Andrea Johnson, Young Adult Provider at the St. Louis Public Library, worked with the Pulitzer’s Community Projects Coordinator Emily Augsburger during the concordance workshops. She reflects on the partnership in the following.
On the morning of Tuesday, October 26, 2010 about thirty students from St. Elizabeth Academy visited their high school’s neighborhood public library, the Carpenter Branch Library. The students arrived armed with paper and red pencils engraved with the school’s name. Their goal: to find newspaper articles about their community using the print materials and online databases available in the library. These articles would be scanned and used to create concordances.
As an employee of the St. Louis Public Library, working with St. Elizabeth Academy and the Pulitzer Foundation on the stylus teen program was a unique way to partner with two community organizations. As a part of Teen Services, outreach to city middle and high schools is a significant part of my job. It is important to us to reach as many middle and high students as possible in order to inform them of the many resources and programs that are available to them for free at their public library. Working with St. Elizabeth Academy through the Pulitzer Foundation provided a great opportunity for the students to not only learn about the library’s resources, but to actually get into the library and use them for themselves.
Before students visited the Carpenter Branch Library, if they did not already have a library card, they were given an application for one. Most of the students who turned in applications were able to get their library cards upon visiting the library. After the students arrived, Eliza Pope, the youth services librarian at the Carpenter Branch Library, and I split the students in two groups and explained to them the merits of using online databases. We then gave them a quick tutorial on how to use the newspaper database, Newsbank. The online databases provide a way to search a specific set of journal, newspaper, or other articles. Unlike Google and Wikipedia searches, all of the results from an online database search can be trusted. Once the students found newspaper articles that they wanted to use they were able to print them for free on the library’s reference computer printers. They were also able to make copies of articles from print newspapers.
Having been there for the pre-research discussion about the students’ community, the research process, and the post-research discussion and seeing the concordances and the final video that the students at St. Elizabeth Academy produced, I was excited to see the transformation that many of the students made throughout the process. In fact, it was fascinating to simply see the results for myself. Most of us who were involved in the process had preconceived notions either about the community itself, or about the way that the media would portray the community, and most of us were surprised to see that the negative results we anticipated were not nearly as frequent as the positive results that were revealed. This project certainly renewed many students’ interest in media, word choice, the popular perspective of their communities, and their sense of activism. I am elated that the St. Louis Public Library was able to be a part of and assist with such an interesting and refreshing community project.–Andrea Johnson