BATAVIA/Citizen Science Saturdays- reaching out to the community at the Richmond Memorial Library

Library Assistant Kelly March presented her last Citizen Science Saturday Presentation on the Solar Eclipse on Saturday. March has been educating kids and adults of all ages since October after receiving a grant to fund becoming part of the SciStarter Citizen and Community Science Library Network.

The Richmond Memorial Library has joined with other libraries across the country and is helping people take an active role in finding solutions to science-based issues by encouraging citizen science projects, kits, and events.

“They have many resources online (link Libraries – SciStarter) and they reached out to me because they loved seeing what I was doing, so they’ve been reaching out for ways to support us here in Batavia. They sponsored an astronomer to zoom in with us for free, they’ve helped us build the solar science kits that we circulate and helped us build the pollinator kits that we will be releasing in May,” says March.

In return, SciStarter provided the library with 2,000 solar eclipse glasses and the library then provided several presentations on eye safety for people who plan to view the solar eclipse. Besides educating the community, March has participated in interviews with graduate and PHD students, and interviews with people online, including Science Friday on NPR.

After the Solar Eclipse on Monday, March will continue with Citizen Science Saturday.

In May, a Pollinator Project will start and last through August. It’s geared towards school age kids, adults. Citizen Science Saturday is the first Saturday of the month. Adult classes are at 11:00a.m. at the Richmond Library and Kids and Family classes are at 12:30p.m.

In the Fall, March is possibly looking at the topic of Light Pollution.

“We’ve seen people receptive to the concept and wanting to participate more. Whether it’s through science teachers, science nerds, science fans in the area, they really embraced the whole crowdsourcing piece of science, to help scientists and the world for certain studies.”

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