Buchanan Library Fellows program now accepting applications

The Buchanan Library Fellows program supports hands-on student learning opportunities that build desirable skills and deepen students’ understanding of resources and services in the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries. With a focus on undergraduate instruction, the program connects faculty and professional librarians with students to work on experiential library projects and present their work at the end of their fellowship.

Fellows learn new skills, earn a stipend of $1,000, and participate in experiences that add to their expertise and résumés. Projects may involve curating a physical or online exhibition; creating multimedia content, such as podcasts or videos; contributing new research via academic outputs (e.g. research posters, academic databases or writing an article); or expanding technology and data skills. Through the Buchanan Library Fellows program, the Vanderbilt libraries promote student research and experiential learning. Since 2010, the program has awarded fellowships to more than 250 students.

Program Outcomes

Build a résumé with a completed innovative project
Engage in inquiry-based and experiential learning related to a variety of topics in libraries and information science
Evaluate information from diverse perspectives in order to shape your own knowledge base
Work with leading experts in the library field
Demonstrate persistence, adaptability and reflection as components of inquiry
Contribute to scholarly conversations by becoming a creator or critic
Synthesize and communicate information to a wider audience
Build lasting relationships with information professionals

Application Instructions

To be considered for a Buchanan Library Fellow position, candidates must be undergraduate students enrolled at Vanderbilt University in good academic standing. Required documents include:

Completed application form including statement of interest
Curriculum vitae including name, address, email and telephone

Previously selected Buchanan Fellows may not reapply for a new project.

Applications for fall 2024 are due Aug. 25. Students will receive a formal notice of their status by Aug. 29.

Fall 2024 Fellowships

Building a University: Vanderbilt’s Fifth Decade, 1915-1925

Have you ever wondered about the early years of Vanderbilt University? This project uses primary sources to explore the history of the university’s fifth decade from 1915 to 1925. During this decade, Vanderbilt and the United States reacted to the Great War, now known as World War I, and its aftermath. After the war, Vanderbilt expanded and entered the “Roaring Twenties” in typical Vandy fashion. Fellows will examine historically significant university manuscripts and documents in the Special Collections and University Archives and place them in context with the university’s and the nation’s history. At the end of this project, fellows will blend curatorial practice and the history of the university into an exhibition held on campus.

Fellows will receive a stipend and learn how to think critically about primary sources while building an exhibit. The course meets on Wednesdays from 3 to 5 p.m. This fellowship requires a five- to eight-hour weekly commitment including class meetings and research in the Special Collections. Schedule time to meet with an archivist to maximize your time with the materials. You’ll be able to ask questions about the objects you have selected, learn how to interpret the objects, discuss research materials available, and plan your exhibit.

Mentors: Faith McConnon, Kathy Smith, Jacqueline Devereaux

Connecting the Dots: Exploring Special Collections through Network Analysis

This project aims to bring the Photographs of Jazz Musicians collection to life using network analysis to visualize relationships within the jazz community. Traditional narrative methods often struggle to capture these connections, making network analysis especially relevant. The project will involve fellows gathering and handling data related to the collection, focusing on the relationships between the musicians depicted in the photographs. Using network analysis tools, fellows will map these relationships, collectively building a network. For individual projects, each fellow will focus on a specific aspect of the network to draw insights about its structure and organization. Ultimately, the resulting network will serve as a visual demonstration of the collaborative nature of jazz and highlight the value of network analysis in archival research, offering a more engaging and insightful way to interact with the material. This project offers an exciting chance for undergraduate students to engage with cutting-edge data analysis and visualization techniques and contribute to a unique archival research project. Fellows also will develop valuable skills in project management, collaborative work and public presentations.

Mentors: Julia Khait, Shenmeng Xu

Defining the DCC: Disability Culture, Student Activism and Community Archiving

Disability Cultural Centers (DCCs), much like other identity-based student centers on college campuses, “aim to develop pride in disability identity and share disability culture with the rest of the campus community” (Elmore et al., 2018). These centers emphasize disability as a sociopolitical identity that intersects with and is informed by race, class, gender, sexuality, age and size. This framing of disability contends with issues of power and systemic oppression in meaningful ways, and it provides disabled students with the opportunity to connect with one another to celebrate disability culture and be in community with one another. This fellowship provides the opportunity to capture these student movements through conducting oral history interviews, collecting and digitizing artifacts from DCC-affiliated student organizers and staff across the U.S., and learning to do digital access work such as writing alt-text and making accessible documents. This work will culminate in the creation of an open-access community archive of Disability Cultural Centers.

Mentor: Cazembe Kennedy

Democratizing Access to Image Processing with User-Friendly Digital Technology

This fellowship focuses on the continued development of an existing web application, an easy-to-use interface for creating image processing pipelines in multidisciplinary settings. From cell quantification in biology labs to satellite-based crop analysis in agriculture to quality control on manufacturing lines, automated image processing is a key analysis method in numerous fields. However, the creation of these task-specific tools is limited to skilled professionals who also have to invest significant time in coding and optimizing them. The potential impact of this project is significant. By democratizing access to image-processing tools for diverse applications, we aim to create more data-rich environments and facilitate empirical decision making in many disciplines. This project advances digital scholarship and innovation not only by expanding access to impactful technologies through a digital tool but also by allowing methods developed by this tool to be easily shared with other collaborators.

Students in this fellowship will engage in the development of a simple-to-use web application that unlocks the capabilities of image processing for untrained and trained users alike. Equipped with a drag-and-drop interface, users will be able to build custom pipelines designed to process large batches of images, automatically determine results from them, and record outcomes for further analysis. We aim for this technology to have a broad range of use cases, providing fellows with a truly interdisciplinary experience as they work with our current collaborators at Vanderbilt and other institutions both domestic and abroad. Mentorship from the library’s Digital Lab will help students grow in their ability to create user-centered tools for an array of use cases. In addition to building skills in usability, fellows will have the opportunity to learn and apply a variety of digital technologies. These include React/JavaScript for creating web interfaces, Python for incorporating underlying image processing functions, GraphQL/NoSQL for integrating the interface with a database for storing and retrieving results, and AWS for cloud-based hosting and deployment.

Mentors: Thomas Scherr, Cazembe Kennedy

On Tour with Dizzy: A Mapping Journey through the John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie Middle East Tour Scrapbooks

The Heard Libraries acquired the John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie collection through the NMAAM-Vanderbilt University Collections initiative. Dizzy Gillespie was a renowned jazz trumpeter, composer and bandleader. The collection contains materials including photographs, address books, letters, posters, audiovisual materials, correspondence and a collection of several scrapbooks from his Middle East Tour. The fellowship will continue a mapping project of the Middle East Tour scrapbooks using ArcGIS StoryMaps, historic maps, primary source material and other source material to visually communicate the historical context in America surrounding this tour, the musicians and tour life, and Gillespie’s contribution as a bandleader. Fellows in this program will review the past project and work on the various mapping, historical and bibliographic components to design a cohesive, interactive StoryMap engaging jazz students, researchers and jazz advocates and educators with the special collection and other source material. Participants in the fellowship will present the StoryMap, demonstrate uses for students and researchers, and program a jazz ensemble performance inspired by the archives that interweaves the musical performance of tunes from the tour while moving through the StoryMap (non-performers can opt to contribute in alternative ways). This fellowship will require a three- to five-hour commitment of time per week and an agreement to attend weekly meetings.

Mentors: Kate Linton, Stacy Curry Johnson

The Special Collections Laboratory: Turning Primary Sources into Poetry

The materials held by Vanderbilt’s Special Collections and University Archives cover a variety of subjects and would span nearly five miles if laid out end to end. In this fellowship, students will develop their research skills by directly interacting with selections of these primary source materials, including diaries, letters, photographs, oral histories and artifacts. Fellows will keep a diary of their experience and learn skills such as how to approach different formats of recorded information, how to find primary sources, how to read a collection finding aid, and how to decipher difficult handwriting. As the fellowship unfolds, students will use their imaginations to enter into the experiences of the people who created the primary source materials. Fellows will complete a portfolio of poems inspired by their research and will have the opportunity to showcase items from the collections and read their accompanying poems at an end-of-term public poetry reading. This event will reach a new audience and increase visibility of the library’s collections.

Mentor: Mary McSparran

The Tortured Poets Department (Vanderbilt’s Version)

Nashville’s own tortured poet, Taylor Swift, has released 11 original studio albums. Vanderbilt University has more than 1,100 manuscript collections. Swift’s lyrics are often inspired by her own life while the archives are full of personal histories. Buchanan Library Fellows will find the commonalities of the human experience between Swift’s songs and primary sources to create a virtual multimedia exhibit with materials from the Vanderbilt Special Collections library. Along the way, fellows will learn about primary source preservation, description, research and exhibit curation and design.

Mentors: Sarah Calise, Mary McSparran

Transparency for the Art Museum Collection: Qualifying and Quantitative Approaches

The Vanderbilt Museum of Art is nearing the conclusion of a yearslong inventory of its 12,000-object collection. As the collection becomes searchable this fall with a new public database, we seek a Buchanan Fellow to help us better understand what the museum owns and how to make our collection transparent to Vanderbilt and our larger audience in Nashville and beyond. Using statistical analysis and data visualization, you’ll help us examine how our collection is composed and identify opportunities for its future. Together, we’ll think through how to present this information, what quantitative analysis can (and can’t) tell us about our museum, and how the grammar we use to describe artworks can limit this work. Participants can expect both collaborative and independent work that we’ll map out together early in the fellowship. Students of all majors and interests willing to both crunch numbers and talk about art are welcome.

Mentor: Rachel Kreiter

Urban Forestry GIS: The Edgehill Arboretum

Edgehill is one of Nashville’s most historic and rapidly changing neighborhoods. Over the last five years, the neighborhood grassroots nonprofit Friends of the William Edmondson Homesite Park & Gardens has planted trees in the seven-acre greenspace, establishing a Level 1 arboretum certified by the Tennessee Urban Forestry Council. As an all-volunteer, small, grassroots nonprofit, their capacity is minimal. The organization has requested assistance to help take the arboretum status to a Level 2 certification. These requirements include providing a robust, easy-to-maintain and user-friendly public-facing online database, GIS mapping and education platform to engage the community on this precious urban greenspace and historic site. This is a great opportunity to use GIS technologies, assist in neighborhood preservation, and work with a nonprofit to achieve Level 2 certification status for an urban arboretum. This fellowship includes:

Validating an existing static tree map and creating a dynamic, database-driven map with links to information on each tree and species
Geolocating all trees on site and keying to the existing species list
Building out brief narrative descriptions with photos of each tree as well as fun factoids
Hosting this resource on Vanderbilt’s ArcGIS license, embeddable on the nonprofit’s website and accessible through QR codes
Suggesting or developing additional educational resources

Mentors: Stacy Curry Johnson, Alyssa Sklar