Great LibTech Insights Picks for Summer Break 

Looking for a summer project? We can get you started.

Posted on May 21, 2025 in Blog Posts

With any luck, you have already started or are very close to starting your summer break, and your cortisol levels have retreated from their end-of-the-semester peak. This week, we thought we’d reprise our post from last summer highlighting some pieces we ran during the semester that are best enjoyed with a little more free time to explore and learn. Some pieces suggest what could make manageable summer projects for you or a small team, and others introduce tools to play around with so you have one more item in your toolkit this fall. All will keep your mind curious and sharp for when the school year starts back up. 

🔨 Experiment with new tools 

Thanks in particular to AI, there is no shortage of new tools to play with, but during the crunch of the semester, it’s often easier to default to familiar, if suboptimal, options. Summer offers a chance to test out some new options, for instance, using AirTable for electronic resource management, Notion to organize library projects, or Zoom to take notes. You might also build out some new resources, such as NewsNow and OLMoTrace, for the classes you plan to teach in the fall.

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👩🏻‍🏫 Design a micro-course 

A micro-course is a structured way to pass bite-sized pieces of information and tutorials to your library community. The “micro” in the name perhaps underplays the amount of effort that goes into developing an effective course, but summer is a good time to toy with the idea: brainstorming a possible course, checking your colleagues’ pulse, and making a road map. Thankfully, Lorin Flores wrote a full series on micro-courses: from learning what they’re all about to executing your ideas. 

📦 Preserve institutional webpages 

Though at times thankless, digital preservation is an important undertaking. For institutions without staff dedicated to digital preservation, this task is easy to neglect during the touch-and-go days of the semester. But given the fast pace of changes on university websites and the open web, it’s a good idea to preserve pages, whether for your personal use or for the public record. We published a full series of videos on preserving and restoring webpages using different tools, such as the Internet Archive, SingleFile, and Zotero. 

📒 Improve your library’s user experience 

North Carolina State University’s Robin Camille Davis has kept LibTech Insights readers informed on best practices and cool ideas for improving your library’s user experience, and summer is a good time to take on this work. You might begin by running some quick tests to locate snags on your library website. If there’s a survey you plan to run this fall, take a moment to read through Robin’s suggestions for survey design to see if you can’t make some tweaks to improve response rates. If, more broadly, you’re interested in taking on more user experience and design work as a part of your job, check out Robin’s tips for being a one-person UX team to consider how you might integrate these considerations into your other responsibilities. 

📚 Update Wikipedia with your summer reading 

If you’re like me and your favorite part of summer is reading on your porch, consider taking a moment after you’ve finished your latest read to update its Wikipedia page. Laurie Bridges makes the case that updating Wikipedia with good, accurate book descriptions is an effective way to combat book bans and misinformation. Wikipedia pages are highly trafficked and often the first place that people look to learn more about contentious books, making them a key public resource. Besides, there’s something very satisfying about seeing your edits become part of Wikipedia’s public knowledge—why rob yourself of the joy? 

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