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SkillShops & Makerspace Internships

Highlighting the great projects and workshops Cal Poly Humboldt Library interns have created!

Spring 2022

Anne standing in Old Town Eureka with a GoPro Max camera on a tripod sticking out of her backpack, above her head.

Anne Howard (MA in English, 2022) built a unique internship during the Spring 2022 semester that bridged working at the library with working in the community. The internship included time spent at the Cal Poly Humboldt Special Collections and Digital Media Lab as well as the Clarke Historical Museum, working in partnership with the Humboldt Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity (HAPI) and the Eureka Chinatown Project (ECP). 

Three projects were completed as a result of the bridging between these communities: a research guide for Eureka’s Historic Chinatown that includes digitized items from the ‘Chinese in Humboldt’ pamphlet file and an accompanying finding aid, a 360 virtual tour of the Clarke Historical Museum, and a 360 virtual tour of Eureka’s Historic Chinatown.

These projects helped to create a bridge from the past to the present, and produce more opportunities for the Humboldt community and beyond to learn about Eureka Chinatown. From digitized newspaper articles to a VR experience, the importance of sharing the historical contexts that shape our world today cannot be overlooked. Anne hopes that this project will support current and future students, researchers and activists. 

Anne was looking for a way to learn some new skills and connect with the community. Having no experience in Special Collections or Digital Media, the learning curve was steep. However, the result was greater than could’ve been imagined, and it has been a wonderful experience. With the skills learned in the Digital Media Lab, Anne even incorporated a 360 video into her thesis project.

Anne's thesis project research is on developing reading strategies by applying critical cartography methods and counter-mapping theories to literature and literary analysis. She credits this internship with the experience of listening, learning, and witnessing the strength of community collaboration. 

The research guide was compiled with the assistance of Archivist and Digital Publishing Specialist Sarah Godlin. Anne digitized over 50 items from the pamphlet file related to Eureka's Historic Chinatown and the Chinese residents of Humboldt County. She then organized them according to year, ranging from 1860 to 2017 (with a handful of undated items) and created a detailed finding aid with citations. 

 

Visit: Aiding Eureka Chinatown Research

 

 

The 360 virtual tour photos and video of the Clarke Historical Museum were created with the technology and support of the Digital Media Lab and Learning Librarian Tim Miller. The video tour included original music provided by Aaron Laughlin. It was shot with a GoPro 360 MAX camera and edited with Adobe Premiere Pro. The 360 photos of the Clarke reached thousands of views on Google Maps within weeks of posting! 

 

The 360 virtual tour of the Eureka Chinatown was produced with the help of Tim Miller and with the research and existing walking tour resources of Katie Buesch, the Clarke Historical Museum, HAPI and ECP. Guidance, supervision and support was provided by Vicki Ozaki, Sheri Woo and Brieanne Mirjah-D’Souza. The narration for the video was done by Katie as well as Dave Young Kim. It was shot with a GoPro 360 MAX and produced and edited using Audacity and Adobe Premiere Pro. The 18 minute tour can be enjoyed by students, researchers, historians and community members in Eureka and around the world. 

 

Things that went well

  • Asking a generous colleague to write original music was a great way to avoid having to use a licensed song for the Clarke tour video. 

  • Writing a script to follow for the Chinatown virtual tour was helpful for the recording process and for adding in accurate subtitles on YouTube later.

  • Working one day at the Cal Poly Humboldt library and one day at the Clarke Museum provided a variety of perspectives and hands-on experiences. 

  • Setting up regular meetings to check in with HAPI and ECP was very helpful.

Things to consider

  • 360 video editing can be very time consuming.

  • Consider the way most people will enjoy the video when editing -- i.e. will they use YouTube on a desktop or their phone or a VR system? Knowing this will help you to make editing decisions.

  • File storage and sharing can get tricky when working with several community groups. Stay organized from the beginning, and consider hard drive formatting settings in advance. 

Links to check out

Tips & Tutorials

Makers-In-Residence 2020

Maker-in-residence

Cherish Fulcher and Marie Lopez were the first MiR at the HSU Library Makerspace. The Makerspace was launched in Fall 2019 and the MiR program was intended to help us establish the space as one that is open to all HSU students and promotes interdisciplinary projects and equity. The main goal in our call for proposals was:

HSU Library is seeking two Makers in Residence (MiR) to support achieving the Library Diversity & Social Justice Working Group’s goal of making our collections, services, and events equitable, inclusive, and reflective of our diverse campus community. We are seeking students from all majors and disciplines who are passionate about making, diversity, equity, and inclusion for this stipend-based internship.

We were excited when we received their proposals because both had ideas and visions of projects that met these goals and also had ideas for how to teach and inspire others to become makers.

For more information about their projects, visit the Maker-In-Residence project homepage where you can see and hear:

Fall 2019

Mari Lopez profile photo

In their time with SkillShops since December 2018, Mari Lopez was a student assistant and helped create the SkillShop Leaders initiative for Fall 2019. This collaborative effort with the Cultural Centers for Academic Excellence (CCAEs) aimed to create SkillShops for students who frequent the various centers. As the coordinating liaison, Mari set up communication avenues between the MultiCultural Center, African American CAE, and El Centro to nurture possible topics that the student staff felt were needed as Skillshops. By creating the opportunity for diverse SkillShop programming, we are working towards an equitable campus community that nurtures all forms of knowledge and experiences. For our first SkillShop in collaboration with El Centro, we had Surviving College: Building Community, facilitated by Jonathan Pena, on ways to find community and access the cultural communities and their events. This SkillShop highlighted the importance of building a strong community to help you through your college career and addressed important needs given that many students struggle with finding community in college, especially in a rural town like Arcata, California.

As a Critical Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies major with a minor in Native American Studies, Mari was able to apply their knowledge of structural oppressions embedded within the institution of higher education. They recognized that there is a need for more Skillshops tailored towards students of color and the adversity we experience in order for the Library to be a more equitable space for all students.

Things that went well

  • Buy-in from the CCAE’s: we were welcomed into the centers and given suggested topics from the student staff.
  • Creation of more jobs within the Library that conduct outreach work for cross-campus collaboration.

Things to consider

  • Allowing for more advertising time for the Skillshop Leaders positions at the various centers.
  • Continue outreach in order to include all the Cultural Centers for Academic Excellence.
  • Relationship building is a fluid and difficult process to keep on hard deadlines, recognizing that things might move slowly.

Links to check out

 
 

Spring 2019

Christina Cordova profile photo

Christina Cordova began interning with the DML in the Fall of 2017 where she created and facilitated the SkillShop How to Design Buttons using Adobe Illustrator (see more below) and then in Spring 2019 with Create Your Own Business Card Using Adobe Illustrator. By facilitating these SkillShops, she wanted to bring awareness to the availability of Adobe Creative Cloud programs on various computer labs and desktops on campus. By navigating Adobe Illustrator for an hour, she hoped that it could spark an interest in graphic design among her peers and reveal an opportunity into the design courses offered on campus. She also hoped that attendees would gain a new skill that they could apply in future projects such as with personal projects, campus clubs, or publications on campus.

With her major in Art Education, she was able to apply lesson planning and graphic design expertise to guide her peers throughout the program and were given an overview of the tools. Instructional worksheets were provided that are also available in the Digital Media Lab in a binder, containing step by step directions on how to download fonts, vector graphics, and images from free source websites.

 

Things that went well

  • Students emailed the DML their finished works of the button that they continued to work on after the SkillShop.
  • Attendees learned how to download fonts and vectors which worked well on Mac computers, but were not able to be downloaded on PCs because of administrative access.
  • The instructional worksheets allowed for attendees to go at their own pace if they felt that they wanted to skip ahead or consider taking more time on a certain aspect of the design process.
 

Things to consider for next time

  • Use slides that display examples to follow along with the visual step-by-step instructions while students are working independently.
  • Book computer labs in advance that are capable of downloading fonts or vectors.
  • Include exporting directions on the instructional worksheet just in case time runs out or if attendees want to work on it outside of the SkillShop.
 

Links to Checkout

 
 

Fall 2018

Carlos Lemus profile photo

Carlos Lemus created a training video for Scholars Without Borders during the Fall 2018 semester. He conducted interviews to capture the personal experiences of undocumented and mixed status students at HSU. He then edited the footage into a short video to be used in trainings for educating HSU staff, faculty, and student staff and leaders about how they can support undocumented students. Carlos worked with Scholars Without Borders because he enjoys helping people get equitable access to the resources they need for their success.

The previous semester, Carlos worked as a facilitator for the Scholars Without Borders trainings and took that experience and knowledge to inform his process for crafting this video. He used the GoPro Hero 6 Black camera with the built-in microphone and edited his footage using Camtasia.

The things that went well

  • Conducting multiple interviews with the same person created a better rapport with them and uncovered responses that wouldn't have been caught with just one conversation.
  • Using openly licensed music to set the tone of the video was a great way to make the video more emotionally engaging.
  • Using text annotations on the screen was helpful to highlight important ideas, clarify complex concepts, and was also useful in determining out how to organize the various clips.

Things to consider for next time

  • Room setup -- make sure to mitigate any noise (close any windows because it's hard to know when a truck may drive by) and shoot away from a sunny window.
  • Provide the interviewee with the questions beforehand so that they can think about their answers.
  • Editing takes a long time! Be organized and write out an outline with the questions.

Special note: In order to respect and preserve the anonymity of the interviewee, the video Carlos created is not publicly available. If you are interested in learning about the experiences of undocumented and mixed status students at HSU, we encourage you to attend a Scholars Without Borders training (events are listed on the SWB website as needed).

Spring 2018

Student Snapshots

Rosibeth Cuevas, Grecia Alfaro, Phil Santos and Vanessa Cota created these video shorts as part of the HSU Student Snapshots project, which was showcased at the 2018 ideaFest.

Fall 2017

Spring 2017

Fall 2016