Barry Trott, Editor
Julie Elliott, Guest Columnist
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It is clear to anyone in the library profession, and certainly to readers of this column, that readers’ advisory (RA) services have become an important part of libraries. While librarians have worked to connect readers and books throughout the history of libraries, the past eighteen years since the publication of Joyce Saricks’s Readers’ Advisory Service in the Public Library (ALA, 1989, 1997, 2005) have seen a blossoming of RA tools for thoughtful discussion of techniques for working with readers, and, most recently, an expansion of RA to look at nonfiction reading. As Saricks’s title suggests though, this renaissance has been primarily centered in the public library. In this column, Julie Elliott considers the role of RA services in the academic library. She looks at the history of the role of extracurricular reading at colleges and universities. Elliott examines current practices in academic libraries, and outlines the issues that have kept readers’ services from taking a prominent role in academic libraries. Her article concludes with a call for academic libraries to revitalize their approach to readers’ services.
Elliott organizes the One Book, One Campus events at Indiana University-South Bend as well as the library’s speaker series. Elliott is an active participant in the promotion of RA services, and she serves on the Reference and User Services Association Collection Development and Evaluation Section (RUSA CODES) Readers’ Advisory Committee as well as the Library Instruction Round Table’s (LIRT) Conference Program Committee; she is also incoming secretary for the Library Administration and Management’s (LAMA) Public Relations and Marketing Section.–Editor
Information literacy, becoming tech savvy with Library 2.0, and marketing one’s library are common topics of professional library conversation. However, another aspect of college libraries not being discussed is extracurricular reading promotion. Indiana University-South Bend (IUSB) has a One Book, One Campus program, and there are some ongoing recreational reading programs in colleges across the United States, but it was unclear how many were out there. It was also unclear what academic librarians were doing in addition to reading programs to promote extracurricular reading, and if they weren’t promoting extracurricular reading, why not?
To that end, I created a survey and corresponded with academic librarians across the United States to determine what academic libraries are doing to promote extracurricular reading, what barriers are keeping them from promoting it more, and why some of them do not actively promote reading.
To get a better idea of why recreational reading promotion is so scarce in academic libraries, I examined the history of reading promotion in academic librarianship. What I found was that it was not only elitism among past librarians that hampered the concept (or that could impede its future) but rather the same three culprits that hamper just about every project in our profession: budget, staff time, and space.
That is not to say that the idea of reading promotion in academic libraries is a nonstarter. Rather, I discovered that there are many librarians dedicated to the idea who have found creative methods of getting past the barriers of budget, time, and space to create programs and collections of value for their students, faculty, and staff. I also learned that nearly everyone I interviewed wants to continue the conversation and to begin collaborating with our public library colleagues to learn from their experience how to create better recreational reading resources for our students. Please visit appendix A for links to collections and activities by librarians interviewed in this article. I’d like to suggest that anyone interested in continuing the conversation via a wiki, discussion list, or other method to please e-mail me at: jmfelli@iusb.edu.
History of Extracurricular Reading Promotion in Academic Libraries
Encouraging extracurricular reading used to be a component of an academic library’s mission. In “Recreational Reading in Academic Browsing Rooms,” Janelle Zauha wrote that in the 1920s and 1930s, the “promotion of reading was considered one of the important functions of the college librarian.”1 Zauha noted that university libraries were quick to add reading rooms into their buildings–”For example, by 1939, there were no less than four recreational reading collections located throughout the University of Iowa campus in ‘browsing’ libraries … these were described in the library handbook, which vigorously promoted enjoyment of reading as ‘the king of sports.’”2
In 1926, Rollins College named Edwin Osgood Grover, the director of their library, the first “Professor of Books.”3 Grover, who taught a course in recreational reading, was very popular with students, who appreciated his open-minded approach to literature. He was also responsible for creating the only bookstore in town, the Bookery.4 Academic libraries also encouraged recreational reading by offering prizes for the students with the best personal book collections, the idea being that if a student owned a good collection of books, he or she would be more likely to read them.5
In the 1930s and 1940s, there were a number of studies done to determine the amount of time college students spent in recreational reading. The definitions of recreational reading varied–some studies included newspapers and magazines, some did not; the key definition tended to be that it was reading not connected to coursework. In 1948, a study of students at the University of Illinois found that the average student spent approximately four hours a week in recreational reading (including magazines and newspapers) and that “two thirds of the students read one or less books a month outside of class assignments.”6 A 1951 study by Willard Abraham found that college students were spending between two to eight hours a week on extracurricular reading, with seniors reading more than freshman.7
Although by the 1960s extracurricular reading in academic libraries was starting to decline, Morgan State College (now University) began in the 1961-1962 school year what could be considered the first One Book, One Campus or Campus Community Read program ever. The Book-of-the-Month Reading Program was started by college president Martin Jenkins, who provided all faculty and students with copies of the same books on a bimonthly basis, scheduled discussions, and showed related films.8 Librarians such as Virginia Richardson were involved in the implementation committee for the program and created displays of materials related to the selected books. The program was very successful, with Jenkins noting that “this innovation has brought a new intellectual vigor to our campus.”9
The Decline
A number of college theses in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s examined the rate of student extracurricular reading of materials from the college libraries. By the 1950s, the results were indicating that students were not making use of the material, and that faculty did not always expect the students to use their library for such purposes. In her 1957 dissertation, Patricia Knapp quotes a faculty member as saying, “Not too much recreational reading is expected here. Mostly they’re shunted to the public library for that.”10 Knapp concludes that:
The negligible amount of use of the library for non-course purposes suggests that resources, in financial support and staff time and effort, should be devoted primarily to support of the curricular program … It should be remembered that the college population is basically different from the self-selected clientele of the public library. The kinds of promotional activities which attracts [ sic ] perhaps 10 percent of the community to use the public library reach an even smaller proportion of the college population since even most of the “natural readers” among college students get at least their normal quota of reading in connection with course work.11
Part of what may have led to the decline in students’ extracurricular reading is an attitude of elitism and even hints of censorship in the name of selection on the part of the librarians recommending the books. Several academic librarians writing articles on reading promotion from the 1920s through the 1950s made regrettable predictions on whose works would last the test of time and whose would not. “How can the groping reader confide in those who hailed the tangled web of William Faulkner’s Fable as if it were the fifth Gospel?” complains one academic librarian in the 1950s.12 An author writing of the reading habits of students of Wellesley College in the 1920s notes with pride that while the students may have been fooled into enjoying one Fitzgerald novel, they knew better than to pick up a second: “If an occasional This Side of Paradise finds an eager audience, it is because for the moment she thinks she sees her contemporaries as they really are. She is not slow to discover her mistake, and when The Beautiful and the Damned comes along … it is unnoticed.”13 A history of this kind of attitude has dissuaded some current academic librarians from ever considering RA as part of their job.
Perhaps the largest issue in the decline is something academic librarians of today can also relate to–ever-increasing demands on one’s professional time and library resources. As Arthur P. Sweet wrote in 1960, “In large research libraries … the volume of business, the variety of materials, and the number of services to patrons increase year by year in greater ratio than the increase in staff.”14
In addition to increased responsibilities, fewer staff, and changing technologies such as television, academic librarians in the late 1950s were trying to brace themselves for the first wave of Baby Boomers, who they referred to as the rising tide. In addition to the effect of expanding services for students on the promotion of recreational reading, space in the library was also becoming an issue. Clifton Brock wrote, “In the past, libraries have struggled to find places to put their books. In the future they will also have to find space to put their students.”15
In his 1957 report, “College and Research Libraries in a Decade of Decision,” Paul C. Reinert, S.J., then president of St. Louis University and a member of President Eisenhower’s Committee on Education Beyond the High School, noted that academic librarians needed to “accelerate the flight from cheap TV programs and other forms of entertainment” enjoyed by college students and steer them toward reading, especially to encourage the students to become active public library users after their graduation.16 Reinert concludes that with budget pressures, his theory of “education for leisure” will be difficult to make a reality: “with the press of numbers, with the inevitable tendency to give in to a passive, ‘filling station’ type of education with too much emphasis on television and mass consumption–the importance of books may be more and more difficult to promote.”17
Others argued that by the 1970s, library schools’ tendency to downplay RA led to a decline in reading promotion not just in academic libraries, but in all libraries. “A primary reason for the decline in readers’ advisory service (and this is true not just in public, but in academic, school, and special libraries as well), is that in a very few years the book has become de-emphasized … Reading is just not fashionable in the library world anymore.”18 Taking its place, authors such as Money noted, was the focus on new technologies.
Not all the news about college libraries and extracurricular reading in the past fifty years has been negative. Paul Wiener, in his 1982 article, “Recreational Reading Services in Academic Libraries: An Overview,” noted that in a survey sent to 110 academic library directors, he found that “the majority of academic libraries are providing services to meet the recreational, or leisure, reading interests of their patrons.”19 The most common method he found by which college libraries were meeting this need was through the browsing room, but the usual suspects–”lack of money, lack of staff, space, or interest on campus”–were the reasons why some libraries did not provide any recreational reading service.20 Wiener also noted that providing RA service in academic libraries was not just for students’ benefit, but should be considered for faculty and staff as well.21 The author concluded by noting that, “Rather than treat recreational reading as an altogether superfluous function of the academic library, as it has been treated historically, it must be considered a necessary and inevitable element of service, if the academic library is to fulfill its role of satisfying the educational needs of its users.”22
In 1993, Zauha argued that browsing rooms that were the main source of extracurricular reading promotion were being neglected by academic libraries, and were in danger of disappearing:
Today, browsing rooms perform this service with far less institutional support than they once had, and with much less professional publicity. As a consequence, browsing rooms are endangered. Unless their function in the university and their value to the student are reasserted and promoted, browsing rooms will go the way of all “additional services” in times of scarce money.23
She also noted that during the heyday of the browsing room, these areas were staffed by librarians at an RA desk, and that this had slowly changed to the rooms being staffed by “paraprofessionals and/or students, or they are not staffed at all.”24 Calling browsing rooms “the remains of a more text-centered era,” she argued that they still could serve a very important public relations function as well as an intellectual one:
Increased need for external funding means the academic library must be more interested now that ever before in selling itself to alumni and friends groups. The browsing room, with its congenial atmosphere and its potential as a showcase for the newest jewels of the collection, is the perfect location for programs which serve the double function of promoting the library while assisting with book collection and reader guidance.25
As the decades progressed through the 1980s and into the new millennium, the demands on librarians’ time and library resources expanded. In addition to dealing with growing numbers of students, now librarians had to address the technology boom. This shift led to a need for academic librarians to instruct students on how best to manage their information choices. “The role of helping people access content has grown so much, we didn’t mean to push out readers’ advisory,” said Barbara MacAdam, director of the Graduate Library at the University of Michigan. “[I]t is just that the accessing content part of the job has expanded so greatly … Readers’ advisory in academic libraries has changed in that with all [the] technology that has changed, our role has changed. Technology has changed how we work and think.”26