Rutgers Future Scholars 2023

Other Resources to Help You Evaluate Sources, and Help Your Community Members: 

The ACT UP framework is another way to evaluate sources and develop a critical mindset. It was developed by librarian Dawn Stahura. You can read more about ACT UP at Dawn's guide. 

This week we discussed the work being done by the Black Bibliography Project to build a database of Black print culture and descriptive bibliography.  We learned different ways to look at books as object and to we discussed how printed books are created by communities of people whose politics, aesthetic practices and movements for social justice and liberation all inform the production of the text. 

Lists of Books by Black Authors (for further reading): 

• "African American Classics I Wish I Read In High School"
• "10 of the Best Black Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers"
• BLM Book Mobile: BLM Booklist (See the fiction, poetry and audiobooks)

All relevant links for the Data lesson are at

https://github.com/ryandata/Rutgersfuturescholars/

We mostly looked at the College Scorecard, which provides standardized data for all colleges in the US to compare majors offered, financial aid offered, income of students after graduating, and many other things.  We saw how to download the full data and use the Data Dictionary to understand the data. This can be used in combination with open source R software to develop a customized College Search Tool.  Working with data in this way is the kind of thing that data scientists and data librarians do, but hopefully can be useful to you in your own college search.

Remember when looking for college information, each school will have a "Common Data Set", providing data on their student body, acceptance rates, and other information, and a "Net Price Calculator" which will allow you to see what financial aid the college would offer you, customized to your family circumstances and income.  Just search the school name and those phrases to find them.

More details are at the github link above.

Link to slides: https://go.rutgers.edu/qdrf44iq

Letter from William T. Hutchinson (AKA Squirrel): https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T37M0BPK

Together, we'll read and think about how we'd mark up his letter that begins "Well, Woody, they got the old squirrel in a pine woods in the Champagne sector."