When librarians team up with first-year Duke engineers, archives inspire innovation
By Aaron Welborn, Director of Communications
Next time you visit Perkins Library, expect to be greeted with a smile.
You’ll find it waiting in a display case near the entrance—a gleaming set of artificial teeth kept in perfect pearly whiteness by a machine that brushes them for you.
If that sounds odd or even a little creepy, you should see the grill that inspired it.
This curious dental doohickey is a toothbrush tester, designed and built by Duke students. It’s part of a new library exhibit on the archives of Consumer Reports, the nonprofit consumer education and advocacy organization that’s been putting everything from toasters to tires through their paces since 1936.
When Duke’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired the papers of Consumer Reports in 2019, the collection came with dozens of bizarrely wonderful contraptions—including the original, old-fangled toothbrush tester, a Rube Goldberg-esque device sporting a truly nightmarish set of choppers.
There was also a lipstick tester, razor blade tester, tissue tester, even a condom tester—each one custom-built by Consumer Reports staff engineers to assess the effectiveness, durability, and value of different consumer products.
Once these devices entered the archives, they became historical artifacts—ingenious examples of engineering in the public interest, no longer for actual use (tempting though it may be to plug them in and see what happens).
Still, for classes visiting the Rubenstein Library, it would be nice to offer some idea of how they worked. That was the thinking of Joshua Larkin Rowley, Research Services Librarian with the Rubenstein’s Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History. Rowley regularly uses Consumer Reports materials in his instruction sessions, and he’s part of the team that put together the new library exhibit—Test, Inform, Protect: The Consumer Reports Archive at Duke University—the first public showcase of this massive collection since it arrived at Duke.
Rowley loves sharing the testing equipment with students. But he has long wished he could demonstrate the machines in action—to help students appreciate Consumer Reports’ scientific rigor and make the learning experience come alive.
For help, he turned to Duke’s own budding in-house engineers. Rowley submitted a proposal to the First-Year Design program in the Pratt School of Engineering.
Each incoming class of Pratt undergrads is required to take First-Year Design (EGR 101). The course divides students into teams and matches them with “clients” around campus and the local community who have real-world design problems in need of solutions. Rowley’s challenge: build a modern-day toothbrush tester that replicates the original’s functionality, is safe to operate, and could invite hands-on interaction in the classroom. If it worked, it might even appear in the upcoming exhibit.
Luckily, he got a bite.
Four first-year Pratt students—Jonathan Ransom, Bryan Chan, Gulnoza Abdurashidova, and Ewa Adebayo-Oke—formed the “Consumer Reports Team.” All four are electrical and computer engineering majors, and they were intrigued by both the technical complexity of the project and the promise of seeing their work exhibited in one of Duke’s busiest public spaces.
The team met regularly with Rowley, who served as their “client,” updating him throughout the semester as they defined the engineering challenges, conducted research, brainstormed ideas, prototyped, and tested designs. They also consulted with Exhibits Librarian Meg Brown about exhibit safety and display standards. And they got some unexpected help when Rowley arranged a video session with Misha Kollontai, an actual testing engineer at Consumer Reports, who offered feedback on their work-in-progress and answered questions about the organization’s work today.
When the students finally unveiled their functioning toothbrush tester—complete with a homemade blend of dental “plaque” that gets scrubbed away with the push of a button—Rowley and his colleagues were all smiles.
You can see the device for yourself in the new Chappell Family Gallery exhibit, on view through early June 2026. After the exhibit comes down, the tester will have a new life in Rubenstein Library instruction sessions about the Consumer Reports Archive.
Aside from the chance to ruminate on their own oral hygiene, the experience gave the Pratt undergrads a new appreciation for the extensive design and testing that goes into everyday products we take for granted. It also drove home the importance of what libraries and archives do, preserving hard-won knowledge for posterity.
After all, as any dentist will remind you, you don’t have to brush your teeth. Just the ones you want to keep.
In early 2025, Duke University launched the most significant fundraising and engagement campaign in its history. Made For This: The Duke Campaign will engage alumni and friends to accelerate progress in areas where Duke can make the greatest difference for the world—advancing innovation through science and technology, creating a more sustainable planet, shaping students as next-generation leaders, and advancing healthcare to help communities thrive.
The comprehensive campaign will support key priorities across the university, with a goal of raising $125 million for the Duke University Libraries.
There’s no shortage of buzz about the good, the bad, and the ugly of AI’s impacts. Much of the conversation swings between extremes—either AI-hype or doomsday predictions about world-ending robots—without as much attention to the subtler human and social dimensions of these technologies. At a liberal arts institution like Duke, our team saw an opportunity to explore AI from a more humanistic perspective.
Generative AI can still feel like a taboo topic, and both faculty and students struggle to determine where the line is between acceptable and inappropriate use. The toolkit doesn’t address that question head- on. Instead, it offers nuanced and creative ways to spark meaningful conversations about AI use in the classroom. The term AI literacy can be unhelpfully broad, but it refers to understanding how these technologies work “under the hood” and recognizing their broader societal impacts. By helping faculty and students engage critically and thoughtfully with AI, the toolkit encourages curiosity, reflection, and ethical awareness—approaches that will help students make informed, responsible decisions about when and how to use AI tools. The toolkit also helps normalize conversations about AI, supporting Duke’s broader commitment to fostering ethical engagement with AI.
My first experience with ChatGPT’s limitations came in 2023, when I encountered one of its now-famous citation “hallucinations.” In that moment, I realized two things: 1) everyone would be clamoring to use this tool for research and information-seeking, and 2) libraries would have a critical role in helping users understand the limitations of this seemingly magical technology.
We shared the toolkit with Thompson Writing Program faculty at the beginning of the fall 2025 semester, and many appreciated having simple, ready-made entry points for talking about AI with their students. Sometimes getting over the initial hump—simply naming AI in the classroom—opens the door to important conversations with students. In collaboration with one writing instructor, we tried out a toolkit activity in which students used ChatGPT to generate a bibliography for their research topics. One group discovered that every citation had been fabricated, which brought home the lesson about the need to fact-check AI-generated information carefully. Another faculty member shared that she and her students had created a collaborative AI policy together after I visited their class.
The students on our design team felt that concise, provocative questions offered more engaging hooks for their peers. A prompt like “Is AI theft?” sparks curiosity more quickly than a more formal question like “What are the impacts of AI on the copyright landscape?” Even though both essentially ask the same thing.
Be skeptical and fact-check any suspicious information. If it seems too good or too easy to be true, it probably is! Fact-checking can be as simple as opening a new browser tab and looking into the author, organization, or claim that you find suspicious. I think this process of fact-checking will become one of the most important twenty-first-century research skills. To help with this, I created something called the SNIFF test, to provide a framework for evaluating AI-generated information:
Information requires context. In an era where much of what we consume comes through social media feeds or AI-generated summaries, we’re experiencing what you could call a “context collapse.” We see snippets of information, detached from their sources, and the constant deluge of content can make it harder to pause, verify, and critically evaluate what we’re seeing. From misinformation and disinformation to AI hallucinations and deepfakes, students and faculty increasingly look to the library for help navigating this complex information landscape. That’s part of our mission. Unlike AI chatbots trained on terabytes of largely uncurated internet data, the library’s carefully curated collections—and the expertise of the people who steward them—offer depth, reliability, and perspective that AI alone can’t replace.
In her own lifetime, Austen was relatively unknown. When her first novel Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, its author was simply identified as “a Lady.” Her subsequent books were also published anonymously. Yet from those unobtrusive beginnings emerged one of the most popular and canonized voices in all of English literature.