I could start with those people who talked because I, yeah.

That's powerful.

I would suggest that it has to be, you know, a multi-platform strategy.

Certainly, I hope there'll still be an internet 50 years from now.

I hope that some of the ephemera as well as the visual documentation of exhibitions be available in terms of print material in a San Francisco public library archive, or maybe even one at an institution as well.

I do think that it also has to exist in community archives.

It's not even the only Dolly that loves reading.

Dolly Goyle is with the San Francisco Public Library.

My mom did not want to name me Dolly, but my dad is a big fan.

Through Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, every child in the city can get one book a month for free until they turn five years old.

I appreciate it.

So this book really all works through Ray, our 75-year-old main character, a lover of ODC and the mission branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

Just introduce

us to Ray.

She enjoys watching the promotional State Farm bookmarks get closer to the ends of library books before they are replaced by the next ones.

She thinks about getting her own card with the SFPL.

She asks the paper cranes to wipe down the counters on the weekdays when she's not here.

She still hasn't sorted through the complication of feelings that warm when she sees the paper cranes at her windowsill, carrying tinfoil-wrapped burritos as big as her head or takeout boxes of char siu over rice.

We'll see what happens.

And I had a meeting with the San Francisco Library earlier this week, and they want to...

Well, yeah, too late this year, but they want to get involved next year.

And they're also talking about hooking me up with the Asian Art Museum and Yerba Buena and, you know, SFMOMA, you know, down on market.

[laughs] It's like- Wow ...

I mean, there are times, you know, when we think, when I'm thinking, "Am I living all the lives at the same time, or what's going on here? Like, why is there no time?" And I s- we lived in the, the San Francisco Bay Area for 12 years, and I searched that l- San Francisco Public Library for anything that could explain why is there no time.

Like physics books, and I would just skip the math because I was like, "This is way too complicated" physics.

[laughs] So, but I could never find anything, and eventually I just said, "Okay, that's it." So then I got really sick, and I had a, uh, like a blood disorder because, because that's what happened.

So I'm gonna say there is some kind of way for them to control what we get to remember, and then it's like I'm standing on the moon looking down on the Earth, but what's around the Earth i- at the time, 'cause this is now 1994, I called it the silvery, glittery fishnet because it was diamond shaped, silvery, glittery net around the Earth.

We did not have Google, right, back then.

I, again, I searched the San Francisco Public Library for anything to ex- [laughs] to explain to me what is this net, which we now call the grid, right? So people who wanna know what that is, if you Google grid around the Earth, you're gonna see lots of images, and that's very, looks very similar to what I saw.

But, um, the spirit, the spirit guide said, "Everything on Earth is connected to each other, and everything on Earth is connected up to this grid."

And Ray wanted the first application of OmniFont Optical Character Recognition to be a machine that would read print out loud for blind people.

We created a project where we purchased several machines and then for 18 months from 1976 in October through June of 1978, I lived in suitcases or out of suitcases in hotels, traveling around the country where we put machines at places like the New York Public Library, the Iowa Commission for the Blind, the San Francisco Public Library, and some other agencies for the blind around the country.

The idea being that we wanted blind people to come and use the machine, read whatever they wanted to read, and then give us information about what needed to go into a final production model of the machine.

I wrote training curriculum.