by Whitney Harder, Whitney Hale

(April 9, 2014) — University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections will host a reception to open an exhibit highlighting four undergraduates' Learning Lab internship projects from 3-5 p.m. Thursday, April 10, in the Great Hall of the Margaret I. King Building. The free public exhibit, showcasing items from their processed collections, will feature presentations from the four Learning Lab interns, including commentary on their scholarly projects.

The Learning Lab internship, now in its second year, is an experiential learning program that introduces undergraduate students to archival processing and theory using rare and unique resources in UK's Special Collections Library. The program is designed to increase the accessibility of those resources and research output by mandating that all students complete a scholarly project during the internship.

Learning Lab intern Katie Elmore, a history and anthropology senior from Morning View, Ky., processed a medical history related collection. Elmore’s scholarly project on the Dr. Daniel Drake Carter papers is a digital humanities timeline using emerging technology that she will present at the College of Charleston's "Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library" conference in June 2014.

Interns Nicole Priest, a senior history major from Louisville, Ky., and Qaaim Stainback, a secondary social studies education senior from Louisville, have processed three separate collections covering Kentucky history, gender and women's studies, and mental health policy in the 20th century. Their scholarly project involved creating an information literacy-based curriculum that introduces students to primary source material and assessed learning outcomes and teaching methodology.

Intern Dominique Luster, a theatre senior with a focus on dramaturgy from Louisville, processed two theater collections, including one related to gender and women’s studies and another related to African-American history, as well as a timely hemp manufacturing collection, all of which had previously been unavailable to researchers. Luster’s scholarly project involved presenting a poster on the Ron Nickell Playbill Collection at Harvard University's National Collegiate Research Conference in January 2014.

UK Special Collections is home to UK Libraries' collection of rare books, Kentuckiana, the Archives, the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, the King Library Press and the Wendell H. Ford Public Policy Research Center. The mission of Special Collections is to locate and preserve materials documenting the social, cultural, economic and political history of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

The Special Collections' Learning Lab exhibit will be on display through June 1. For more information, contact Stacie Williams, Learning Lab manager, Special Collections, at 859- 257-8371 or email stacie.williams@uky.edu.