Each summer brings to LIL a new cohort of Summer Fellows to inspire and challenge us with their visions of what libraries make possible.

Over the past two summers, we’ve learned with and from these colleagues about building online collections of local news stories (Alexander Nwala), connecting citizens of Nigeria with information about human rights law (Jake Effoduh), exploring the Guantanamo Detainee Library (Muira McCammon), creating high fidelity web archives (Ilya Kreymer), imagining Palestine-Israel through maps (Zena Agha) and many other things (more about our previous cohorts here, here and here).

Next month, we’ll welcome eight new Summer Fellows to LIL:

  • Hannah Brinkmann - Hannah is a comic artist and student at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, Germany. She’ll be connecting with our Nuremberg Trials Project and our Library’s foreign collections to develop a graphic novel about “conscience trials” in Germany.

  • Alexandra Dolan-Mescal - Alexandra is a UX designer focused on ethics in design and research. She’ll be developing a social media data label system inspired by the Traditional Knowledge Labels project.

  • Tessa Walsh - Tessa is a digital archivist and programmer. She’ll be working on tools to help librarians and archivists manage sensitive personal information in digital archives.

  • Carrie Bly - Carrie is an architect studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She’ll be exploring connections and contrasts between library and garden classification systems.

  • Shira Feldman - Shira is an artist and writer. This summer she will be exploring the intersection of internet and art, and what it means to live in a networked, digital culture.

  • Kendra Greene - Kendra is a writer and researcher from Dallas. She’ll be working on a book about dangerous library collections.

  • Evelin Heidel - Evelin (aka scann) is a teacher and open knowledge advocate from Argentina with deep experience in DIY digitization. She’ll be developing learning resources to help small libraries, community archives, underrepresented groups and others build their own digital collections.

  • Franny Corry - Franny is a digital history researcher studying at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She’ll be working this summer on combining personal narrative with web archives to collect social histories of the web.

We invited these eight explorers to join us after reviewing over 120 applications and conducting roughly 60 interviews, including multiple interviews with all of the finalists. This year’s applicant pool amazed and challenged us, and we are so grateful to everyone who applied and who helped spread the word about the opportunity. Thank you!