Iron & Glass

Themes by Jasmine McGreen: A Student-Driven Book Display at the PMC Library

Hello! My name is Ellery, a 3rd semester MSLIS student at Pratt Manhattan Campus (PMC). You may have seen summer emails from me about a Student Driven Book Display. Thank you to everyone who submitted ideas! The results are in:

Congratulations, Jasmine McGreen! Jasmine is in the MSLIS program with a concentration in archives and special collections. Jasmine plans to “work in a museum or archive in fashion or costume conservation and preservation” upon her graduation in May 2025 (J. McGreen, personal communication, September 30, 2024). 

Jasmine submitted interesting and unique themes! I enjoyed finding resources to best showcase as many of her ideas as possible. The display–“Themes by Jasmine McGreen: A Student Driven Book Display Collaboration with PMC Library”– based on Jasmine’s submission ran throughout September and featured resources on Spies and Fashion, Child Heroes, Books (and More) With a Surprise Secret World, and Books Where Blue is Important. If you didn’t get a chance to see the display, I encourage you to check out the online display at the end of this post. 

The Background

How did this project come about? Over the summer, I was a Reference and Collection Development GA at the PMC library. One of my responsibilities was to create engaging book displays featuring the library’s resources for patrons. Part of making displays, I’ve learned, is asking questions about what topics your community would like to explore. After curating a few displays, I was increasingly curious about what PMC students are interested in and thought the best way to find out was to ask current students. I was exhilarated to think about developing more community connections and to bring student’s ideas into the library! 

Once my supervisor, Access Services Manager Harsh Taggar, approved my idea of a student-driven book display, I got to work. After sending out a Google form to current PMC students and collecting their ideas in a secure Google sheet, I used a random number generator to select the winning submission. As promised in my initial email from the summer, topics not selected will have another opportunity to be made into a display. I will randomly select another topic from previously submitted ideas for the next collaboration. 

Selection Criteria 

After securing Jasmine’s themes, it was time to curate resources! And this meant developing  selection criteria:the general goals, constraints, and other criteria used to choose materials befitting Jasmine’s ideas. (If you’d like to know more about selection criteria, the American Library Association has a great article: “Selection Criteria”). 

My first criteria may seem obvious, but is important: find resources to best illustrate Jasmine’s themes, which requires that I determine which themes PMC Library’s holding could best support. This process involved interpreting each of Jasmine’s themes in a multitude of ways while searching PMC library’s catalog. When thinking about the resources for Child Heroes, for instance, I thought about what that theme meant to me and others, how different resource types would showcase the theme, and what keywords may get me to those resources based on my prior reflections.  The four themes I curated resources for were the most initially promising in terms of PMC holdings: Spies and Fashion, Child Heroes, Books Where Blue is Important, and Books (and more) with a Surprise World.

I also thought about resource types. My initial thought was a mix of print books and eBooks. But, I had forgotten about DVDs! PMC has a collection of DVDs available to check out, and I thought some of the movies must fit into Jasmine’s ideas for the book display. 

As mentioned above, I thought about the themes’ different interpretations, but I later expanded that inquiry to think about the different reasons a patron would want to check out a book within each theme. What different uses could each theme fulfill for patrons? For instance, Library and Information Science students may be interested in learning how to do reader’s advisory for each theme, which would require books with background knowledge on a subject, genre, and/or titles of fiction and non-fiction books. Design and fashion students may be more interested in the history of fashion or the uses of color for a project. Or maybe patrons want to have a break from research and studying, requiring fun titles to be included in the display. In other words, who are my patrons and what are the different reasons they might check out a resource? Asking this question led me to my last selection criteria of having a blend of fictional and non-fictional resources that could be used for multiple purposes.

In sum, my selection criteria were: 

• Find resources that represent Jasmine’s ideas to the best of my ability 
• Showcase themes that aligned with PMC Library’s holdings; non-digital resources must be in PMC Library’s holdings
• Utilize multiple types of resources and don’t forget DVDs
• Find resources, both fiction and non-fiction, that can be used for multiple purposes to fulfill a patron’s potential needs and wants

Finding Resources and Trouble-Shooting Searches

Now, onto the fun, but slightly trickier part: finding and selecting titles based on the selection criteria that are in PMC library’s holdings. 

To begin, I started at the library website’s homepage, library.pratt.edu. To ensure I found items at PMC library, I filtered by location on the library’s website after I entered a search term into the search bar. Filtering by location can be done two ways. One method is to use the basic search bar on the library’s homepage. First, enter a keyword into the search bar, then click the magnifying glass or press “enter” on your keyboard. 

 After the results load, scroll down until you see a filter on the left of the page called “Library Location.”

This filter will show Pratt Library locations that have resources for your search term(s); not all of the library locations will be listed. You may need to try different keywords until you see the library location you want (ex: Manhattan Center Stacks). Selecting one or more of the locations allows you to see the holdings at that library location(s) that align with your search terms. 

Another way to filter by library location also begins on the library website’s homepage. Click on “Advanced Search.” One of the advanced search  filters is “Location.” Selecting one of the listed locations will tailor search results to that specific collection.

But, back to how I navigated the research process. My first strategy of using the themes’ titles as search terms didn’t yield enough results. For instance, I used Boolean searching using phrases like “spies AND fashion,” “spy’s fashion,” “fashion of spies”  in different basic searches, but I didn’t get what I was looking for. So I stepped back. For each theme, I asked: What results do I expect  to see based on my search words and phrases? How can I amend my search terms to better match my intended results? 

Let’s continue with the Spies and Fashion example. I expected to see resources  about different clothes, costumes, or disguises of covert agents. I also thought I’d see resources on the history of these things or a book of how a spy did something really cool with their wardrobe. But databases don’t think like humans and the metadata driving searchability and discovery doesn’t always match how individuals describe subjects. We need to be creative and remember searching is iterative. 

I tried again by brainstorming different ways of thinking about “Spies and Fashion.” I drafted different search terms: “costume(s),” “CIA,” “disguise(s),” “fashion,” “history,” “history of,” or “clothing,” “covert agent.” By doing an advanced search for “CIA AND disguise,” I found the magazine article, “She Was the CIA's Chief of Disguise: A Master Spy Unmasked” by Dawn Klavon. Being flexible, creative, and thinking about what I expected to find and what search terms I needed to get there helped identify more resources about fashion and spies- a searching tip applicable to most, if not all, research. 

Sometimes, we need to leave the online catalog when researching. If I’m unfamiliar with a topic, I’ll do some Googling. When looking for resources that featured child heroes, I Googled the phrase “books where kids save the day” and found Goodreads book lists that invoked new interpretations of Jasmine’s theme and gave me keywords to try. By broadening my understanding of the topic, I was able to search Pratt’s catalog with more confidence and more refined keywords.

In sum, I used the following search/troubleshooting strategies to navigate finding resources that matched Jasmine’s themes: 

• Ask what you want/expect to find; Why do or why don’t your search results match those expectations? 

• Brainstorm keywords 

• Try different combinations of phrases and see which produces the most results

• Utilize the database filters (ex: “Library Location” or “eBooks only”)

• Google a subject to gain familiarity

• Broaden your scope/ interpretations of a subject

• Be flexible, creative, and persistent 

Here’s the list of resources I found for each subject by applying the above search strategies, a virtual book display if you will:

• Women’s Lives and Clothes in WW2: Ready For Action

• Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy : The Story of Kawashima Yoshiko, the Cross-Dressing Spy Who Commanded Her Own Army

• Fashion's World Cities 

• Fair Game : My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House

• She Was the CIA's Chief of Disguise: A Master Spy Unmasked

• 20,000 Years of Fashion; The History of Costume and Personal Adornment

• Fashion Today

• The Lion King

• Persepolis

• Supernatural Youth: The Rise of the Teen Hero in Literature and Popular Culture

• Perpetual Adolescence: Jungian Analysis of American Media, Literature, and Pop Culture

• The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-time Indian

• Jellicoe Road

• On a Sunbeam

• The Prince and the Dressmaker

• The Elephant Vanishes

• Zita the Spacegirl

• Black Panther

• Inception

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

• The Rime of the Modern Mariner

• Blue: The History of a Color

• The Cartographer of Water

• Dark Blue

Conclusion

Developing this Student Driven Book Display was a great exercise in community building and research strategy. I am excited that by collaborating with students, PMC library could showcase one of our community member’s ideas! As a current Reference GA, I learned more about the interests of PMC students which can inform future displays and had fun selecting resources based on Jasmine McGreen’s themes.  I hope this blog post is useful to readers, too, by offering search strategy and troubleshooting tips to guide us as we navigate search and discovery in our various school projects. Thank you to all who submitted ideas, and congratulations, Jasmine! 

I am excited for the next opportunity to collaborate with students. Please, keep an eye out for the next Student Driven Book Display!