Last month, many of our wonderful student interns studying at the University of Michigan School of Information presented at the UMSI Student Project Exposition, an “annual poster fair that showcases the exceptional projects completed by students through their courses, co-curricular programs, student organizations and independent endeavors.” Each of them presented on the hands-on projects they participated in as part of their education this past year.
Ellie Franklin, Milo Quaife Intern in Conservation – Libraries and Literacy: Making the Case for State Funding
Project synopsis: Michigan’s child literacy rates are among the lowest in the country. With the Midwest Collaborative for Library Services and EveryLibrary Institute, this project aimed to find research showing the impact libraries have on improving literacy, in an effort to convince lawmakers to increase statewide library funds.
Ella Brooks-Kamper, Historic Visual Culture Graduate Assistant – Archives Blitz! At Yellowstone Alternative Spring Break 2026
Project synopsis: Our team of six graduate students, led by Prof. Jesse Johnston, worked with archivists at Yellowstone National Park Heritage Center to process 175 linear feet of records from the Yellowstone Justice Center. We organized and sorted files, rehoused them into archival-grade storage, and identified any restricted or sensitive content and any unstable file formats.
Throughout this process we got to learn about federal record-keeping standards and procedures, the record-creation process for the documents we were working with, and the structure of the National Archives and Records Administration. The project also included discussions around user-friendly organization and categorization of records with the head of Yellowstone Archives.
Diana Baxter, Library Assistant in Manuscripts, and Theresa Azemar, Library Assistant in Reference and Manuscripts – From Clippings File to Dataset: Data Cleanup for UVA Library
Project synopsis: Between the 1930s and 1990s, UVA Library reference librarians and adjacent staff aggregated over 22,000 newspaper clippings, correspondence, press releases, and other documents pertaining to UVA’s history, thus creating the UVA History Clippings File collection. Librarians curated the clippings, grouping them into labeled folders. Through two years of organized crowdsourced digitization efforts (“Index-a-thons”), whereby volunteers surveyed each item and populated textual metadata into a Google form, UVA Library has created an index for the collection containing over 22,000 spreadsheet rows of item-level metadata. However, the raw dataset lacked standardization and could not reasonably be made available to library users, history researchers, or digital humanists. The primary focus of our work this term was to clean and standardize this index spreadsheet, preparing it for ingest into UVA’s open access data repository, Libra. In addition to the cleaned dataset, we produced a data dictionary to contextualize the dataset for future users and drafted recommendations to guide future digitization projects and minimize the need for extensive data cleaning.
Diana and Theresa were the winners of the Libraries, Archives and Knowledge Environments in Society Project Exposition award, receiving a $500 prize!
Witnessing the life changing education that our interns receive at the School of Information is always exciting, and we’re proud to be a part of their graduate school experience! Great work, you four!