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Public libraries serve patrons who mainly live within food desert areas. Libraries are now redefining their services by examining how they can better meet their users' needs. One is educating patrons on how to obtain and sustain healthy food choices. Another, is by eradicating food deserts within their communities.

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields are a major component of our society and student success in STEM can lead to important opportunities and future careers. STEM education programs are important components to get children and youths interested in STEM fields and to instill in them STEM concepts. This paper describes two successful Ohio urban STEM programs, produced as collaborations between public libraries and higher education institutions. Cleveland's Mean Green Science Machine focused on middle and high school-aged children while The Ohio State University (OSU) Science Café in Columbus focused on preschool and elementary school-aged children for its summer sessions. Recommendations for best practices for creating children's programming using STEM is provided.

The methods we use to learn about our user communities are critical to shaping our understanding of their library experiences, expectations, and needs. Professional librarians are overwhelmingly white and middle class, which means that we must be particularly thoughtful in how we learn about, learn from, and engage with user communities that have traditionally been underserved. Specifically, we must ensure that we are mindful of learning about underserved user communities from their perspective(s) rather than applying the perspectives of the majority. In academic librarianship, we have learned about traditionally underserved student populations, such as students of color and first-generation students, through quantitative and basic qualitative interviews. While this research has provided an important foundation for understanding the library experiences and needs of these students, it has not provided information about the arc of their library experiences and how their past experiences may shape their present and future library use.In this presentation, we introduce Seidman’s (2013) phenomenological interviewing and how it was modified and applied to two research studies exploring the experiences of traditionally underserved student populations—first-generation students and Black/African-American students—at two large research universities in the Midwest. Phenomenological interviewing requires the researcher to consider the research participants’ histories and lived experiences as they relate to the phenomenon being explored. Seidman outlines a three interview series, which includes understanding the participants’ historical experiences with the phenomenon being explored, their present experiences with the phenomenon, and, finally, a reflection on the meaning of those experiences. In each of the two studies introduced in this presentation, Seidman’s three-interview series was modified to design a 60-75-minute, semi-structured interview protocol.Finally, we highlight significant findings for each of the two studies and discuss how we believe the use of phenomenological interviewing allowed us to gather, analyze, and interpret rich, complex, and nuanced sets of data that contribute to and transform our professional and scholarly knowledge about these user communities.