Reference Services to Incarcerated People

NYPL’s Jail and Prison Services serves individuals within New York’s Department of Corrections and nationwide. One of the services they offer is answering reference requests via snail-mail. I assisted with this, answering three letters from individuals whose access to information is greatly restricted due to incarceration within the US prison system.

Customized to the information requests of each individual letter, I curated both open- and closed-source online resources into 18 pages of text, images, and charts. Definitions and key points were visually highlighted, and information was formatted with consideration to the uses and needs expressed by each patron, as well as potential barriers due to incarceration.