Summer 2026 Projects
For the summer of 2026, all Fondren Fellows projects are led by members of the library staff and support at least one goal from the library's 2025 strategic plan.
Directories to Data: Leveraging AI to Create a Digital Preservation Pipeline for Historical Directories
We propose to develop an end-to-end, reproducible pipeline for digitizing historical directories into a structured database format, leveraging cutting-edge AI enterprise tools, specifically Microsoft Azure Document Intelligence in Foundry Tools. While conventional optical character recognition (OCR) and prebuilt models in AI excel at handling standard forms, receipts, or invoices, historical directories present unique methodological challenges related to their semi-consistent structure, dense shorthand, and the necessity of distinguishing directory entries from peripheral content (e.g., advertisements or headers).
The core of the project involves three phases of AI model application and refinement: first, extracting raw text and layout information using high-definition OCR tailored for documents; second, training and refining custom extraction and classification models to automatically isolate individual physician or resident entries; and third, segmenting entries and parsing the data into distinct fields (e.g., name, address, business, profession). The final pipeline will be documented and designed to be generalizable, to create a scalable method of extracting data from a variety of directories for historical research. This effort moves historical data from inaccessible print to a database format, which is essential for comprehensive analysis.
Fondren on Demand: Creating Instructional Video Tutorials
This project addresses a need among Rice students for short-form, asynchronous instructional materials from Fondren Library. Over the duration of their fellowship, students will spearhead the creation of peer-to-peer multimedia learning content for the library, particularly video tutorials. Fellows will investigate how other academic institutions have developed instructional content, and will evaluate how Fondren may expand its current learning opportunities for students. Potential video topics may range from how to navigate a particular library database to understanding what a literature review is. Overall, these videos are aimed at acquainting students with Fondren’s services and resources, and helping students build their research skills on their own time and at their own pace. By the end of this project, fellows will produce at least five instructional videos and will create a library guide on how to create and publish videos. This guide will allow Fondren to continue to efficiently produce videos after the conclusion of this fellowship.
Paper Trails: Evaluating a Collection of Museum Exhibition Publications
The Brown Fine Arts Library (BFAL) is home to a sizable collection of uncataloged museum publications that were produced to accompany exhibitions. These items include pamphlets, announcements, booklets, and other short-form documents from the 1960s onward, organized geographically. The collection is no longer being actively developed, and none of the items are discoverable in the library’s online catalog. As it currently exists, this collection is essentially invisible to users and potential researchers. Nevertheless, these materials occupy a significant portion of the limited physical space in the BFAL footprint of Fondren Library, and assistance is needed in evaluating and relocating the collection. An initial assessment has shown that the collection includes gems of design inspiration or documentation of artists or movements that are greatly underrepresented in the larger literature. This project is an opportunity for the fellow(s) to evaluate these materials and assist in creating three ‘paper trails’ to organize the collection by:
Identifying materials to be considered for cataloging that could contribute to the research priorities of Rice students and faculty, and that may be rare or not widely available at other institutions;
Creating a teaching/exemplar collection of items with interesting design elements that could coordinate with the Athena Press and book arts/printing design instruction and outreach;
Assessing material to be withdrawn and removed from the BFAL.
The overarching goal of this project is to transform a literal wall of paper into a tailored and discoverable collection of resources that will better serve the Rice community. It is an opportunity for truly hands-on (with gloves, if you like!) collection management and interaction with printed materials.
Reimagining Fondren: A Charrette Study to Redesign Fondren’s North Reading Room to Align with Student Needs
Imagine redesigning one of Rice’s most iconic spaces! Join a hands-on charrette to help reimagine Fondren Library’s North Reading Room as a vibrant hub for learning, collaboration, and connection. Blend creativity, research, and design thinking to shape how the next generation of Owls will study, share ideas, and build campus community.
This project invites a Fondren Fellow to collaborate on a charrette study to reimagine a portion of Fondren Library’s first floor—one of the library’s busiest and most visible spaces. As academic and social needs evolve, this study will investigate how space can be better designed to foster inclusivity, collaboration, and scholarly engagement through the input of students. A charrette is an intensive, collaborative design workshop that brings together stakeholders to generate creative, research-based solutions to spatial challenges. Partnering with the Director of Access Services, the Fellow will employ participatory design methods, space-use analysis, and benchmarking of peer institutions to develop conceptual redesigns and actionable recommendations.
This project is well-suited for the Fondren Fellows program because it combines research, creativity, and community collaboration in service of the library and the broader scholarly community. It exemplifies the program’s emphasis on experiential learning projects that both engage students in authentic research experiences and generate tangible outcomes benefiting Fondren. The Fellow will gain hands-on experience in qualitative research, design thinking, and stakeholder facilitation, while contributing meaningfully to an ongoing institutional effort to align library spaces with Rice’s evolving academic culture.
The project’s impact will be twofold. For Fondren, it will produce research-driven insights into how students experience Fondren, offering data and conceptual design directions to inform future renovation and service planning. For the Fellow, it provides an opportunity to apply design and research skills in a real-world setting, developing a deeper understanding of inclusive space design and participatory engagement within academic environments.
roadsTaken Part II
During the academic year 2022-23, three Fondren Fellows–Josué Alvarenga, Samuel Lee, and Indrani Maitra–helped our team at the Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies and Spatial Studies Lab map the more than 11,000 structures destroyed by highway construction in Houston from 1946-1974. These students then presented their findings at the Black Houston(s) Symposium. Their labor and scholarship helped create the interactive website roadsTaken, which chronicles the first three decades of highway construction and displacement in Houston.
Today, Houston is at a turning point, planners are in the process of building over $10 billion in highway expansions in the urban core of the region. Initial estimates place ongoing displacement at over 600 structures and over 1,000 residents. roadsTaken, as the most comprehensive catalog of historical highway displacements in Houston, with the help of potential summer 2026 Fondren Fellows, will expand its spatial database, which currently ends in 1974, to the present and to near future. Fellows will be invited to become spatial historians for the summer, working to develop the project’s research strategy, their own historical and GIS skills, before mapping and cataloging the people and buildings displaced over the last five decades and in the coming five years. By the end of the second stage of this project roadsTaken will be a complete temporal cartography of the past, present, and near future of transit infrastructure building and displacement in Houston, and the essential resource for scholars and policy-makers interested in the impacts of these displacements on the poor and Houstonians of color.
Since roadsTaken’s publication in the winter of 2024, the roadsTaken team has gathered the materials, both archival and technical, to complete the last 50 years of highway spatial history in Houston. Students will begin work by engaging with current scholarship in this subject from the field of urban and planning history. Students will plan their work with close supervisor guidance, georeference and enrich historical maps and other archival sources, and then extract, classify, and create spatial historical data (using GeoAI and by hand) from these sources. Students will also select a key region or neighborhood of a city and use historical maps, aerials, and newspapers to track its evolution before, during, and after highway construction. Finally, students will create a historical narrative around the spatial data and historical sources they have worked with. At the close of the project, the supervisor will update the interactive map with the fellows’ work and publish their narratives on roadstaken.org.
Teaching Critical Generative AI Evaluation: Developing and Testing an Innovative Framework and Curriculum
Have you ever wondered if ChatGPT is making things up when it helps with your research? Do you want to be at the forefront of tackling one of higher education's most pressing challenges—teaching students how to tell if AI-generated results are trustworthy? This project offers a unique opportunity to shape how thousands of students will learn to critically evaluate AI-generated content, while developing interdisciplinary research skills at the intersection of information science, education, and communication.
As generative AI (GenAI) becomes ubiquitous in the academic life of students, a critical gap has emerged: students lack the skills to evaluate AI-generated content that may contain hallucinated citations, mismatched narratives, embedded biases, and misinformation. Traditional source evaluation methods become insufficient when AI, without transparency of how it works behind the scenes, can fabricate plausible-sounding references and present biased information with the appearance of authoritative confidence.
This summer project builds on a Spring 2026 pilot instructional module of "Evaluating Generative AI Output for Research" at Fondren Library. The project centers on developing a novel framework that teaches students essential skills to verify AI outputs through three complementary checkpoints: source verification, cross-reference checking, and contextual evaluation. Using cases from two academic fields (one in public health and one from the fellow’s own area of expertise), the Fondren Fellow will systematically test and identify common AI error patterns, develop practical evaluation tools and instructional materials, and conduct usability testing of the course content with student volunteers.