Professor Burek Pierce teaches courses that support students developing careers in children's books, youth services, book history, and special collections and archives.  Public-facing course projects, or ones that result in publications and visible work with community partners, have long shaped her classes.  In recent semesters, students in Reading Culture:  History & Research in Print & Digital Media, have developed blog posts for UI Special Collections, which can be located there with the From the Classroom tag.  Students in Resources for Children now share their course readings via Instagram, and those posts can be located using #slis5220.

Questions about how changes in media change how books, information, and ideas are shared have shaped her research, and Prof. Burek Pierce is invested in library use as a facet of this issue.  She has presented research at the American Philosophical Society's Evidence:  The Use and Misuse of Data seminar, the Center for Middletown Studies' Library Circulation History Workshop, and the Open University of London's Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic conference.  She also participates in the Society for the History for Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, as well as ALA's Library History Round Table (LHRT).  Prof. Burek Pierce has won LHRT's 2021 Winsor Award for her developing research on mid-century public libraries and its Davis Award for her 2016 Information & Culture article, "The Reign of Children:  The Role of Toys and Games in American Public Libraries, 1876-1925."  Her most recent book about John Green and the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel, Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media, was published by the University of Iowa Press.