Original Design

The original design behind our interactive exhibit was produced in LIS 547 (Design Methods for Librarianship). In this version of the design, an institution would display materials with little to no contextual information and would ask users to offer up their interpretations of the mystery item. The display would operate as a form of outreach for special collections libraries and archives that would allow them to crowdsource user interpretations of their items. The display would be set up in public areas, such as a bus station, that attract large quantities of passersby. Community members would be able to freely approach the display and contribute their thoughts on the item. The user interpretations could then be incorporated as catalog metadata; in turn creating a folksonomy and enhancing the findability of items.

The Exhibit

Coming into the year, our goal was to create an exhibit that incorporated the interactivity of our LIS 547 project, but that also maintained the traditional exhibit’s role as an educational tool. Exhibits represent a great opportunity to engage library visitors that do not actively use special collection’s services. They draw in passersby and help introduce people to interesting materials held by an institution. We believe that there is great value in the traditional exhibit model, but we wanted to involve the patron in the learning process. In engaging the material patrons can utilize their critical thinking skills with the intent of identifying the meaning behind the items they are exploring. We decided to include more contextual information than was in our original design to enhance the patron’s ability to explore their own understanding of the content.

Adaption to COVID-19

While we spent most of the academic year planning an in-person exhibit, it became apparent at the end of Winter quarter 2020 that this would not be reasonable, nor feasible due to COVID-19. In response, we had to move to an online platform that would carry over our original mission of creating an interactive exhibit. While no one on the team had much experience with web development, and many of the images we originally planned to feature were not available digitally, we did our best to take the challenge in stride and adapt wherever necessary. While this no doubt made for a hectic final push, in some ways the change really enhanced and enabled what we wanted to accomplish. The space constraints that originally restricted the number of images we could include were suddenly gone, which allowed us to feature more content then the physical exhibit would have allowed for. In addition, the move to an online format gave us the opportunity to reach a lot more viewers, theoretically increasing the number of responses that the exhibit receives.

Though obviously this adaption was never a part of our original or ideal plans, we are incredibly thankful to have been able to make such a transition. We understand that many of our fellow students faced similar difficulties in adapting their projects and courses due to COVID-19 and we would like to congratulate and commend them for successfully doing so!

Donor Information

All the children’s books featured in the exhibit were donated to the University of Washington Special Collections Library by the family of Pamela K. Harer. We are incredibly grateful for their kind donations and cannot wait to see how these books benefit future scholarly works.

Contributors

This exhibit was created by MLIS 2020 candidates Niko Kirsch and Kat Jennings for their capstone project. The project was sponsored by Sandra Kroupa, the Book Arts and Rare Books Curator for University of Washington Special Collections.

The initial interactive exhibit design in LIS 547 was created with help from fellow classmate and MLIS candidate Daniel Blanchard.