The word “library” often conjures images of books on shelves. Providence Public Library (PPL) certainly has them, but this nonprofit organization offers city residents far more – educational programming for everyone from toddlers to elders, English language learners to small business owners, community exhibitions produced with local artists and cultural workers, support for community archives “created by and for the groups that they represent,” an annual Creative Fellowship to foster new work connected to PPL’s special collections, and more.  As PPL celebrates its 150th anniversary, students, staff and faculty from Brown University have collaborated on a wide range of projects that contribute to the library’s present impact and future sustainability. 

Digitizing Downtown Providence’s LGBTQ+ History 

Curators in the PPL’s Special Collections department and community advisory board members have worked for years to develop the Rhode Island LGBTQ+ Community Archive. Kate Wells, then-Curator of Rhode Island Collections and project manager of the Community Archive at PPL, volunteered with other public historians to develop and offer a popular  in-person walking tour of Downtown Providence’s LGBTQ+ history.  “There's just too much interest, which is a great problem to have,” Wells shared during a 2025 Love Data Week panel discussion. "But also, we were finding that there were people with mobility issues” who wanted access. Participants on walking tours were also sharing stories and information that could be added to the archive and the tour. The team considered a digital tour a promising option for increasing accessibility, allowing for ongoing updates, and sharing more critical context for the map’s content, limitations and purpose. \

In exploring options to digitize the walking tour, Wells spoke with the Community-Engaged Data and Evaluation Collaborative (CEDEC) staff at the Swearer Center and was quickly connected with a Bonner Community Fellow, Chloe Jazzy Lau ‘27, an International Relations and Affairs (Security Track) and Applied Mathematics concentrator. It was a fitting match for Lau, who was eager to learn mapping methods and digital storytelling tools. "I was super excited,” Lau said; “it was about bringing a part of history and physical history and archives into a digital space,” making it “more accessible and more of a living, breathing experience." Through her fellowship, Lau designed and built an ArcGIS StoryMap with the materials Wells and others had gathered. The LGBTQ+ Downtown Providence Tour StoryMap guides users through notable places and events in the city’s LGBTQ+ history with a timeline and ten tour stops, concluding in anecdotes connected to the Bicentennial Commission and RI's First Pride Parade. Each stop showcases photos connected to the location and offers a brief explanation of the spot’s importance. Although Wells is now the State Librarian with the Rhode Island Department of State, she is still active with this community archive, and its team will continue working to capture a fuller picture of LGBTQ+ lives and experiences in Providence. 

Generating Fundraising Insights

While the LGBTQ+ Story Map was being released in November 2024, CEDEC was developing another partnership on a different floor of the Library—with its Philanthropic Engagement Manager, Annie Foley. “PPL prides itself on being innovative in the library field for offering data-driven public programs,” she noted, “with formal evaluation systems in place that tangibly demonstrate the impact our programs have on our learners. It felt organic to evaluate our fundraising efforts through a similar lens, and to use tangible data to inform and refine our practices for maximum impact and benefit to the library's fundraising goals.” 

Foley set out to understand in greater detail how to leverage PPL’s fundraising data for their 150th anniversary campaign. Soon, she was working with first-year Bonner Community Fellow and intended Computer Science concentrator Loang Chiang ’28 and Chiang’s faculty mentor Dr. Tom Sgouros of Brown’s Data Science Institute.  Throughout the Spring semester, Chiang compiled key findings including giving trends across time and geography in Rhode Island, presented through lists, tables and graphs. Chiang’s data visualizations “helped inform our plans for next year and beyond,” Foley reports, and are now being referenced in operational decisions, presentations to internal stakeholders and decision makers, and strategic planning discussions with the Library’s Board. The project holds potential for future collaboration, with both Chiang and Foley eager to explore emerging questions and trends in Fall 2025 through Chiang’s continued Bonner Fellowship. According to Foley, “it can be really easy…to keep plugging and playing with inherited institutional systems that appear anecdotally to be working. But sometimes, when you’re too close to something or too invested in a specific outcome, you don’t realize the little pieces of the machine that need love and attention!” 

Evaluating Early Literacy Impact

With more than 80% of PPL’s funding coming from private foundations and individual donors, many of whom are library users, evaluating the effectiveness of programs is a critical part of stewardship and accountability. One of PPL’s many educational programs, 1,000 Books before Kindergarten, promotes early childhood literacy through the challenge of parents and caregivers reading at least 1,000 books to children before the age of 5-6. Children and their grown-ups are sent home with a starter book and a tracking sheet, and are encouraged to return for additional tracking sheets as they become filled out. The same book can be read 50 times and be tracked 50 times - it is not necessarily about the number of different stories a child hears (though they do recommend variety!), but rather increasing the minutes and moments of curiosity shared between a child and their trusted adults.  Measuring impact goes beyond counting books to consider how the act of reading to young children shapes lifelong habits, critical thinking, social-emotional development and even parent and caregiver reading patterns. 

To come up with a plan for measuring the impact of the 1,000 Books before Kindergarten program at the Library, Foley and children’s librarian Bonnie Lilienthal teamed up with a group of students in a community-engaged course, IAPA 1502: What Works: Evaluating the Impact of Social Programs, taught by Wendy Sheldon, a professional researcher and evaluator and Adjunct Lecturer in International and Public Affairs. The students—Julian Cronin ‘25, Matthew Shabino ‘25, and Gabriella Soliman ‘’25—spent the Spring 2025 semester building out a logic model and theory of change for the program—two tools that help articulate how a program hopes to effect positive change. They also proposed methods for the program to collect data that would capture the impact beyond the number of books read, such as parent experiences and satisfaction with the program, as well as tools for measuring program engagement, reach, and barriers to access. All the while, Foley and PPL provided the vital context for deep student learning. Upon completing the project, one of the students working with PPL shared that “program evaluation is something I had never even heard of or thought about. Now, it will be on our minds as we approach the real-world challenges of our future careers.” 

Wide-ranging Collaborations

PPL’s collaborations extend beyond Bonner and coursework. Both faculty and student researchers have found PPL a valuable partner in recent years. When Associate Professor of Anthropology Katherine A. (Kate) Mason and her collaborators in the Pandemic Journaling Project, for example, were considering sites for a local exhibition in 2023, PPL made sense (in addition to several satellite spaces on campus). Given PPL’s role – along with the Rhode Island Historical Society – in creating the RI COVID-19 Archive, they shared a strong interest in documenting diverse lived experiences of the pandemic and democratizing knowledge production. (Read more in this overview of the collaboration.) Aaron Castillo ‘23, an independent concentrator in Food and Identity and a Bonner and Royce Fellow, developed his thesis project with Wells and other PPL staff. “F​​ood can provide a way of remembering the diverse people who shaped life in Providence in the past,” Castillo said, “even if they have since been displaced, and even if history books have skipped over their legacies.” A culminating exhibition, Who Has a Seat at the Table?, at PPL also incorporated contributions from two local artists of color. (Read more in this Brown News story.)

The Brown University Library (BUL), one of CEDEC’s core campus partners, also collaborates with PPL (and the Community Libraries of Providence, which are organizationally separate) in significant ways, including summer storytimes and family-focused tours on campus. BUL’s Head of Library Community Engagement Kelly Clifton began the summer reading partnership in 2023 when a main program sponsor was no longer able to provide financial support. “The timing aligned perfectly,” Clifton said, “as I had recently joined Brown University Library and had begun building relationships with the public libraries in Providence…. I wanted to make sure that we were not only providing financial support but a reciprocal partnership that benefits our community.” BUL staff sort books and materials that are given to each library location and invite local families to programming on campus, including public art tours with the Brown Arts Institute, visits to accessible spaces like the  5,000 square foot research greenhouse on top of 85 Waterman Street (which is open to the public Monday-Friday) and–the most popular event–a sports-themed storytime with Bruno and Brown athletes. In addition to supporting the distribution of thousands of books and school and art supply bags to children, the collaboration in 2024 funded four family workshops led by local artists and dance troupes and two mentor stipends for the four-week STEM Club summer session.