A long, long (ish) time ago I was a student librarian in the School of Education at the Cape Technikon (now the Cape Peninsula University of Technology). It was during the second year of my studies that one of my favourite lecturers (Dr Liz van Aswegen) showed my class a video called The Mind’s Treasure Chest
Released in 1991, THE MIND’S TREASURE CHEST is a feature length educational comedy that teaches students to think for themselves. This film is a marriage between a Hollywood movie and an educational video. It’s about libraries, research, and information. It’s about history and hypothesizing. It’s about thinking for yourself.
Distributed in five countries, it won a multitude of awards, including Best Film for Grades 7 – 12 at the National Educational Film and Video Festival.
For Kennedy buffs, the film features a number of sequences that dramatize the history of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Parts of it are a bit dated, for example I do not think that many (or any) school libraries still use microfiche readers; catalogues are computerised and the internet is now available on broadband rather than a limited dial up service.
You may be able to show it to your students as part of their library induction or get them to spot the ways that school library usage has changed (and indeed, remained the same) but if not it is still an entertaining and educational film for Librarians to watch and reminisce on how things used to be done.
