LibGuides’ Usage Stimulates an Essential Civic Duty: Voting

During the 2020 election and in the run up to the 2022 midterms, Nancy Kranich worked to encourage voter participation with Sherri Farber, information literacy librarian at New Brunswick Libraries, by compiling and updating a useful LibGuide. It contains information about registration, early voting, polling, voting news, your rights, and more. This effort is allied with the Eagleton Institute’s Center for Youth Political Participation and RU Voting, a nonpartisan effort to register, mobilize and engage Rutgers University students to participate in politics and vote in local, state and national elections. Relatedly, in 2020 she organized a discussion on voter suppression that included panelist and historian David Greenberg in conjunction with the documentary, “Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook.” The Voter Guide built on their Census 2020 guide that was embraced across Middlesex County in its efforts to improve on previous undercounts in New Brunswick. More recently, she has planned a series of community-based conversations in East Brunswick at the public library: one on immigration, one on diversity, one on single-use plastics and one on Earth Day 2023. And, during Fall 2022, as a trustee of the Highland Park Public Library, she conducted community conversations in preparation for the public library’s strategic planning process.