Hi there! My name is Abby Schreck and I’m a rising senior studying Social Theory and Practice, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Amerian Culture. My research interests include justice work, activism, and religion, specifically worship-based justice work done within Unitarian Universalism.
This summer I’m working with Dr. Deborah Robinson on her project developing a model for Black History Month programming in public libraries. I expect to work on several tasks related to their recently sent-out second pilot survey including coding qualitative answers and finding connections between their Knowledge of the Community and Community Humility scales to the responses of the libraries. Additionally, in anticipation of their third and largest-scale national survey, I will be collecting information about public libraries nationwide to ensure they can send out the survey directly to librarians in as many locations as possible.
One challenge I anticipate running into is learning how to work with research methods I’m not as used to. I have experience doing archival research and oral history, but will mostly be working with quantitative survey data. However, I believe the work this project is doing is vitally important, especially in the current political climate surrounding libraries and the public’s access to history and information, and think my curiosity and personal investment in the project’s goals as well as self-motivation and commitment to the project will allow me to grow and feel more confident in a type of research that’s new to me. I’m also excited to do work with and about libraries which are very important and I hope to learn more about the inter-workings of over the course of the summer.
Finally, a fun fact about me is I’m an illustrator and love doing crafty things! Here’s a little self-portrait I did recently!
