You have reached post #100 on the Books We Read site, an exciting milestone for this project. Reviewing 18 months of our work through 99 blog posts illustrates how the world has changed since August 2019, when we launched this site.
The project was born in the Chang Science Library aiming to serve mostly our users on the Cook Campus. The goal was to promote library resources and services via book recommendations to read for pleasure. Now in its fifth semester in Spring 2021, Books We Read seems to have come a long way and has a lot more to offer, shown in a brief timeline.
Sharing students class projects in the Chang Science Library in the summer of 2019 was quickly followed by displaying galleries of the mini-posters created by SEBS students ins courses such as Spring 2019 PASS course and Fall 2019 Academic Mentoring course.
Still on campus, we hosted two Harry Potter Days at Chang in September, 2019 (see our story and pictures) and in February, 2020 (story, pictures). We opened our Little Free Library in Foran Hall in February 2020 for a successful month, only to start blogging about books during the time of corona four days later.
We were honored to be chosen as library co-hosts of the SEBS Science Café and had a few successful events (pictures), the last one during the week before the shutdown.
The invitation to run the Summer Tales Virtual Reading Club during the Summer Session acknowledged our work in the previous semesters, with our event Meet the Author as one of the highlights. We were honored to host the discussion with renowned author Joyce Carol Oates in the summer of 2020, and of course, we all shared our individual reflections on the program.
In the Fall of 2020, the extended Books We Read team had a chance to blog about broader projects and virtual events, as we partnered with the New Brunswick Libraries and other Rutgers groups. Those who were unable to participate appreciated the six posts related to Banned Books and the six posts on Urban Sketching, promoting and documenting the event. Guest bloggers included librarians Nancy Kranich and Megan Lotts.
As we discovered when looking at site stats recently, the most popular blog post of all times was a guest post entitled From Humans to Gods: a Trip Through the History of Humankind written by Susana Echeverri Herrera, a Reference Assistant at Douglass. The next two popular ones are Summer: Time for Audiobooks and Classics for the Coronavirus.
The most popular book review-type posts on a single title (a.k.a. staff picks) were Staff Pick: One Hundred Years of Solitude written by Nick Allred and Summer Reads: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. by Judit Ward. The most frequently visited ones featuring collections were Audiobooks for Quarantine, Escapist Reads: Fantasy Edition, and Summer with New Jersey books and authors.
We blogged about our interview series featuring Special Collections with an eye towards how to best use their resources at SEBS during the spring semester. Then, in Fall 2020, we launched a new topic called Science Communication. The ten posts included two by guests Stephanie Bartz and Megan Lotts and we have others committed to write on science. This series sneaks in some information literacy while covering topics of common interest, such as predatory publishing, citizen science, and marijuana resources at Rutgers.
To balance all that serious academic material, we also posted several fun stories in our virtual stressbuster series, including a popular one welcoming the new DOTUS, aka Presidential Dogs. The number of posts tagged in the top three categories, RUGRAT (65), Cook Reads (50), and Little Free Library (43) indicates that we haven’t strayed too far from the original goal of the project. See all categories in the pull-down menu on the right or in the footer.
We are grateful to our partners, especially the SEBS Communications Team, who continue to share our posts on their social media platform reaching out to large audiences.