Q & A with University Librarian Anna Gold
How has the library adapted to the needs of the WPI community during the pandemic?
When the campus closed down in early 2020, the WPI community dispersed. The only way we could offer information and services was digitally. Fortunately, we were in a great position to do that. We had a deep portfolio of digital information, and we added even more, especially materials needed for remote teaching. Library instruction, research services, and outreach went online. So did WPI’s annual Sustainability Project Competition—and we had a record number of submissions. One librarian, Robin Benoit, took her twice-weekly mindfulness meditation sessions online and they continue to this day. When we returned to campus last spring, we reorganized our study spaces to ensure users felt safe and welcomed. The pandemic experience changed us all and taught us so much.
What is the Digital Scholarship With Purpose initiative all about?
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests prompted us to ask: How can we reinvest our skills, space, and time to create sustained support for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) across all the library’s services? One answer was Digital Scholarship With Purpose—our plan to reinvent the Shuster Lab for Digital Scholarship as a place where people with common research interests in DEI and sustainability can make connections and find inspiration together. Digital technologies and techniques can help us ask new questions, document marginalized voices and experiences, and interrogate accepted narratives through research and analysis.
Our initiative was one of seven selected nationally for a LYRASIS Catalyst Fund Grant. We’re thinking about whether our library—and other libraries—could offer a DEI research consultation service, designed specifically to help students bring DEI and sustainability lenses to their projects and research by exploring new information and scholarly techniques.
How has the Shuster Lab grown since its creation in 2018?
One of the programs we piloted after the Shuster Lab opened is Digital Volunteers. The volunteers meet once a month to do things like increasing the Wikipedia presence of underrepresented people in STEM. Starting in C-Term (January 2022), the lab is planning to start hosting informal meet-ups to share research as well as techniques, and then we’ll share highlights through our website. We’re also planning to invite organizations and people who are doing exemplary work in DEI and sustainability using digital scholarship to visit us remotely. The pandemic helped us see how relatively easy this is to do!
We’d also like to offer use of the lab’s high-end scanners and digital archiving expertise to empower community-based archiving projects, whether by WPI students or by other Worcester-area community groups and organizations.
What are Open Educational Resources, and why should we care about them?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are materials teachers create and make available free to students and the world. They can be anything from a syllabus to a video module to a complete course textbook. A surprising number of students don’t buy required textbooks today; our data shows that many WPI students don’t buy all required textbooks. Those who do, may have to go without meals to afford textbooks—some cost $250 or more. So, using OER reduces the cost of college for students and puts all students on a level playing field; everyone has the textbook!
There are other benefits, too: reusing and modifying OER resources can facilitate collaboration and innovation in teaching, and faculty can also incorporate diverse language and examples, creating more inclusive course materials that encourage STEM success for all students.
What other library initiatives make you proud?
- Modernizing Gordon Library: We’ve been expanding and redesigning our study spaces to meet student needs. We want to keep this momentum going and add even more seats and Tech Suites.
- Digital WPI: This is an invaluable resource for current students; it shares our student projects and research with the world. It also has over 150 years of WPI publications—a cultural and historical goldmine.
- Our Charles Dickens collections: The WPI Archives has rapidly become a destination for research on the work and world of Charles Dickens. Dickens is not only a literary giant, but his work offers extraordinary perspectives on social justice and the human impacts of technological revolutions.
- Last but not least, celebrating our artists: This winter we are exhibiting a beautiful collection of paintings by a WPI (ME) PhD student, Elif Asar. Sharing work by WPI’s artists and authors is a special pleasure and privilege.