joy at moll projects dot com
I was interviewed, along with a freshman and a professor, for an article about Wikipedia in the student paper, Student Life. We all cautioned against citing the articles in academic work. I'm pretty sure I said that one should cite scholarly sources, not primary ones--oh, well. I also wish I had managed to highlight the many great alternatives we have for obtaining background information--including the online Encyclopedia Britannica and our print reference section, including an amazing selection of subject encyclopedias. I might have even mentioned one of my favorite methods for getting an overview of a topic: children's books--we can get them through Mobius (our state-wide consortium) or students can utilize one of the local public libraries.
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Well, I'm not posting this in the middle of the night, but I did work it all out when I couldn't sleep the night after I got back from the conference.
ReadMOre is a one state / one book campaign for the state of Missouri. The ReadMOre selection for 2007 was announced at the MLA Annual Business Meeting on Thursday: Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell. The book is set in Missouri and written by a Missouri author whose prose is described by Publisher's Weekly as "lyrical as often as dialogic."
According to the announcer, ReadMOre events can take place at any time and by any entity, but they tend to peak during National Library Week at libraries. I was a little disappointed by the lack of attention to National Library Week at my library in 2006. But it's understandable, it comes at a lousy time of year for students--just before finals. ReadMOre is not a particularly good draw for students anyway, since many of them are transient in our state.
So, that brings me to my idea. Why not have National Library Week events featuring the ReadMOre book but aim it at staff instead of students? The staff of Washington University are mostly Missourians (with a fair number commuting in from Illinois) and they aren't, as a group, swamped with assignments in April. Staff, unlike faculty and students, are often not aware that they have library privileges, so a promotion directed at them might improve our visibility to a large section of our community.
There are lots of formats this could take. My thought was for the library to host brown bag lunches each day of National Library Week with a discussion of a different aspect of the book. That way, staff could come on any one day or all five. The library could provide drinks and cookies and a library staff member could lead the discussion.
Labels: outreach
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