iCommons celebrates hidden figures of STEM
We all loved Hidden Figures here at the iCommons, and so we decided to put together a themed display. Except for information freedom, there’s nothing librarians love more than a themed display, so this will be the first of many.
The Clark library system has about 67,000 books, which sounds like a lot until you have an idea like “Women of NASA.” It turned out that we have only four books on women at NASA, and one of them is the one Hidden Figures is based on; since that’s a brand-new book, it had to stay at Cannell. So we broadened the idea to “Women in Science, Math, and Engineering.”
In the process, we recognized some hidden figures of our own: the library had relatively little material on women of color in science. So we bought a general history (Black Women Scientists in the United States by Wini Warren) and a book of contemporary interviews (Sisters in Science by Diann Jordan), which will be added to the collection over the next few months.
The library may look static, but it’s in a continuous state of renewal. For every outdated engineering text that we remove, we buy a new book carefully selected by the staff for its quality, its relevance to the curriculum, and other considerations. As the Clark reference intern, these two books were my first purchase, but the reference librarians have years of experience with book buying. They make sure that the library stays in step with our school, our city, and our society. Our collection may never be huge, but it’ll always be just right for our needs (supplemented, of course, by ebooks and databases!).
We also included a “Summit Spotlight” in the display to highlight books that aren’t at Clark, but are only a click away. Sign in to the Cannell system with your computer lab login and you’ll have access to the Summit library system, which lets you order books from libraries all over Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. If you liked Hidden Figures, for example, you might want to read Martha Ackerman’s The Mercury 13 or Stephanie Nolen’s Promised the Moon, both about the female 1960s aviators who underwent the same testing as the male astronauts, trying to prove their worth to a NASA that wasn’t ready to listen. (Cannell does have one book on the Mercury 13, Margaret A. Weitekamp’s Right Stuff, Wrong Sex.) There’s also Lynn Sherr’s biography of Sally Ride, or Mae Jemison’s autobiography, Find Where the Wind Goes.
We hope you enjoy the capsule collection here at Clark’s satellite campus. (All puns are intended, always.)
