University Libraries Announces 2026 Undergraduate Research Award Winners
Posted: May 12, 2026 Filed under: Archives & Special Collections, Art Library, Ekstrom Library, Kornhauser Health Sciences Library, Law Library, Music Library, People, Services, ThinkIR, University of Louisville Libraries Leave a comment
Two UofL undergraduate students received the inaugural University Libraries Undergraduate Research Award (URA) for producing scholarly works that made sophisticated use of library collections, resources, and services. On April 23, the students were recognized at the URA ceremony and reception. Their research areas included mathematical and computational chemistry as well as political science, and they were awarded for their outstanding research and use of library resources.
In its first year, the program received 27 applications spanning the humanities, fine arts, social sciences, natural and formal sciences, and engineering. To be eligible for the award, each student had to be enrolled as an undergraduate student at the University of Louisville, meet with a librarian or archivist about their research project, and agree to have their work featured in the university’s digital institutional repository, ThinkIR, which is managed by the University Libraries.
To apply for the award, students had to submit a final version of their research project, a bibliography, a reflective essay discussing the research process and use of library resources, and a letter of recommendation from a professor, librarian, or archivist.
The 2026 award winners are Leandro Ajo for the project Non-Redundant Rovibrational Hamiltonians by Molien Generating Functions and Gröbner-Basis Reduction, and Yassin E. Mohamed-Hassan for the project The Limits of Popular Mobilization: Examining Psychological and Cultural Obstacles to Democratic Transition in Egypt. Each winner receives a $1,000 scholarship.
To read the winners’ bios and learn more about the program, please visit the University Libraries Undergraduate Research Award homepage.
The Grawemeyer Awards: Celebrating Decades of Award-Winning Ideas
Posted: April 10, 2026 Filed under: Archives & Special Collections, Collections, donor, Ekstrom Library, Events, Exhibits, Music Library, People, Photographic Archives, University of Louisville, University of Louisville Libraries Leave a commentBy Melissa Rothman
What if one idea could change everything?
At the University of Louisville, one alumnus not only dared to ask this question, he committed the final chapter of his life to answering it. In 1984, Charles H. Grawemeyer established an award with the visionary goal of recognizing and elevating ideas with the power to improve the world. Presented in music, political science, psychology, education, and religion, the Grawemeyer Awards continue to honor groundbreaking work that advances knowledge and inspires future generations. More than four decades later, the awards stand as a testament to the enduring power of ideas to shape the world around us.
Charles H. Grawemeyer’s philanthropic journey with the University of Louisville began in 1970, when he gifted $20,000 along with 4,000 shares of stock in Reliance Universal, the company from which he retired after 40 years. His generosity came with a specific purpose: He stipulated that the funds be used to establish a continuing program that would honor two faculty members and five students through monetary awards. This commitment to education is further demonstrated in 1981 when he established an award through the Kentuckiana Metroversity program recognizing faculty at six colleges for excellence in teaching. His philanthropy extended well beyond the awards program; over the years, he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in endowments to Ekstrom Library to expand its collections, underscoring his profound belief in the pursuit of knowledge. What began as a modest investment and an ambitious vision, eventually culminated in the creation of the internationally recognized Grawemeyer Awards.
The first Grawemeyer Award, established in 1984, recognized excellence in music composition and carried a $150,000 prize, an unprecedented sum for a music award at the time. From this beginning, the program expanded to include awards in world order, education, psychology, and religion. Grawemeyer possessed a deep appreciation for the liberal arts and viewed them as essential to fostering positive social change. His passion for improving the world was shaped, in part, by his experience as an engineering student in the 1930s, a period when the humanities were largely absent from hard science curricula. In a 1990 address to the Rotary Club, he reflected, “Our world has advanced so fast and so far in technical achievements that there now exists a vital need to learn how these accomplishments can best be applied to humankind’s total well-being.” For Grawemeyer, the humanities were not separate from scientific progress but rather an essential component in creating meaningful change.
Unlike many honors that recognize a lifetime of achievement, the Grawemeyer Awards focus on a single idea, one with the potential for lasting impact. What further distinguishes the awards is their selection process. While scholars play a central role, Grawemeyer believed that ideas should not remain confined to academic circles. As a result, the evaluation process includes a stage involving informed lay committees. Judges are guided by three core questions: Is the idea novel? Does it demonstrate academic integrity? And is it something the broader public ought to consider? This emphasis reflects Grawemeyer’s conviction that powerful ideas should be accessible and capable of influencing the world beyond academia.
Current Executive Director John Ferré, who has worked with the Grawemeyer Awards since 1994, emphasizes the breadth and influence of the ideas recognized. When asked to name a standout recipient, he found it impossible to choose just one, instead pointing to impactful ideas across all award categories. Though he resisted singling out a particular recipient, Ferré did share a memorable moment from the awards’ history. When Mikhail Gorbachev visited Louisville in 1995 to accept the award for Ideas Improving World Order, Ferré recounted an amusing anecdote: “At the banquet, the Russians ate little. People associated with the award later learned that they had spent the afternoon gorging themselves on Kentucky Fried Chicken. They were simply too full to eat dinner.”
The awards have also experienced moments of controversy. In 2011, Greg Mortenson was named the recipient of the Grawemeyer Education Award for Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time, a book describing schools for girls established by his Central Asian Institute in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Just days after announcing the winner, 60 Minutes aired an exposé, asserting that much of Mortenson’s claims were fabrications. Amid the ensuing scrutiny and legal challenges, Mortenson never came to Louisville to accept the award. While this incident revealed challenges within the selection process, it also underscored a deeper truth: even as the awards strive to elevate transformative ideas, as with any noble endeavor, they remain subject to the complexities and fallibility of human judgment.
In honor of Charles H. Grawemeyer’s enduring vision, Ekstrom Library has created an exhibit highlighting the far-reaching impact of the Grawemeyer Awards. Drawing from Archives and Special Collections, as well as digital resources, the exhibit features original documents, photographs, and news articles that offer insight into the history and global reach of the awards. Visitors can explore materials related to Grawemeyer’s philanthropic legacy alongside select examples of notable recipients across disciplines. By showcasing ideas that have shaped fields and influenced societies, the exhibit does more than celebrate the past; it invites visitors and students to imagine their own potential in shaping a better world.
The Grawemeyer Awards Exhibit will be on view through August 2026 in Ekstrom Library West, located across from the main checkout desk. Visitors interested in learning more can explore the official Grawemeyer Awards website. The Music Library also houses the Grawemeyer Collection of Contemporary Music, offering access to compositions by past recipients.
Article clipping – Business First, May, 1992. From the Charles Grawemeyer Papers, 2012_001‑UA. University of Louisville Archives & Special Collections.
Diane Ravitch
“2014 Grawemeyer Awards Presentation and Dinner,” Flickr, April 15, 2014
Kelly Brown Douglas Grawemeyer Award Medal.
From – Dittmer, Allan. The Power of Ideas : The University of Louisville Grawemeyer Awards in Music, Education, Religion, and World Order. 2nd ed, Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2000.
Urban Renewal Commission photographs digitized, now available
Posted: March 11, 2026 Filed under: Archives & Special Collections, Collections, Digital Collections, Louisville, Louisville History, New Items, Photographic Archives, Photographs, Primary Sources, University of Louisville Libraries Leave a commentBy Emma Beck
In the 1960s and 1970s, Louisville’s Urban Renewal Commission planned and oversaw the redevelopment of downtown. The project sought to improve the city and eliminate perceived deterioration of urban areas, clear room for Interstate 65, and build the main hospital network, including the University of Louisville’s Health Sciences Campus.
In 1989, the City Archives donated photographs taken by the Urban Renewal Commission to the University of Louisville. The collection consists of black and white photographs and negatives, some color prints, and a limited number of accompanying documents. We are pleased to announce that the 3,856 images in the print series have been digitized and are now available in our Digital Collections. To increase usability, images of the same location on what is presumed to be the same day have been grouped together on the same record, leading to 2,443 total records.
These images show houses, buildings, and businesses primarily in the Central Business District, Russell, and Phoenix Hill. Despite the usage of these photographs as evidence of deterioration, many of these images show people living in the thriving Black business district in Louisville, including Old Walnut Street, now known as Muhammad Ali Boulevard.
The Carousel Restaurant and L&M Used Furniture and Appliances at 609-611 West Walnut Street, Louisville, Kentucky, 1960. Source identifier ULPA 1989_026_1314
The Economic Development Department of the Urban Renewal Commission documented the locations of buildings set for demolition by block and parcel (lot number). This system made using the collection for research very challenging. To increase the collection’s usability, Cassidy Meurer, Archivist for the Barry Bingham, Jr. Courier-Journal Photograph Collection, re-processed the collection by location as part of her Master of Art History thesis, Lost in the (re)process: Challenging constructions of downtown Louisville through the urban renewal commission photograph collection.
The digitization of the collection could not be possible without student worker Abby Ward (’25) who re-numbered, scanned, and created metadata with the scans, Metadata Librarian Emma Beck who edited the collection, and Digital Initiatives Librarian Rachel Howard who reviewed it.
This collection shows snapshots of a city that exists only in the photos. For example, the image below depicts the corner of Second and Main Streets, the current location of the KFC Yum! Center. This photograph collection is significant because it documents a version of downtown Louisville on the precipice of its drastic evolution.
Second Street Bridge entrance at 209 West Main Street, Louisville, Kentucky, circa 1960. Urban Renewal Commission. ULPA 1989_026_0001.
Finding humanity in the archives: A student worker’s story
Posted: March 3, 2026 Filed under: Archives & Special Collections, Collections, Databases, Ekstrom Library, Government Documents, Kentucky, Librarianship / Archivy, Louisville, Louisville History, Primary Sources, Research Tips, University of Louisville Libraries | Tags: Family, history, life, travel, writing Leave a commentBy Alexanna Woodard
Many people spend their weekends shopping with friends, catching a movie, maybe hitting a hiking trail, or seeing some boy band literally nobody’s ever heard of. Maybe even partying. Me? I like to spend mine hunting down grandma’s obituary from 1997.
Resources provided by the University of Louisville Libraries have made this hobby of mine possible. There’s something oddly comforting about hearing the stories of people in the past who lived before you, whether that comes from anecdotes, testimonies, community contributions, even photos and videos ranging from what they did, who they loved, and the random little quirks that made them human. It’s like peeking through a window into lives that could have been forgotten or erased. Even if the story is something simple like Grandpa Warren—a volatile World War I soldier who later retired, spent his days painting, and his nights settled into a rocking chair with a cat on his lap—in a strange way, it’s very grounding to know that these people laughed, cried, fought, and lived just like we do now. The Libraries let me catch glimpses of that humanity decades later, sometimes even centuries later.
But what do I mean by that? Well, I didn’t exactly plan on this becoming a hobby. My mom (who is a librarian) was researching our family history and genealogy while I was helping document old photos and headstones during a winter break trip. We visited Old Broad River cemetery in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and found five generations of our family there. The adventure included a lot of crouching, squinting, and taking photos of headstones that barely made it out of the 1800s.
Somewhere between the awkward squatting and playing assistant photographer for my mom (an unpaid position, for the record), I realized I was having fun. Plus, it’s good cardio, so it’s a win-win in my book. That interest became serious when my brother and I stumbled across River Valley Cemetery, a potter’s field in Louisville, Kentucky, in severe disrepair. Seeing unmarked graves, overgrowth, and even tractor tracks running through burial sites was really unsettling. These were people, the poor, the marginalized, the homeless, who seem to be an afterthought. That was the moment I decided that documentation wasn’t just interesting, it absolutely mattered.
It turns out that a gravestone can only tell you so much, which is how I ended up heavily relying on the Libraries’ databases. When I started my grave documentation hobby, all I had was a person’s headstone, name, dates of birth and death, and maybe location if I was lucky enough to find it on Family Search. I knew there was probably way more to the story than what I was finding, but I wasn’t sure where to find their stories. My mom subscribed to Ancestry’s newspaper catalog which allows her to access literally anyone. It was great but I wasn’t exactly eager to spend fifty dollars just to find where Uncle Loogie the potato merchant’s funeral was held in 1972. That’s when I remembered that the Libraries provide access to newspaper archives, and I started with ProQuest.
I was surprised by how easy it was to navigate ProQuest. What I really love about it is if you can narrow searches down to year ranges. If that’s still too broad, you can filter to only provide results from a specific month. It also highlights the name you’re looking for in yellow, and you can examine the newspaper article and see if the names, age, date, location match up which is a blessing and makes things way less complicated than I originally thought. When I find what I’m looking for, I screenshot and crop the image, then I upload my findings on Find a Grave. I always cite the source in that image caption as An obituary published by [insert newspaper] on [date] so others will know where I found the sources.
All of this is technically a solo hobby, until you factor in my mom, who knows what she’s doing. A lot of this work ends up being a team effort: my mom handles the research side, and I handle the physical documentation. I’m the one crouching, bending, reaching, and wedging myself in questionable positions like I’m auditioning for Cirque du Soleil to get readable photos of headstones or mausoleums she can’t physically reach or get on her phone, while she double-checks records and catches missing or incorrect information I might miss. More than once, I have very confidently and proudly logged someone as “Chip Douglas,” only for her to later find an obituary revealing that his legal name was something different.
There’s no way I’d be able to catch some of these errors on my own, and my mom has been doing research far longer than I have and it really shows. Thankfully, I do catch the mistakes slightly faster; I always make sure to put in the surname then death date like “Johnson 2007” and check to see if any names and dates match. If they do, I either add their photos if they don’t have one or leave it alone. If there’s already info about them and there’s absolutely no information, that’s when I add the memorial. And that’s how a hobby that started with crouching for headstone photos turned into a full-scale mother-daughter operation with public records, citations, and the occasional identity crisis courtesy of Chip Douglas and the University of Louisville Libraries. But honestly? I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Alexanna Woodard is a sophomore studying Communications at the University of Louisville and a student employee at the University of Louisville Libraries.
Rare local history lives on in UofL’s Internet Archive
Posted: February 11, 2026 Filed under: Collections, Digital Collections, Kentucky, Librarianship / Archivy, Louisville, Louisville History, Primary Sources, Technology, University of Louisville Libraries 2 CommentsBy Kaelyn Harris
The Internet Archive is a non-profit online repository containing billions of digitized materials such as audio recordings, visual materials, webpages, books, and other texts. These include older materials that have been digitized and are freely available as they fall under public domain access and usage rights. Many libraries and other information institutions, as well as motivated individual users, contribute material to the Internet Archive for preservation and access.
The University of Louisville collection, as curated by Ekstrom Library’s Technical Services department, contains books, pamphlets, and other items related to Louisville and university history, governance, economics, and society, though there are a few notable exceptions. The most-viewed item is “The Arkansas race riot” by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, with over nine thousand views. The book goes over the events of the Elaine Massacre of 1919 and the ensuing court injustices, including segments of trial transcripts.
One of the least-viewed but certainly interesting items is “Stay Alive!” by Marcus Dow, a 1928 semi-comedic book on the rules of the road for pedestrians and drivers as car ownership gradually became more common among the American populace. Some of the advice is still applicable today, but most of it exists now as fodder for a good laugh. The main key to road safety? Don’t be a jerk.
The archive collection focuses heavily on the preservation of Louisville history. There are several texts covering influential figures, like the story of the Bernheim family as written by Isaac Wolfe Bernheim, but it’s the lesser-known stories of Louisvillians past that interest me. A portion of these are memorial literature, which is created as a special remembrance of an event, occasion, or person. As a genre, it has largely fallen out of fashion with the turn of the 21st century, making these examples from the late 1800s and early 1900s special finds.
The most common example of memorial literature is a booklet from a funeral or memorial service. One such piece is Alice Fraser Bigelow, published in 1927 by an assortment of her closest friends and family members. The booklet reflects the mourners’ own feelings combined with pieces Alice herself loved, including poets Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Victor Hugo, and Theocritus. She is portrayed as a great lover of music, art, and education. Alice becomes more real to us, nearly a hundred years later, because of this book.
In a similar vein, Aunt Cilla: a tale of old Bardstown briefly chronicles the life and death of Priscilla Howell, an African American maid to the Howell and Caruthers families in the mid to late 1800s. This memorial piece is written by a wealthy white woman, Louise J. Speed, and includes period-typical biases and language within it. However, it also provides an intimate look into Speed’s remembrances of a dear friend, who left an immeasurable impact on the people she loved. Still, Speed tries to reconstruct Aunt Cilla’s life and personality as she and the neighborhood remembered her. The dedication says it all, really. “Because the story of Aunt Cilla is not fiction but a beautiful fact, I dedicate its telling to her memory with the hope that it will prove helpful to many of her race and mine.”
Both of these texts can only provide an echo of what Alice Fraser Bigelow and Priscilla Howell were like during their lifetimes. However, our study and understanding of local history would be much the poorer without them; by digitizing materials like these, the UofL Internet Archive collection preserves and shares past memories in service of building a more understanding, freely accessible future.
Looking for love? Meet your numerical match during Love Data Week 2026!
Posted: January 30, 2026 Filed under: Ekstrom Library, Events, Librarianship / Archivy, University of Louisville Libraries 1 CommentBy Tessa Withorn
Each year in February, the University Libraries celebrates International Love Data Week (February 9-13, 2026), an educational event sponsored by the research consortium ICSPR. This year’s theme “Where’s the Data?” offers a way to get people thinking about data’s journey from collection through analysis and dissemination. Check out our Love Data Week online resource guide to learn more about finding, visualizing, managing, and sharing data.
Our main event, a Love Data Week Scavenger Hunt, will take place on Wednesday, February 11, from 11:30am-12:30pm in the lobby of Ekstrom Library. Participants will track down data throughout the data lifecycle and explore university support services for all things data. You’ll learn from our Learning Commons partners about how to find and manage data, how to visualize data, how to write about data, and other data study tips.
During this year’s International Love Data Week, we’re also showing off what UofL students, faculty, and staff are discovering with data! We hope these data love stories inspire you! #LoveData26
Wild Birds, With Love
UofL Biology professor Mikus Abolins-Abols and his team share how temperature affects heart rate in wild birds. To collect their data, they place a fake egg with an embedded microphone into American robin nests to record heart beats of incubating birds. This figure shows how heart rate varies in wild songbirds across time and temperature. Each box is a different bird. The horizontal x-axis shows time of day, the vertical y-axis shows heart rate, and color indicates temperature, with redder colors indicating hotter temperatures. Dr. Abolins-Abols likes this graph because it shows just how variable heart rate is across the day. It also shows a strong effect on the temperature on heart rate—the higher the temperature (coded as bright red), the lower the heart rate.
Star-Crossed Data Lovers
Graduate student Clayton Robertson in the Physics & Astronomy department created a series of visualizations of the overlap region of two galaxies in the pair VV191. The elliptical, yellowish background galaxy acts as a light table for the dust in the foreground spiral galaxy. On the left is the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope color image with the three regions demarcated. On the right is the opacity (top) and optical reddening (bottom left) and near-infrared and optical reddening (bottom right) (results published in Robertson et. al., 2025). We can see most of the dust behaves like the Milky Way (yellow) but varies based on where in the arms one looks through and if near-infrared information is included. For comparison, check out the NASA color image of these observations.
Physics & Astronomy graduate student Trevor Butrum’s plot shows overlapping galaxy pairs that were classified by Galaxy Zoo volunteers and grouped into specific morphological categories. Each category contains galaxy pairs of the same general type, allowing us to separate different morphological combinations, similar to how the Hubble space telescope tuning fork distinguishes between spiral, elliptical, and irregular galaxies. Classifying these overlapping systems is important because different pair types exhibit different dust geometries and stellar populations, which directly affects how we measure and interpret dust attenuation.
Plenty of Fish in the Sea
Biology graduate student Luke Rose compares how parental care strategies have evolved in fishes and how these strategies may be associated with differences in skull shape. Bettas exhibit two forms of parental care: bubble-nesters store their eggs in floating nests made of air bubbles, and mouthbrooders incubate their eggs within their mouths. This figure shows an evolutionary family tree depicting relationships among Betta species and two close relatives (Trichopsis and Parosphromenus). MicroCT-scanned skulls of Betta burdigala (bubble-nester) and Betta akarensis (mouthbrooder) are shown as representative examples (marked on the tree by red stars). Mapping parental care onto the tree suggests that bettas were originally bubble-nesters, with mouthbrooding evolving independently at least six times. Transitions from bubble-nesting to mouthbrooding are substantially more likely than the reverse, which is not observed.
Do We Have Chemistry?
Throughout a semi-structured interview, Chemistry graduate student Emma Drake asked students about their thoughts on scientific models to elicit their epistemic modeling knowledge, which is known to have six dimensions, each with multiple levels of sophistication. These radar charts allow for the visualization of all twelve students in the sample, providing analysis of the levels they reached for all of the dimensions, how their thoughts changed throughout the interview, and patterns seen between students.
Chemistry graduate student Salawat Lateef explains that despite extensive instructional efforts, students often struggle to move beyond classical conceptions to embrace the modern theory of the atom and its fundamental quantum mechanical principles. In this study, the team sought to explore some of the possible reasons behind the classical-to-modern atomic model struggles. Through semi-structured interviews with thirteen General Chemistry II students, they explored students’ conceptions when creating atomic models and when using existing models to explain foundational atomic concepts. This was done to investigate some resources that students use to conceptualize the concept of the atom, and behavior of subatomic particles. They observed instances of non-disciplinary reasoning with atomic models as students based their understanding on perceptual features of models, with a positive correlation between when developing models and when applying existing models of the atom.
In the figure, the first tier outlines key epistemic criteria for general scientific models previously reported in the literature. The second and third tiers represent the criteria we observed in this study. Elements in purple occurred in both the development and application tasks, and those in red emerged only during model application. They observed substantial overlap between the two tasks, as the majority of considerations involved in drawing an atom (development) were also present when applying existing atomic models (application), with some expansion evident during model application.
Don’t Go Breaking My Heart
Brinda Nirmal in Procurement created a dashboard that reveals a steady increase in employee turnover over time, peaking in 2021. A significant portion of turnover occurs within the first 12 months of employment (38%), followed by employees with 2–5 years of service (33%), indicating challenges in early retention and mid-career engagement. Financially, total turnover costs are substantial, with estimated losses ranging from $0.19M to $0.56M, underscoring the economic impact of attrition. Overall, the data suggests that targeted onboarding improvements and early-career retention initiatives could yield meaningful reductions in turnover and cost.
Meet Me in the Stacks
Student Engagement Coordinator at Ekstrom Library Melissa Rothman provides a detailed overview of student demographics and engagement patterns for those who attend library-hosted events and use library resources. Her presentation examines who the library is serving by highlighting student attributes such as class standing, undergraduate and graduate status, first-generation, transfer, and international student representation, as well as a breakdown of academic majors. The presentation also summarizes event attendance trends, including unique and repeat visitors, and contextualizes this data alongside broader library usage metrics such as instruction sessions, consultations, learning modules, space use, and virtual interactions. Together, these insights are used to explore how the library engages students and to frame ongoing conversations about the library’s role in supporting student success, retention, and academic performance.
Code Book Love Story
Curriculum & Instruction Ph. D. student Amanda Lacey is working on her dissertation “Orientation or Disorientation? A Critical Content Analysis of Refugee Cultural Orientation Curriculum,” which outlines the findings of a critical content analysis of The Road Ahead (TRA), a curriculum designed to orient refugee newcomers to the culture of the United States. All data for this study was coded, organized and analyzed according to the constant comparative technique (Creswell & Poth, 2018). Her visualization details each step of this process. Overall, this visual creates a comprehensive understanding of the perspectives and patterns found within the data. Findings revealed that TRA heavily confers cultural capital centered on basic survival. The curriculum also presents an idealized American reality—one of possibility, progress, and prosperity—implying a linear, upward “American Dream” socioeconomic trajectory. This optimistic forecast is achieved largely through omission, failing to address systemic barriers such as discrimination, biased policing, employment stagnation, or the specific needs of marginalized populations (e.g., LGBTQ+). Furthermore, the analysis shows that TRA often relies on stereotypes and “common sense” advice that implies refugees arrive with deficient, childlike cultural capital, thereby othering the newcomers it aims to serve. By prioritizing immediate employment, demanding legibility to the government, and reinforcing a second-class status, TRA functions as a tool of recolonization that pushes refugees to the bottom of U.S. socioeconomic hierarchy—promoting disorientation rather than orientation.
Chemistry Students Meet Their Career Match
Eric Glasser, graduate researcher for the Balabanoff Group in the division of Chemistry Education, created the figure below which shows how students with different sources of self-efficacy are supported in the G-IBL Lab to similar chemistry career choice goals. G-IBL Lab students were observed with audio/video recordings as they participated in the course and took part in follow-up semi-structured interviews. Observations were coded for association within the six constructs of the choice model of Social Cognitive Career Theory. Codes were rewritten as summarizing statements, two students of five total depicted.
Employee Retention Strategies in Laboratories
Zeeshan Ul Haq in Pathology developed an interactive Power BI HR analytics dashboard to analyze employee attrition across age, education, salary, tenure, gender, and job roles. The analysis shows higher attrition among early-career employees, lower salary bands, and specific roles such as laboratory technicians and sales executives, highlighting key areas for targeted retention strategies.
From the archives: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visits to Louisville
Posted: January 15, 2026 Filed under: Archives & Special Collections, Collections, Digital Collections, Images, Kentucky, Louisville, Louisville History, Photographic Archives, Photographs, University of Louisville, University of Louisville Libraries | Tags: civil rights, history, holidays, mlk, news 2 CommentsDr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visits to Louisville in the 1960s were important moments in the Civil Rights Movement, with key speeches and rallies held in the city. From his 1960 voter registration rally at the Jefferson County Armory to his 1967 visit to the University of Louisville’s Brandeis School of Law, King’s presence called for justice and equality.
The University of Louisville Libraries are honored to preserve the photos below which document some of his visits, thanks to the Barry Bingham, Jr. Courier-Journal Photograph Collection in Archives and Special Collections. These images offer a glimpse into the city’s role in shaping the Civil Rights Movement.
Muhammad Ali, left, along with Dr. Martin Luther King, spoke to the media regarding Civil Rights issues in Louisville and the nation. By Thomas V. Miller, The Courier-Journal. March 29, 1967. CJ_1967_03_29_TVM_001.
Dr. Martin Luther King spoke with reporters during an open housing rally at a church in Louisville. By Charles Fentress, The Courier-Journal. March 30, 1967. CJ_1967_03_30_CFJ_001.
Dr. Martin Luther King spoke during an open housing rally at a Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Louisville. By Charles Fentress, The Courier-Journal. March 30, 1967. CJ_1967_03_30_CFJ_010.
Thanks to Cassidy Meurer, archivist for the Barry Bingham, Jr. Courier-Journal Photograph Collection, for compiling the photos and captions.
From the archives: When poison was medicine
Posted: January 7, 2026 Filed under: Collections, Kornhauser Health Sciences Library, Librarianship / Archivy, University of Louisville Libraries Leave a commentBy Cassidy Polack
As I have been working on an inventory of our medical instruments in the Kornhauser Health Sciences Library’s historical collection, I have come across a wide variety of items. Surgical needles, scalpels, amputation kits, all sorts of instruments! I have also come across some historical medicines.
Historical medicines are incredibly interesting! Having evidence of the kinds of medicine used in past allows us to study how medicine has evolved, and treatments have changed. Biochemical analyses have been done on different collections of historical medicines. Often the goal is to determine what is inside the bottles, because the labels aren’t always truthful. Other times researchers look at the contents to determine how effective the treatments may have been and how they differ from modern ones.[i] The empty bottles themselves are also topics of research studies.
One of the medicines I found may be familiar to you: strychnine. Known largely for being a poison, strychnine and its root plant native to Southeast Asia and Australia have been used for the past five centuries, primarily as a pesticide for small animals, birds, and insects.
Strychnine has also been used medicinally, as it affects muscle contractions. It has been used in history as a laxative, appetite stimulant, treatment for heart issues or paralyzed muscles, and even to enhance the performance of athletes.[ii] In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, strychnine was used alongside caffeine in experimental procedures to resuscitate patients who went into cardiac arrest under anesthesia. It was later superseded by more effective and safer methods. [iii] It continued to be used in various foods and medicines until it was banned in the United States by the FDA in 1962. However, it could be found in over-the-counter medicines well into the 1980s.[iv] Today it is mostly used in rat poison and similar pesticides, though the FDA warns consumers about its use in some homeopathic remedies.[v]
Handling and storing historical medicines can be dangerous in a number of ways. Safety has been a priority throughout the entire process of this inventory. We have been working closely with UofL’s Department of Environmental Health and Safety (DEHS) to determine which items are safe for us to keep. In regard to the strychnine, together with DEHS we have decided the risk of potential harm outweighs the benefits of keeping it. Trained DEHS personnel will be cleaning the contents out of the bottles and returning them to us to safely keep in our collections.
[i] Torbenson, M., Kelly, R.H., Erlen, J., Cropcho, L., Moraca, M., Beiler, B., Rao, K.N., & Virji, M. (2000). Lash’s: A bitter medicine: Biochemical analysis of an historical proprietary medicine. Historical Archaeology, 34(2), 56-64; White, W.A. (2020). Just what the doctor ordered: Biochemical analysis on historical medicines from downtown Tucson, Arizona. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 25(2), 515-543.
[ii] Science History Institute. Strychnine sulfate tablets. 2023. Philadelphia/ https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/4voh934; Gupta, R.C. (2007). Non-anticoagulant rodenticides. In Veterinary Toxicology, 548-660.
[iii] Somerson, S.J. (1990). Historical perspectives on anesthetic-related cardiac arrest and resuscitation. Journal of the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, 58(4), 288-295.
[iv] Otter J, D’Orazio JL. Strychnine Toxicity. [Updated 2023 Aug 7]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2025 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459306/
[v] Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. (n.d.). Some homeopathic products may put you at risk. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/understanding-over-counter-medicines/some-homeopathic-products-may-put-you-risk
Investing in the Future: The Hannelore Rader University Libraries Professional Development Fund
Posted: December 10, 2025 Filed under: Archives & Special Collections, Art Library, donor, Ekstrom Library, Kornhauser Health Sciences Library, Librarianship / Archivy, Music Library, People, University of Louisville, University of Louisville Libraries | Tags: education, higher-education, history, news, politics 1 Comment
The University of Louisville Libraries is proud to announce the creation of the Hannelore Rader University Libraries Professional Development Fund, established in collaboration between Dean Fox and Ingrid Rader. This robust endowment, formed by a generous gift from Ingrid Rader, honors the late Hannelore B. Rader, former Dean of Libraries at the University of Louisville, and her lifelong dedication to advancing library professionals. It is designed to provide meaningful financial support for full-time University Libraries staff pursuing an MLIS degree and to help recreate a pathway for career progression at a time when opportunities have become increasingly limited.
Hannelore passed away peacefully on April 25, 2024, at the age of 86. Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1937, she survived the war and endured the challenges of living under Russian occupation in East Germany. Her family emigrated first to Brazil and ultimately to the United States in 1954, where she and her parents began a new life in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A resilient and determined student, she became a U.S. citizen, completed high school, and earned multiple university degrees, including three master’s degrees.
Hannelore’s career in library science spanned decades and multiple institutions, including the University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, University of Wisconsin–Parkside, and Cleveland State University, before she became Dean of Libraries at UofL in 1997. During her tenure, she transformed the library into a center for students and the campus community. “When I came here in January of ’97, the place was dark, gray. Nobody was in here, really. My thought was, ‘This has got to change,’” she told UofL Today in 2009. “I wanted the library to be the place for students so they could be here between classes to not only do their schoolwork but to socialize.”
Under Hannelore’s leadership, the University Libraries achieved major milestones. UofL joined the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), a network of leading North American research libraries. She oversaw the expansion and renovation of Ekstrom and Kornhauser Libraries, the installation of a robotic retrieval system to make books more accessible, and the development of the Learning Commons to better serve students. She championed technology, adding over 600 computer stations and access to over 70,000 e-journals. She also worked to diversify Libraries faculty and successfully restored faculty status and tenure for qualified Libraries’ employees.
Hannelore’s impact extended well beyond Louisville. She presented workshops nationally and internationally, including in South Africa and China, and published over 100 works on information literacy and library administration. She also prioritized outreach and partnerships to help the Libraries serve both students and the broader community.
Hannelore had a deep sense of personal mission. In her 2009 retirement interview with UofL News, she reflected on her time in Germany during World War II and her escape from East Germany. “I wasn’t supposed to live to begin with. I was born weighing two pounds. I just feel I need to write a book with some of that stuff we did.” Even after decades of leadership, she remained dedicated to sharing her experiences and advocating for the growth of others.
The Hannelore Rader University Libraries Professional Development Fund preserves Hannelore’s legacy of mentoring, elevating, and inspiring library professionals. By investing directly in the growth of University Libraries staff, the fund reflects the values Hannelore championed: opportunity, equity, and the belief that libraries thrive when those who steward them are supported and empowered. Awards are expected to be available in mid-2027 and will stand as a lasting testament to Hannelore’s vision and to the profound impact she had on the University of Louisville community.
“First step into my future career”: A student worker’s story
Posted: November 20, 2025 Filed under: Archives & Special Collections, Ekstrom Library, Librarianship / Archivy, People, Photographic Archives, University of Louisville Libraries | Tags: archives, education, history, writing Leave a commentBy Lila Keeling
I was originally hired to work at Ekstrom Library as a student assistant through Access and User Services, or the help desks, and I worked in this department for three years. My senior year, I moved on to Archives & Special Collections (ASC) where I work now. I joined archivist Cassidy Meurer’s team processing photo negatives we received from the Courier-Journal, which basically entailed me filing through boxes of folders and detailing their contents in a large set of spreadsheets that the team shared. I spent my first semester in ASC like this, copying information from folders into a spreadsheet in between classes.
My second semester with ASC was markedly different, though. Cassidy and I worked together to try and curate my work towards an internship-like structure, giving me a set of tasks that could help introduce me to more aspects of the archival process beyond just rote processing. Most of what I’ve been doing has involved taking on the entire oversized prints sub-collection for the larger Barry Bingham, Jr. Courier-Journal Photograph Collection and processing these. A previous volunteer already created a spreadsheet for this task, so my job entailed going through the 39 boxes, each with a large assortment of prints filed into folders, and filling out this spreadsheet with the information on each print. The information includes the titles of the prints (called subjects), a date range for the folders, and the number of prints in each folder. Because the spreadsheet was made before going through each folder to the item level, I ended up having to do a lot of reorganizing and some renaming as I went through the collection. This reorganization resulted in the addition of six more boxes, making a total of 46 boxes and about 370 folders of prints with extra materials to be refiled elsewhere in other collections.
I also participated in work on the reference desk in ASC’s research room, wherein patrons and researchers can come and request help finding specific materials in our collections. I do this every Tuesday and Thursday, mainly helping my coworkers fulfill their reference requests or helping archivist Chad Kamen retrieve materials for classes he teaches in the Mazzoli Room on the fourth floor. Some of my most unique experiences working in ASC have been on the reference desk. Through helping Chad with these classes, I’ve been exposed to a lot of the materials we have in the archive, ranging from an illustrated book about Japanese mythological legends made on rice paper to an original 16th-century work by Copernicus. My favorite of these was a fairytale art book I pulled for a myths and legends class Chad was teaching which featured beautiful illustrations, some in color, of old 19th– and 20th-century works depicting fairytale and folklore scenes, such as Snow White, Baba Yaga, Beauty and the Beast, and more.
As an Anthropology student with a Jewish Studies minor, my work in Archives & Special Collections has been irreplaceable. I’ve not only learned a lot more about where I live and grew up, but gained knowledge about the inner workings of archives that can be very helpful towards my career in the social sciences, as much of the work I’ll be doing involves research, cataloguing, and use of old materials. Leading my own project, as well as collaborating with a lot of my colleagues in ASC, was a really fun and useful first step into my future career, and I’m excited to keep working alongside everyone here.
Lila Keeling is a senior studying Anthropology and Jewish Studies at the University of Louisville and a student employee in Archives & Special Collections.
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