April 2025

Each spring, six Swarthmore students participate in a paid, semester-long internship exploring careers in library and information science through seminar-style meetings with a variety of librarians and field trips to local libraries. We also examine social justice issues through the lens of the American Libraries Association’s Core Values. 

This semester, we’ve met librarians whose work focuses on research and instruction, outreach, digital scholarship, digital archives, and more. We’ve visited the archivists in Swarthmore’s Special Collections and plan to visit the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University. We’ve worked with the Prison Libraries Support Network to answer reference questions from incarcerated individuals. And we welcomed book artist Alice Austin to learn about the history of tunnel books and create our own. 

The Library Internship takes place every spring; keep an eye on JobX in late fall 2025 for next year’s application. We are currently taking applications for a similar week-long program, Careers in Library and Information Science (CILIS), which will be held Tuesday, May 27 through Friday, May 30, 2025 at Bryn Mawr College.  

Exhibition and Reception: Generative Clothing Designs 

This project brings together artists and programmers to create algorithmically generated clothing designs through a user-friendly online platform called AlgoArt. The exhibition tells the story of the Generative Clothing Designs project, which includes the Swarthmore students, alumni, and external collaborators who helped make this possible. Over 50 artworks, including shirts, hats, bags, and other accessories, will be on display. The opening reception will feature alumni guest speakers EK Brickner '22 and Xingyu (Kevin) Dong '24. Sponsored by the Aydelotte Foundation, the Center for Leadership and Innovation, and Swarthmore College Libraries.

Reception: Thursday, April 3, 5:30–7:30 p.m., McCabe Library LibLab (1st floor)

Exhibition: Tuesday, April 1–Sunday, June 8, McCabe Library Atrium (1st floor)

Kafka Café

The coffeehouses of Central Europe have a storied past. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, these spaces straddled the public and private, and were the site of public debate and literary inspiration. Plus coffee. In collaboration with the German Studies Section, the Libraries present an evening of strong coffee, sweet pastries, and legendary literary culture.

Monday, April 14, 4:30–6 p.m.
McCabe Library LibLab (1st floor)

Exhibition and Reception: Newton Book Collecting Prize 

Join us to celebrate the winners of the 2025 Newton Book Collecting Prize! The winning collections will be on display and we will hear remarks from these extraordinary student bibliophiles. Light refreshments will be served.

Reception: Wednesday, April 23, 5–6:30 p.m., McCabe Library Cratsley Lounge (2nd floor)

Exhibition: Wednesday, April 16–Sunday, June 1, McCabe Library Cratsley Lounge (2nd floor)

Pop-up Exhibition and Reception: Histories of Modern Craft

Join us for the closing event for the course Histories of Modern Craft with Assistant Professor of Art History Paloma Checa-Gismero, featuring objects produced by the students, embroiderer Tania Lucas, and COGNATE. This event is open to the public. Tamales will be served.

Reception: Wednesday, April 30,
4–5:30 p.m. McCabe Library LibLab 

Pop-up Exhibition: Wednesday, April 30–Sunday, June 1, McCabe Library LibLab Hallway (1st floor)

Do we control technology, or is technology controlling us? In Amanda Licastro's course "Virtual Bodies, Virtual Worlds," students engage with sci-fi literature and films that investigate our surveillance culture while exploring Swarthmore College Libraries resources. Students enrolled in this full-credit English Literature course get hands-on experience with cutting-edge technology in the Makerspace, interact with Special Collections at Swarthmore Libraries, and meet industry professionals who are shaping the future of immersive realities. Licastro, who is the Libraries' head of digital scholarship initiatives, says that students' final projects will be to design their own virtual reality and artificial reality applications that tackle important issues like gender representation, racial disparity, and climate change using the 15 Meta Quest headsets provided by the Libraries' digital scholarship team.

“Professor Licastro's course has fundamentally transformed my understanding of surveillance and virtual reality technologies in our contemporary world,” says Olivia Medeiros-Sakimoto ’25, who is majoring in Ethics through Film, Design, and Human-Computer Interaction. “Today, we routinely sacrifice privacy for convenience, blurring the line between fictional dystopias and our present reality. Through the work of scholars such as Safiya Noble (UCLA) and Sasha Costanza-Chock (Northeastern University), I've gained insight into both critical and hopeful perspectives on technology, developing a stronger, more nuanced vocabulary to articulate my own enthusiasm and unease for the future.” 

The pop-up exhibition “A Statement on Surveillance,” on display on the first floor of McCabe Library through Monday, April 28, was inspired by a session led by Special Collections archivists who guided Licastro’s students through varied and provocative examples of protest art from the robust collections housed at Swarthmore College Libraries. The course also got a shout in a recent issue of The Phoenix. Want to know more about how library experts can help you integrate emerging technologies into your academic work? Contact digitalscholarship@swarthmore.edu.

Rebecca Michelson-Ziegler (she/her/hers) is the electronic resources specialist at Swarthmore Libraries. She is from Los Angeles but is now a happy Philly resident with her wife, two cats, and pet snake. When she's not at work, she spends her time learning Italian, playing the banjo, and watching a lot of movies. Her favorite dinosaur is the stegosaurus.

What are you reading these days? The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio and Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, both in the original Italian.

Describe your favorite place to read on campus. At the tables just outside McCabe Library or on a bench under the magnolias.

Is there a book you've read multiple times? The Devil Wears Prada on many a road trip when I was in high school and more recently the Teresa Battaglia detective series by Ilaria Tuti.

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