River Campus Libraries

What does curriculum design look like inside a library? 🤔 For Chase Hayden, it looks like gamified empathy training, AI learning activities, creative problem-solving workshops, and human-centered design—all in one summer.

Chase is Barbara J. Burger iZone's Summer Educational Program Intern—one of five undergraduates in our 100% philanthropy-funded summer internship program—and his project list this summer is remarkably broad. He's building empathy-development games for pre-medical students, designing creative problem-solving workshops for pre-college students, developing open educational AI learning activities for the Writing, Speaking & Argument Program, and creating a human-centered design workshop for engineering students.

The thread connecting every project is a single question: how do you create learning experiences that genuinely engage students rather than just deliver content? Chase has spent the summer developing a rigorous answer—and discovering that AI is impossible to ignore in that work.

"With the increasing availability and usage of AI, it is almost guaranteed that it will be used in some capacity by students taking courses or workshops," he says, "and it is important to ensure students are still reaching the goals of the learning opportunity."

The skill he's taking away? Systems thinking. "With my new learning from iZone on system and design thinking I feel more confident in my ability to clarify the root of an issue, ideate and develop solutions, and implement said solutions, especially in a team setting."

Chase's longer-term goal is graduate school in neurology or biomedical engineering, where he plans to keep doing exactly what he's doing this summer: "being a mentor that can both create and facilitate opportunities for growth, while still growing myself." 💙💛

Jane Randrianarisoa initially thought user experience design was about making things look better. Her internship at River Campus Libraries taught her otherwise. 😍

Jane is the UX Design Intern this summer at Edward G. Miner Library—one of five undergraduates in Libraries' 100% philanthropy-funded internship program—and her project is deceptively consequential: redesigning the History of Medicine website at the Edward G. Miner Library. 🩺 The site serves an unusually broad and high-stakes community: undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, clinicians, historians, and external researchers from institutions across the country who depend on these collections for their work. If they can't find what they need, the knowledge might as well not exist.

Jane's job is to make sure it does. 💛💙

Her process has been rigorous—evaluating the existing site, reviewing UX literature, conducting user surveys and interviews, and learning tools like Figma, Qualtrics, and UX Metrics along the way. But the most significant shift has been conceptual.

"One thing that surprised me is how much UX design is rooted in empathy," she says. "Good design isn't about making something look better—it's about understanding people's needs and creating an experience that genuinely works for them. I realized that UX is about empathy, not aesthetics." 😯

What makes the library context distinct, Jane argues, is the weight of the mission itself. "Libraries are not just content providers, they are stewards of knowledge, and their mission is to preserve, organize, and make information accessible over time. That means design decisions are not only about usability, but also about how information is structured, represented, and discovered within a larger archival system."

That's a sophisticated understanding of information architecture—and she developed it in ten weeks, as an undergraduate intern. 👏

My Nguyen came into her summer internship at River Campus Libraries expecting to clean spreadsheets. She didn't expect to spend the summer thinking about ethics. 🤔

My is the libraries' Data Services Collections Intern this summer—one of five undergraduate students in our 100% philanthropy-funded summer internship program. Her work centers on a deceptively simple idea: data is only powerful if people can actually use it. Across three concurrent projects, she's building the infrastructure that connects researchers, students, and the public to information they might otherwise never find. 📊👀

One of those projects involves digitizing and publishing Special Collections datasets—including the Monroe County Penitentiary intake cards and the Atwater Patent Medicine Trade Cards—so that anyone, anywhere, can access them without traveling to Rochester. That's where the ethics came in.

"When I publish something like the Monroe County Penitentiary intake cards— records of real people over a century ago—I have to make real decisions," My says. "How should I present this responsibly? Does it need a content warning? Who gets credited, and how? I thought I'd be cleaning spreadsheets. I didn't expect to be making judgments about how to handle history with care."

She's also building a database evaluation rubric so students and researchers know where to go for reliable data instead of guessing, and auditing the libraries' discovery system to surface valuable datasets that aren't easily findable—what she calls "hidden gems." 💎

What does a library context add that a corporate data role wouldn't? My puts it simply: "At a company, data work usually serves internal goals. In a library, the goal is access."

That's a distinction worth sitting with—and exactly why this work matters. 👏

On America's 250th anniversary, we're sharing something from our own collection—and thinking about how this country has chosen to narrate itself.

Carl William Peters was born in Rochester in 1897, and his papers and sketchbooks are preserved here within Special Collections at the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries. During the New Deal era (1933–1938), Carl was employed by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Arts Project to paint large-scale public murals. He completed 14 of them, most right here in Rochester. 🎨

His most ambitious work was an eight-mural series titled "The History of the Lake Ontario Region" (1939-1942), which you can see at a much smaller scale in this carousel of images. 📲

Watch how the story the murals tell unfolds: it opens with "Algonquin Fishermen" and "Seneca-Iroquois"—Indigenous peoples depicted in untouched nature. It moves through the arrival of French explorers, missionaries, and settlers. It ends with murals called "The 19th Century" and "Triumph of the American Ideal"—industry, steam engines, and the march of American progress.

The WPA actively encouraged artists to portray "local history narratives" and provided research material to facilitate them. The story Peters painted wasn't incidental—it was the story the New Deal government wanted told: white settlers as heroes, westward expansion as progress, industrialization as triumph.

What the series doesn't show—the violent displacement of Indigenous nations, including the Haudenosaunee peoples who had inhabited the Lake Ontario region for centuries before European contact—is as historically significant as what it does.

250 years is a meaningful moment to look honestly at the stories America has told about itself, and the ones it has chosen to leave out. Libraries hold these collections precisely because engaging with difficult history—not sanitizing it, not canceling it, but examining it with clear eyes is part of what it means to understand where we are and how we got here. 🇺🇸

The Carl W. Peters digital exhibit is available online 👉https://rbscpexhibits.lib.rochester.edu/exhibits/show/cpeters

Images: Marten, Jessica. Art for the People : Carl W. Peters and the Rochester WPA Murals. Rochester, New York: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 2015.

The Phyisics-Optics-Astronomy Library is becoming a fully self-service space on July 1. 📚 We know this space means a great deal to the people who study, research, and spend their time here, so we want to be clear about what’s changing, what isn’t, and how we’ll keep showing up for you.

The heart of it: the space, its hours, the collection, and how you get in all stay the same. The main change is that the desk will no longer be staffed, and a new self-checkout station will let you borrow materials on your own.

Why the change? Like all units in the University’s academic services division, the Libraries were asked to reduce our budget this fiscal year. At POA, we chose the path that keeps the space, its hours, and its collection open and available—using self-checkout to preserve access rather than cut hours or close the space.

Your subject librarians are still your research partners, available by appointment, by email, and during weekly on-site office hours right in POA. Course reserves for physics, optics, and astronomy stay exactly where they are now.

Swipe through for the quick guide, and find every detail in our full FAQ 👉https://bit.ly/POA_FAQ

We know you’ll have questions—and we want to hear them. Leave a comment or email us at [email protected], and we’ll help however we can. 💙💛

Evans Lam Square. The Barbara J. Burger iZone. Studio X. If you've ever studied, built, or dreamed something up in one of these spaces, you've experienced the vision of Mary Ann Mavrinac. 🤩✨

We're delighted to congratulate our Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean Emeritus on receiving the 2026 FIMS Alumni Award of Excellence from FIMS - Faculty of Information & Media Studies at Western University— the school where her career in librarianship began more than four decades ago. 👏

Across her leadership of River Campus Libraries through 2022, and in roles spanning the University of Toronto Mississauga, Western, and the highest levels of national library leadership, Mary Ann reimagined what a library could be: not only a place to find answers, but a place to gather, create, and discover together. 💭

Chosen from a competitive field by a committee of FIMS students, faculty, staff, and alumni, she'll return to where it all started to accept the honor at Western's Homecoming this September. 💜

Congratulations, Mary Ann — a recognition this rich is so well deserved. 🙌
Read the full story from FIMS 👉 https://www.fims.uwo.ca/news/2026/mary_ann_mavrinac_named_winner_of_the_2026_fims_alumni_award_of_excellence.html

⚠️ Carlson Library will be closed from June 17 through July 6, 2026, while crews update the building's fire alarm system—an important safety improvement for everyone who uses the space.

The collection stays within reach throughout the closure. Materials from Carlson can be requested online via DiscoverUR (www.library.rochester.edu) and picked up at the Q&i Desk in Rush Rhees Library.

Thank you for your patience as we make these updates. 💙💛 We look forward to welcoming you back to Carlson in early July.

Every family has a story. We'd love to help you start uncovering yours. 📖

Join River Campus Libraries for Getting Started in Genealogy, a welcoming, hands-on introduction to family history research.

Whether you're chasing a long-told family legend or simply curious about where you come from, you'll leave with the tools to begin: how to ask the right research questions, how to work with pedigree charts and family group sheets, and how to build a strong foundation for the journey ahead.

Fittingly, we'll gather in Special Collections at the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries— a place devoted to keeping history's records safe and within reach. And no experience is needed: whether you're brand new to genealogy or dusting off rusty research skills, there's a seat for you.

🗓️ Wednesday, June 17 · 12:00–1:00 PM
📍 Rush Rhees Library, Rare Books, Special Collections & Preservation (Room 216)
🎟️ Free and open to all

Reserve your spot👉

University of Rochester Genealogy: Getting Started in Genealogy Begin your genealogy journey by learning the essential foundations of family history/genealogy research. Participants will explore how to ask effective research questions, use pedigree charts and family group sheets, and build a strong starting point for discovering their family story. This interact...

This past Thursday, a group of eight River Campus Libraries staff members traded their desks for garden gloves and joined the United Way of Greater Rochester and the Finger Lakes's annual Day of Caring. 🌿💪🪏

We partnered with the Swillburg Neighborhood to clean up Otto Henderburg Park and the Labyrinth Garden — weeding, pruning, raking, picking up trash, and getting the spaces ready for the community to enjoy. ☺️

A huge thank you to everyone who participated, and especially to Katie Papas, who organizes this effort every year and makes sure our libraries show up for our broader Rochester community. 💙💛

Here's to clean parks, good neighbors, and muddy shoes for a good cause.👏