Needless to say, this year has been a busy one. There has
been plenty that I could have written about before now, but there was simply not enough time to
justify composing anything written that wasn’t an assignment. For the past nine
months I have been working as a graduate library intern at the Environmental
Protection Agency at Research Triangle Park. I wanted to quickly share a few
semi-artsy projects I have completed while working out at RTP.
Currently I am working on creating a series of posters to highlight quotes from
library patrons that demonstrate the quality of our services. Initially I
worked in Illustrator to create a few potential designs, but they ended up
being a bit too whimsical for a scientific research library. Ultimately I ended
up using Microsoft Publisher to compose these posters because I do not have
access to Adobe Creative Suite at the reference desk. While this did not allow
me the freedom I am used to having in making art, I still had fun with shapes
and colors. The potential design for the posters consists of a multicolored
QRcode with other colored squares added to balance and abstract this design. The
quotes from patrons emphasize the importance of the library to the work of
researchers at the EPA and the skill and efficiency of the library’s staff. I
have made different variations of the basic design in four different colors.
Included below are examples.
QR Code posters
Initial Illustrator poster
At the very beginning
of my time at the EPA I worked with Lisa Becksford, one of my fellow EPA-SILS
interns, on brainstorming ideas to replace the old library logo. Part of the
fun was simply looking through other library logos to see what was possible.
Our old logo, like many library logos, was very book centric. While I still
feel that books are at the core of library services, I do recognize that there
is a lot more to libraries than books (I am technically an IS major even if I
seem to overlook this half the time…). In the end none of our designs got
selected, but it was a fun project that gave us the chance to experiment. Below
are a couple examples of my sketches.
Our branch of the EPA focuses on air pollution - hence the cloud theme here
I'll be continuing to work at the EPA Library over the summer and for the remainder of my time as a graduate student at UNC. For the summer I will be working in both the reference and serials rotations and this fall I am slotted to be the cataloging intern. I am looking forward to it and hope I can sneak in a few more fun yet useful art projects along the way.
