News from the City Tech Library
Join student activists and educators for Higher Education Action Day on February 25th. This is an opportunity to directly talk to state legislators about the need for more affordable tuition and more funding to support your educational experience. NYPIRG (local organizers with an office on campus) will provide free buses up to Albany for a 1 day trip.
Here is more information about the event and registration details.
Every voice matters!
The library will be open December 22-23 from 9am to 5pm.
The library will be closed from December 24th – January 1st.
We will re-open on January 2nd at 9am to 5pm.
Enjoy the holiday break!
Wikipedia Day is an annual celebration of Wikipedia’s birthday, and in 2026 this online encyclopedia turns 25. City Tech Library is thrilled to be working with Wikimedia NYC to host this celebration at City Tech. Weather forced us to reschedule, and we’re now looking forward to this event on March 28, 2026.
Register now on eventbrite to attend!
Together we will explore the past, present, and future of the free knowledge movement, and celebrate all the people, communities and ideas that make Wikipedia possible. The day will include keynote speakers, family friendly activities, lightning talks, great food, and much more.
Interested in helping out? We’d love more volunteers! Sign up to volunteer on this form.
This fall, students in Professor Robin Michals’ Photography I class have been contributing images to Wikimedia Commons with support from CUNY’s Wikimedia in Residence, Richard Knipel. We are so excited to see their work online!
All their photo uploads can be explored on the Contributions from Communication Design students, CUNY City Tech category page. In addition to being available on the Commons under Creative Commons licenses, it’s exciting to see these already being incorporated into wikidata items and wikipedia articles in various languages.
I visited one of their classes to chat with them about the impact of their contributions to Wikimedia Commons and to hear their thoughts on the images they added. Check out some student reflections on their images below:
Of Fort Greene Park in Autumn, Kylan Whittaker explained, “My mom used to take me there a lot when I was a kid, so I made a lot of good memories in that park.”
Wikipedia user Photonatomist explained that Crotona Park Pond is “vast” and feels like “a calm place to be.”
Nurcan Akca says of I.S.125 Thomas J. McCann Intermediate School: It was my middle school!
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Rodrigue says of Canarsie Skate Park: “That place is special because it’s close to home and it’s a large place where friends and family can come together to have fun. “
When I asked students what it means to them that their work is now on Wikimedia Commons, they had a few more thoughts to share:
To me it feels nice that I can share a part of my life to others and basically create an invitation to others to have similar experiences as me.
It makes me proud knowing that my work is being used in Wikipedia commons. It scales out my work and makes me really grasp how impactful my photography can be.
I’m famous!
Workshop: Data visualization for bibliometric analysis with VOSviewer
When: Friday, February 6, 2026, 12-1:30pm
Register on zoom to attend: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/9pYa5bEkSaemujG6oJe1nw
Workshop description: What is the role of bibliometric analysis in our research, and how can data visualization with VOSviewer play a key role in analyzing bibliometric data?
This workshop will provide a brief introduction to the benefits of data visualization for bibliometric analysis before diving into one tool that supports this work. City Tech Librarian Jen Hoyer will guide attendees through use of VOSviewer, an open source data visualization tool, to demonstrate how bibliometric analysis can help examine questions including: what are the main topics or research areas in a field? How do these relate to each other? How has a specific field developed over time?
After an introduction to bibliometric analysis and data visualization, we’ll dive into VOSviewer and its core features. Attendees will have an opportunity to watch demonstrations of the tool in use and to walk through the steps of creating visualizations themselves with a sample dataset (provided).
Attendees should download and install the free VOSviewer software in advance of the workshop if they wish to follow along on their own computer; this is encouraged but not mandatory. Versions for various operating systems can be downloaded at https://www.vosviewer.com/download.
Last Wednesday, December 3, a small group of faculty from across the college met to discuss our first book, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. This 1999 coming-of-age novel has been widely acclaimed and also widely challenged and banned for its truthful depiction of some of the universal challenges of adolescence.
The Banned Books book club will meet again in late February to discuss The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Everyone in the City Tech community is welcome to participate! Stay tuned for details about when and where we will meet. The City Tech library, all CUNY libraries, and all NYC public libraries own copies of this book that you can borrow. If you have questions about getting The Bluest Eye from City Tech or another library, visit us and ask any librarian. Hope to read banned and challenged books with you in 2026!
#CUNYTUESDAY 2025
#CITYTECHTUESDAY: Support the City Tech Library!
The 2025 #CUNYTUESDAY campaign is here, and the faculty and staff of the Ursula C. Schwerin Library are proud to be part of this year’s effort to support student success at City Tech!
We’ve set an ambitious goal of $17,000 to help us expand our services, upgrade student study spaces, and deepen our programming.
But no matter the amount, every gift matters. Your support—whether large or small—makes a meaningful difference.
Here are just a few of the things your donation can help make possible:
These are just a few examples—your gift allows us to be responsive and flexible, meeting student needs as they emerge throughout the year.
The Library is a cornerstone of academic life at City Tech—connecting students with the resources, spaces, and support they need to succeed.
Help us meet this year’s ambitious goal.
Give what you can. Every gift counts. Every student benefits.
Thank you for being part of our community!
Our Archives Week Open House this year (read more about over here!) included a display of book stamps that help tell the history of City Tech Library. While you can read more about our library’s history on our website, we’re sharing some of our display here in digital form.
This project grew out of our interest in collecting the various book stamps used by our library and by the institutions and libraries that have merged into what is now NYC College of Technology (known colloquially as City Tech). While we weren’t able to locate stamps for some of the earliest versions of City Tech Library, we found more than we expected: many library addresses we didn’t know even about and library branches we hadn’t heard of.
Tracing the history of our library has helped us think about the various ways libraries have served students over time, and we get a glimpse of past iterations of library services through the illustrations also on display in this room. These illustrations are from City Tech Library’s archive; we are excited to keep exploring and learn more about what they were initially used for.
As part of the trade schools movement, the New York Trade School (founded as The Technical Schools of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later known as Voorhees Technical Institute) was part of a larger movement by union leaders and philanthropists to educate workers and provide educational opportunities to immigrants. Voorhees Technical Institute was located on West 41st Street in Manhattan, in a building that still exists near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. While our library no longer has books from its earliest iterations as the New York Trade School, several books from various branches of the Voorhees Technical Institute were incorporated into our collections.
The New York State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences was founded in 1946 under legislation that set aside funds to support returning GIs following World War II; classes were initially held in the old Public School 15 building in downtown Brooklyn. In the 1950s, classes were also held at the Hotel St. George at 111 Hicks St, Brooklyn. The library was, for at least some of this time, located in a building at 300 Pearl Street in downtown Brooklyn.
New York City Community College, also known as the Community College of Applied Arts and Sciences, grew from the small set of technical programs offered when it was founded as The New York State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences to boast more than 10,000 graduates by 1963. And while it was part of the State University of New York system in the early 1960s, known for a time as SUNY Tech, it became part of the CUNY system mid-decade. The library had several locations during the lifespan of New York City Community College: in its previous location at 300 Pearl Street; at 12 Franklin Street; on Livingston Street; and at the current address, 300 Jay Street.
Following New York City’s funding crisis of the 1970s and cuts broadly to community colleges across the city, the school’s name was changed to New York City Technical College in 1980 and its charter was amended to designate it an “urban technical institute,” with permission to grant 4-year degrees as well as associates degrees.
The name of City Tech was formally changed to New York City College of Technology in July 2002, to emphasize its high-tech workforce development focus and to distinguish it from other technical schools.
This project was compiled by Prof. Jen Hoyer and Prof. Kel Karpinski
On November 6th, City Tech Library hosted Wikimedia NYC for an editathon connected to the NYC400 campaign.
NYC400 is a project undertaken by Wikimedia NYC this year to focus on impactful New Yorkers and NYC neighborhoods that deserve a place on Wikipedia but hadn’t previously been featured or need to be updated.
Approximately 20 people joined in to edit. Highlights of NYC400 editing projects that attendees undertook include:
We’re looking forward to more wiki-events in Spring 2026; watch this space for updates!
Ashley joined the library as a tenure-track faculty member this past August, just as the busy Fall 2025 semester was getting underway. As a new member of the City Tech community and recent addition to the vast CUNYverse, we thought we’d ask Ashley a few questions to get to know her a little better and to learn more about her role and her research interests. A very belated welcome to Ashley!
Can you share a little about your academic and library background?
Sure! I hold a PhD in African History from the University of Michigan and an MLIS from UNC-Chapel Hill. I initially pursued the PhD believing I wanted to be a professor of history, but a number of experiences led me to libraries. As a doctoral student, I had the opportunity to work with undergraduates as a TA for global history courses; I also had a chance to work on several archives projects in Uganda, where I helped inventory, arrange, and describe a number of government repositories across the country. Both of these experiences–working with undergraduates in the US and archivists in Uganda–really appealed to me, and they helped me recognize new ways to use my training in history to support new scholarship. After grad school, I went on to teach at Bard High School Early College-Manhattan for five years, where I got to design courses in African studies, global history, and world literature. I also spent a year in India where I helped set up a new liberal arts BA program at Munjal University outside Delhi. All of these experiences helped me identify things I really cared about: supporting undergraduates, especially first-gen students; information literacy; collection development and bibliodiversity; and global scholarly communications.
Being a librarian at CUNY allows me to wear many hats. I can teach and provide reference support; I can work on policy and troubleshoot service delivery; and I can conduct research. Moreover, I get to work with a team, which I find more energizing and interesting than working solo all the time. In my past work experience, I’ve been a full-time teacher, a full-time archival assistant, and a full-time researcher, but librarianship gives me a balance of all three.
In terms of who influenced me: As a researcher, I have visited libraries and archives all across the US, Europe, and East Africa. In every instance, I have had to get support from librarians and archivists who knew their collections and knew how to guide me through them. That certainly shaped my interest in LIS. But I’ve also worked closely with scholars in East Africa and India, and I’ve seen the ways in which global scholarly communications works to marginalize and alienate academics outside North America and western Europe. My interest in LIS as a field of study is really grounded in this recognition.
I am the access services librarian. In this role, I oversee everything that happens behind the Borrow and Return desk. I work with a team that manages course reserves, inter-library loan, CLICS, and regular circulation; we also make sure the stacks are in order. Beyond this, I will soon take on liaison roles and reference service shifts.
I’m interested in global scholarly communications, broadly. With my background in African history, I’m especially concerned with questions about the production and circulation of knowledge about Africa. My current project focuses on the role that North American academic libraries have played in shaping this circulation. I’m currently writing about an audit I designed and conducted with the African studies librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill, in which we collected data on the nationality of authors and the places of publication for a large sample of the African studies print book collection. Our aim was to gather better data about the collection and to understand whose work has been privileged over time; we are also analyzing circulation data to better understand user demand (perhaps unsurprisingly, we see users tend to choose books from well-known publishers in the global North). One possible application of our research will be to design critical citation workshops and libguides.
Beyond this, I’m very interested in the history of libraries, archives, and publishing in Africa, current opportunities and challenges of OA in the global South, and what AI might mean for all of this.
As a librarian, I feel a lot of pressure to say I’m doing some impressive reading challenge (!), but honestly the world is so nuts right now that I’ve given myself permission to read all the murder mysteries I want. The last one I enjoyed was God of the Woods by Liz Moore, and I’m halfway through Broadchurch.
And no librarian intro would be complete without a cute cat portrait.
