Purpose & Goals

Falvey Library at Villanova University launched our Popular Reading Pilot Program in February 2024. As part of our ongoing strategic mission to enrich and encourage the continuous development of our students, we began efforts to identify vendor options and form a volunteer student selection committee in Fall 2023. By engaging student volunteers, we hope to ensure that the library leases titles that will be of interest to their peers. It was important to library staff to engage our student community in the selection of book titles, format, and circulation policies. Because the mission of this project is to serve student wellness and not add any stress, we wanted to ensure that volunteer commitment levels were manageable and circulation times were reasonable. We communicate asynchronously, primarily using a Microsoft Teams page for student selectors, with moderation from library staff. The result was a leased collection of approximately 400 print books from Baker & Taylor, with ongoing student involvement as we maintain the collection and rotate in 15 or so new titles per month. We plan to assess the pilot over one calendar year before officially committing to Popular Reading as a permanent part of our library. This poster will address assessment methods used to initially develop the pilot, to refine the pilot over the next year, and the datapoints we will assess when determining whether to adopt this pilot program permanently in February 2025.

Design & Methodology

Datapoints include: Circulations to assess popularity of titles selected, number of overdue books to assess appropriateness of loan term, student feedback regarding book format preferences (print, e-book, audiobook, or some combination of the three), student feedback regarding Student Selection Committee engagement preferences (synchronous vs. asynchronous, software used, reasonable time commitment), source of book recommendations (Student Selectors, online suggestion form, physical suggestion box in library), online user engagement with Popular Reading on the library website, requests for Fiction vs. Non-Fiction, requests by genre. - Environmental scan of academic library literature to see if other universities are engaging students as selectors

Findings

At the time of the conference, our pilot year will not have concluded (2/5/2024 - 2/4/2025), but we will have some preliminary findings and trends to share. Circulation has been very high in the first month of the pilot, and we are interested to see if this level of engagement is sustainable, or if it tapers based on the length of the pilot or time of the academic year.

Action & Impact

The pilot has already drawn our attention to other issues. For example, we have received many suggestions for books that are already available in Main Stacks or as e-books. As a result, we’ve updated our Popular Reading landing page, signage, and added an explanation of where to seek other reading material within the library as a physical FAQ list in the Popular Reading shelves. Our Communications Team is working on a video tutorial for finding popular reading, especially fiction, within Main Stacks. Finally, we now maintain a public list, available on VUfind, of student suggestions available in Main Stacks. We look forward to seeing if this increases the circulation of these books in our Main Stacks collection too.

Practical Implications & Value

We hope to provide guidance to other universities looking to engage volunteer student selectors. This pilot has already included many surprises and taught library staff a lot about our student body – for example, there was a strong preference for leisure reading in print over digital formats. In light of the pressures on university students, especially in these years immediately following COVID-19 lockdowns, we hope that our experience can inform other universities in supporting their student body’s well-being and non-academic interests.