Showcase Winners for Spring 2021

Gustavo points to himself pictured as a participant in the Young Lords' Garbage Offensive in 1969, from the StoryMap Community Control and Gentrification in NYC

Every semester, the Library Showcase highlights remarkable works created using library resources. The Spring 2021 Showcase includes 14 outstanding projects, including a booklet and video created by Learning, Design and Technology graduate student Cristina Benitez (G'21), a 3D printed compost receptacle made by Gracey Owen (B'22), and podcasts produced for Professor John Trybus’s class “The Jane Goodall Rules: Acting Upon our Reasons for Hope” (UNXD-364). 

We are delighted to honor the top projects as the winners of the Library Staff Pick and Voters’ Choice Awards for the Spring 2021 semester.

Two projects tied as Voters’ Choice. Digital Cosmos, Mutual Worlds: An Archive of Queer Social Spaces is an English Honors thesis and historiography of queer and trans* social spaces by Anny Angel (C‘21). Her project sought to critically examine an archive that maps the contours of spaces that have enabled queer and trans* sociality over time. In her submission, Angel wrote that Research Services Librarian Melissa Jones, "was super helpful with showing me how to use research tools and Lau's various databases! Wouldn't have been able to navigate any of these without her help."

Also named Voters’ Choice was Community Control and Gentrification in NYC, a StoryMap website highlighting several community efforts to combat gentrification in Harlem. American Studies student Yaritza Aguilar (C‘22) looks at the Young Lords and Operation Move-In as examples of radical community control and their anti-poverty and mutual aid agenda. Aguilar learned how to create her StoryMap from Digital Scholarship Librarian Megan Martinsen.

An honorable mention went to Back to Life, Back to Sports: Getting Back in the Game after COVID-19, created by Daelyn Waters (C'23). Waters’s sports news video is about how the global pandemic forced sports teams to take an unprecedented hiatus and the excitement that teens, young adults, and their parents are feeling as the world returns to normal in the wake of COVID-19 vaccinations and they can get back into the game.

The Library Staff Pick Award, which showcases projects that made the best use of library resources, is the podcast Interrogating the Archive by Lily Rubinstein (C'22). The podcast was Rubinstein’s capstone project for Professor Adam Rothman’s HIST-099 course, Facing Georgetown’s History, and was inspired by the methods, sources, and practices of the course. Rubinstein was interested in interrogating "how power functions in the archives and how power can work to include and exclude sources, and as a result, stories, people and events from the archives." In the podcast, she begins by diving deep into the history of archives as a practice, considers how archives have the potential to both create silences and fill gaps, and demystifies Georgetown’s own incredible archival resources with the aid of University Archivist Lynn Conway.

A close second place for the Library Staff Pick Award goes to the Donn B. Murphy One Acts Festival—Ponderosa Set, created by Guy Adami (C’23), Bryce Kelety (F’21), Jennifer Loo (F‘21), Allegra Lubar (C’23), and Hannah Miller (C’23). This team made extensive use of Maker Hub equipment to create a laser-cut spaceship interior, decorated with mixed media and soldered Adafruit lights programmed with Arduino circuit boards. The set was photographed and used in Ponderosa, a live theatre production streamed on YouTube during Mask & Bauble Dramatic Society's Donn B. Murphy One Acts Festival.

The Library congratulates all of the winners and is honored to highlight these excellent creative works along with the many other outstanding projects in the Library Showcase.