In June 2025 Susan Graham, Special Collections Librarian, and Lindsey Loeper, Reference and Instruction Archivist, worked with three amazing undergraduate students as part of UMBC’s Interdisciplinary CoLab: Finley Bandy ’26, history, Dagmawi Delelegne ’26 computer science, and Samantha Nguyen ’26, graphic design. This 4-week summer internship pairs groups of three students with UMBC faculty to tackle a research project. For our project we wanted to update our existing outreach videos, which we use to introduce classes and with new researchers to using Special Collections, with a key focus on peer-to-peer communication.
Throughout the month our student researchers learned about Special Collections, what questions and needs new researchers have, and thought about how these videos could help them. They also had three workshops with Kristen Anchor, professor of media and communication studies, to learn about the best practices of video production.
Finley, Dagmawi, and Samantha completed three videos as part of their Special Collections 101 series: What to Expect, Handling Materials, and Collection Highlights. They also left us with a supply of video footage of our collections and interviews with Library staff that we can use to make additional videos. Check out all three of their videos below!