Book Clubs in Academic Libraries: A Case Study and Toolkit

Johanna Jacobsen Kiciman, Alaina C. Bull, and Kari Whitney

Book Clubs in Academic Libraries: A Case Study and Toolkit by Johanna Jacobsen Kiciman and Alaina C. Bull is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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Executive Summary

This toolkit is designed to inform the academic librarian or staff member about book clubs hosted in an academic library.  The toolkit guides academic librarians and staff through building meaningful and effective book clubs at their institutions through an overview of extant literature, the results of a cross-institutional survey, a case-study, and through a series of best practices.  It provides the academic librarian and staff with language about the vision and value of such a program.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the University of Washington Tacoma Library for supporting this programming, to the UW Tacoma Center for Equity and Inclusion for being a strong partner, and to the participants of our pilot, from whom we learned so much.

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Introduction

In Autumn 2018, the University of Washington Tacoma Library and the University of Washington Tacoma Center of Equity and Inclusion launched the pilot program of Real Lit[erature]: Reading for Social Justice, a book club in an academic setting with a focus on young adult fiction.

Real Lit[erature] is envisioned as a thematic reading and discussion program that engages the campus community through literature-based outreach.

The goals of Real Lit were to create a greater awareness and discussion of the experiences that are being had by our students, staff, and community members. By interacting with narratives that reflect different experiences, it has provided opportunities to dialogue with peers about shared and disparate experiences.   Additional benefits include creating community by reducing isolation, and enhancing campus education through peer-based discussion groups.

After a successful pilot, Real Lit[erature] will now be offered quarterly.

The lessons learned from the pilot are myriad, and we wanted to share with our academic librarian colleagues some of the key takeaways. From collaboration to marketing, from book selection to frameworks for anti-oppressive facilitation, we believe our experience and strategies offer a strong foundation for a toolkit.

Why a toolkit?

There are two primary reasons for creating such a toolkit:

1. To promote this sort of programming within academic libraries by highlighting benefits and outcomes; and

2. To support open access resources within the library community as a way to underscore the importance of resource availability.

Promotion of this sort of programming

We believe that this sort of programming offers multiple benefits to academic campuses:

1. Building campus community by increasing empathy

2. Creating closer connections to students, faculty, and staff over literature, which in turn may facilitate future library interactions

3. Increase campus visibility through programming

4. Highlight library services and programming, instead of library resources

Open Access

We  firmly believe in the importance of open access publishing, which we define as a research output that is distributed free of cost and available readily online.  In addition, we have added a creative commons license to promote reuse.

Why? Restricting access to academic research through paywalls and subscriptions to journals poses an unnecessary fiscal burden on smaller institutions; this, in turn favors wealthier institutions.  By promoting open access, we are advocating for greater equality in access to information.

In what follows, we present a case study of creating a social justice oriented book club at the University of Washington Tacoma.

There is a ballooning of articles on book clubs in academic libraries over the past few years, indicative, perhaps, of the growing engagement and role that academic libraries are playing in the extracurricular programming arena.  Though many similarities emerge (incentivizing through providing books and refreshments), the goals of the clubs differed substantially.

Several broader themes emerged:

1. book clubs to increase reading engagement;

2. book clubs to promote interpersonal communication

3. book clubs to promote dialogic learning; and

4. book clubs for community building.

In order to situate the UW Tacoma Library book club within the parameters of what is happening professionally on a national level, we conducted a web scan of extant academic book clubs in the United States. The “state of the field” is important in so much as it helps us determine whether our work is unique or not, or whether we are acting as part of a larger, emergent trend.

What we found:fiction-based book clubs that are sponsored or run by academic libraries in the United States seem to be limited in number.

Below we present the details on limitations, methodology, and results.

What follows is a roadmap for academic library staff to follow in trying to create a fiction-based book club at their academic library.

The appendices that follow share with the reader some of our documents, documentation, and operational materials.

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