Checking in on some big events at the BPL

The Boston Public Library has had plenty of reasons to party over the past week. On Monday night, the Leventhal family and their friends came out in numbers to celebrate the opening of the 5,760-square-foot Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, which features a public learning space, a reading room, a collection of rare maps, and a super-cool globe that’s three feet in diameter. There were about 100 people at the event, including Norman and Muriel Leventhal, Norman’s son AlanLeventhal and his wife, Sherry, BPL president Amy Ryan, map center curator Ronald Grim, associates of the BPL board chair Vivian Spiro, BPL Chairman of the Board Jeffrey Rudman, Mayor Tom Menino, and City Councilor Mike Ross. The map center opens to the public tomorrow. On Wednesday night, the BPL’s Abbey Room was packed with staffers and friends welcoming the library’s new Children’s Writer-in-Residence Fellowship winner, Sarah Winifred Searle, who’s from Danvers and is a student at the Harvard Extension School. Searle’s “Under the Apple Tree’’ is a graphic ghost novel set in Maine during World War II. Searle replaces outgoing fellow Elaine Dimopoulos, who’s working on a young adult dystopian novel.