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For Indian teen who launched village library, it's about more than books

Radhika Iyengar

January 08, 2021 |

The Christian Science Monitor |

Text |

800-1500 Words

Response Location: India, Deora, Bihar

Sadiya Riyaz Shaikh wanted more students, specifically girls, in her village to have access to books and a place to study. She created the Maulana Azad Library, a repurposed family guesthouse full of hundreds of new and second books, newspapers, coloring books, and a tutor who helps students. “Without the library, I wouldn’t have been able to manage it,” said one of the students who regularly attends the library.

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How a 1980s AIDS Support Group Changed The Internet Forever

Michael Waters

December 18, 2020 |

OneZero |

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Over 3000 Words

Response Location: United States, San Francisco, California

In the 1980s, a virtual messaging network, then known as bulletin board systems (BBSs), acted as a support group for many who were in search of peer support and reliable information as the AIDS epidemic spread. Although the site was a grassroots effort with little to no financial stability, it grew to 500 daily users and 100 messages posted per day.

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Writing the next chapter in literary diversity

Haillie Parker Allie Barton

December 12, 2020 |

Cronkite News - Arizona PBS |

Multi-Media |

1500-3000 Words

Response Location: United States, Phoenix, Arizona

Kindred is a program to diversify Pima County libraries' staff, events, and collections. They run programs centered around Black history, culture, and experiences, including Black story time and talks featuring prominent local people of color. Topics include Black history, female entrepreneurship, and quilt codes for the Underground Railroad. A grant allowed them to distribute 200 copies of Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” with a guide for discussion. Pima County built on Kindred’s work by launching new collections featuring materials written by and for LGBTQ+, Indigenous, and Latino patrons.

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With Talk2020, The Wall Street Journal turns an internal reporting tool into a reusable news product

Sarah Scire

November 02, 2020 |

Nieman Lab |

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Under 800 Words

Response Location: United States, Washington, District of Columbia

Talk2020 is a searchable database from the Wall Street Journal with thousands of transcripts from presidential and vice-presidential candidates’ campaign speeches, media appearances, debates, and more. Users can filter by issue, date, candidate, or keyword to find quotes and facts about a candidate’s record. It began as an internal tool to help reporters and editors working in the D.C. bureau frame and inform their own journalism, but focus groups showed that news consumers also wanted to be able to quickly locate quotes and facts for their own edification and to support fact-based debates with others.

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The Wayback Machine and Cloudflare Want to Backstop the Web

Lily Hay Newman

September 17, 2020 |

Wired |

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Under 800 Words

Response Location: United States

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine crawls and caches websites to preserve a history of deleted pages. The Wayback Machine has archived a large amount of the public web over the past two decades, adding more than a billion URLs a day to its databases. The archive has over 468 billion web pages in total, and more than 45 petabytes of data. A new partnership with the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, which caches a static version of websites, has had promising results. Powering Cloudflare’s work with the Wayback Machine’s interface has allowed them to find more sites to archive.

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Challenge of archiving the #MeToo movement

Colleen Walsh

August 11, 2020 |

The Harvard Gazette |

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800-1500 Words

Response Location: United States, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library’s digital services team gathered and archived all the virtual material they could find related to the #MeToo movement. The social media-driven movement is now represented in the library’s online archive that contains more than 32 million tweets, 1,100 webpages, and thousands of articles. The team created a largely automated system to capture the content, including 71 hashtags, and a steering committee of historians, lawyers, and data experts helped work through the challenges of capturing a digital footprint. The data has already been examined to study aspects of the movement.

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How Libraries Stretch Their Capabilities to Serve Kids During a Pandemic

Holly Korbey

July 31, 2020 |

KQED |

Multi-Media |

800-1500 Words

Response Location: United States, Chattanooga, Tennessee

Summer, which is usually the busiest season for libraries around the United States, brought with it challenges due to the pandemic, but resourceful librarians innovated ways to connect with their most valuable patrons. In Chattanooga, Tennessee librarians recorded what would have been an in-person craft lesson and posted it on their YouTube channel. In St. Louis, Missouri, the public library loaned out Chromebooks and hot spots to families to increase accessibility to virtual programming. While the pandemic poses limitations, librarians are seizing the opportunity to try new things and keep students engaged.

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Why San Francisco's Librarians Make Great Contact Tracers

Emily Nonko

May 28, 2020 |

Next City |

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800-1500 Words

Response Location: United States, San Francisco, California

Librarians’ skills have proved critical to San Francisco’s pandemic response, in roles ranging from translating to communicating public-health announcements, but especially contact tracing. The city’s largest-ever activation of disaster service workers meant sending librarians to the front lines. The dozens chosen for contact tracing work use a combination of research and people skills, striving to build trust with people reached by phone. Says one librarian, “You have to be agile and willing to lean in. It aligns well with my skills as a librarian."

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Kansas City's WWI Museum is avoiding layoffs by giving employees thousands of pages from its archives to digitize

Alisha Ebrahimji

April 01, 2020 |

CNN |

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Under 800 Words

Response Location: United States, Kansas

By assigning employees to digitization projects, the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, continues to operate even while day-to-day visitors stay home. To prevent staff from losing their jobs, the Museum has assigned teams to transcribe documents and letters. By shifting their priority, from interacting with visitors to processing collections, the Museum is able to make of its materials accessible to the public and researchers online.

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Bay County librarian using virtual storytime to cheer up families during coronavirus shutdown

Caitlyn French

March 29, 2020 |

MLive.com |

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Under 800 Words

Response Location: United States, Bay City, Michigan

With schools and libraries closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, a librarian in Bay County, Michigan is turning to hosting a virtual storytime. Although this approach lacks some elements of the in-person storytime, it does offer a sense of routine for children during a time that could otherwise be destabilizing.

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