As the new semester gets ready to kick off, among other things, I’m getting ready for a new Project SEARCH intern. In preparation, we’re thinking about the work they might do at the library, including working on our sensory room.
Which brings me to the topic of this post: the sensory room itself. Before I get too deep into things, I want to add the disclaimer that I’ve only tangentially worked on the sensory room; it’s really my boss who’s done the bulk of the work, and all credit really should go to her. Now onto the post!
First of all, what is a sensory room? You can read the Wikipedia article on sensory rooms for yourself to learn more about some of the theory. The goals for our sensory room were to provide a place for library visitors to find stress relief, relax and work through emotions, and use items related to different sensory experiences.
To get this project going, we needed a combination of administrative buy-in, funding, and direction. Again, my supervisor was responsible for all of this while I mainly just looked on from afar. We luckily had a donor interested in funding a sensory room, so the preliminary phase of the project largely involved researching sensory rooms elsewhere to develop a plan for how ours would work. This included drawing up a set of guidelines for use of the room and a list of items to purchase.
You can find a complete list of what our sensory room includes online, but I’ll say here that it covers a wide range of items. There are different sorts of seating options, including a bean bug chair and the very popular egg chair (very similar to the Oberlin College Library womb chairs). There are also all sorts of lighting options, including a dimmer switch for the overhead lights, a light therapy lamp, and a hanging fiber optic light that changes colors. There are then all different kinds of sensory tools and toys, ranging from a weighted shoulder wrap to coloring books to a meditation tool in the shape of a sloth to a Bop It.
The room is decorated with sensory artwork—designs with different textures and colors. My boss also recently added a mosaic-like piece where visitors can follow numbers (in a paint-by-numbers style) and use different colored stickers to create a design together. We also have another space on the wall where visitors can provide feedback with sticky notes—people usually leave nice messages, which are fun to read.
As for how the room runs, we specifically have left it unlocked and without a reservation system, with the idea being that you won’t be able to predict when you’ll need a moment to regroup and therefore won’t be able to make a reservation ahead of time. The room allows for use by multiple people at a time, but there’s also the option to lock the door for thirty minutes. There are also sanitizing wipes available to sanitize anything that gets used.
In terms of maintenance, student workers or our Project SEARCH intern also sanitize high-touch items in the room. They are also responsible for completing an inventory of the room and noting down anything that’s missing or broken. In general, things going missing or breaking have been the biggest challenges we’ve had. We keep the room locked during the late-night hours to try to counteract this.
Overall, the sensory room has been a success. We’ve seen a lot of use just walking by and noting whether or not the door is closed. The feedback left by visitors has been nice to receive. We also have an online feedback form for those who don’t want to leave a sticky note. This feedback can be used to make changes to the room and to know what’s working well. Again, mostly from the sidelines, it’s been a project to get the sensory room up and running, but it has been worth it and does appear to be meeting a need.
As an aside, we also have sensory kits available for check out that work on similar principles. They include things like noise cancelling headphones, fidgets, and meditation tools. These are also inventoried and charged by student workers or interns, sometimes at the same time as they’re sanitizing and reorganizing the sensory room.
Do you have any unique or innovative spaces in your library? How were they set up? How have they been received? What challenges have you dealt with?
Although I took one psycho-linguistics course in undergrad (very interesting, by the way), I never thought I would be able to apply the theories and examples I learned in that class to real-life. As I navigated my first-year of academic librarianship in a bilingual French-English institution, I slowly began to accumulate routines and activities that worked for me the most. With French being my third language, I wanted to take this post to share strategies and tips that helped me in my first year to improve my French more than it ever has.
Identifying Needs
Something that I found to be helpful is to organize my own personal needs in recognizing what skills I lacked the most. For me, they were conversational and oral skills, especially during bilingual meetings or when listening to presentations. Identifying a set of words that were commonly used within everyday work was something I quickly recognized that helped immensely in these everyday situations. In addition, really getting myself out there in terms of French training, lectures, workshops, events, conferences, symposiums and volunteering for co-teaching and shadowing opportunities were other ways to quickly be exposed to an immersed setting.
Confidence
Frenglish is definitely real. I use Konglish (Korean+English) quite often with my family, but I always thought that my French had to be perfect before I opened my mouth, especially in professional settings. If there is something I learned this year, it really is that trying is often enough! I often think about my parents when I think I speak broken French. When they first immigrated to Canada, they must have also felt this fear and wall in communication, accents, and judgement. Most people are simply just grateful that I am trying to speak and communicate, and often to help them! My favourite memory from a teaching session is a student coming up to me after and thanking me for learning French. These little fragments of memory and experiences really motivate me in wanting to learn and refine my skills further.
Building a Network
It is honestly 110% due to my amazing co-workers and supportive network that I continued to work hard on my French this year. From external French courses, to French courses through the university, conversation circles both within the university and at the public library, bi-weekly chats with co-workers, weekly lessons with a French tutor, group lessons, and much more were some ways I received help from my network. Making friends is definitely not something that comes natural to me, but when sharing the same struggles such as learning a new language together, it does become easier. Holding each other accountable and continuing to expand my network without any language barriers has been a challenging, yet rewarding process of this language acquiring journey.
Mélange into your Hobbies
As mentioned in a previous blog post here, one of my favourite ways to spend leisure time is to go out to cinemas and watch movies. Building a routine into incorporating French into my hobbies has been ideal as I find it to be a low-stress, yet beneficial use of my time (we love efficiency!). Things like the French cinema club, French film festivals, Québécois film festivals, purposely watching movies without subtitles, and trying to finish a French director’s filmography, are some fun ways I expanded learning into my time off. The different accents, countries, and cultures are only a snapshot, but the films provide stories and insight into atmospheres and environments that I found to be critical in understanding the language in a colonial, communal, historical, and different socioeconomical contexts.
Overall, I am quite pleased at how much my French has struggled and improved this past year. Having the confidence to teach in French was something unimaginable last summer but now I am happy to have taught 4 sessions in my third language. Of course, the learning never really stops, especially in librarianship, but I am looking forward to more that I will learn with this new lens of a third language.
When I attended my first conference hosted by the Music Library Association (MLA) in Salt Lake City, UT this year, I expected to learn about music collections, cataloging standards, and emerging research resources.
I did learn those things. But what surprised me most—and became the central lesson of my experience—was the way the community’s professional culture fundamentally shaped a sense of belonging and opportunity through mentorship and openness.
The conference became a model for how professional gatherings can foster mentorship, generosity, and true inclusion. For a newcomer like me, this was transformative, demonstrating that professional culture defines not just what we learn, but how we join the field.
I arrived at the conference at a moment of professional transition. I had recently begun a new role as Humanities Librarian at the University of Chicago Library, serving as liaison to the Music Department and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies. The position carries a particular sense of responsibility: it has been vacant for more than six years following the sudden and tragic passing of my predecessor.
While I come to this work with a background in performing arts and librarianship, I do not hold a PhD in music or a formal degree in the discipline. In a research environment like the University of Chicago—an institution known for intellectual rigor and strong disciplinary traditions—that reality can feel especially visible.
Without a dedicated internal mentor in music librarianship, I rely on the field’s insight for questions about publishing ecosystems, vendors, cataloging, and collection strategies, despite supportive supervision.
Conference in a single hotel with multiple maps, an app, Slack channel, and the MLA website with message board.
Entering a Specialized Field
At the same time, I am still learning to navigate the institution’s culture. The University of Chicago has long been associated with intellectual intensity, but also with a certain institutional privacy—an academic environment that can feel somewhat mysterious from the outside. Until quite recently, that culture was manifested literally: the university gates were locked, and visitors to the library needed special permission to enter. While those policies have evolved, the image remains a powerful metaphor for how knowledge institutions sometimes operate—carefully guarded, selective, and structured by invisible boundaries.
Entering music librarianship at the University of Chicago, with its infamous institutional boundaries, has made access, mentorship, and the feeling of community more than just professional benefits—they are essential. Attending the MLA conference thus became a pivotal way to encounter this culture directly.
Although conferences often promote networking and mentorship, those interactions are frequently shaped by hierarchy and credentials in practice.
What I encountered at MLA felt strikingly different.
The conference was intentionally designed for participation—large enough for expertise, but small enough for repeated encounters. All events were held at a single hotel, allowing conversations to flow freely.
Before the conference even began, first-time attendees were invited to a pre-conference Zoom orientation that introduced the organization and explained what the conference experience would look like. Programming was shared well in advance via the CVent platform, making it easy to explore sessions and plan a schedule in advance. Many sessions were also available to stream, supported by a technical team that ensured clear audio and video, as well as recorded access.
As an attendee at the ACRL Conference in 2026, I noticed the conference organizers aimed for similar intentionality in welcoming newcomers. However, in my experience, ACRL felt overwhelming and panel and program acceptance were extremely competitive–less than 10% of submissions were accepted. The biannual structure increased the pressure and made networking challenging, despite the welcoming atmosphere. Even after volunteering on several committees, I found it difficult to build connections and advocate for myself in such a large, bureaucratic organization. Unlike the targeted mentorship I experienced at MLA, ACRL’s size and structure made formal mentoring difficult.
Even the scheduling reflected thoughtful design. Interest group and committee meetings were held the week after the conference, so attendees would not have to choose between participating in the organization and attending sessions.
These structural choices were more than logistical: by reducing barriers and prioritizing access, the conference created a setting where real community, collaboration, and learning could happen—illustrating the central role culture plays in professional belonging.
A Conference Designed for Participation
Professional networking can be difficult, even after years in academic libraries. Finding the right balance between introducing oneself and participating, while respecting others’ boundaries, takes care. Mentorship remains professional labor.
Because of this, I was especially grateful to connect with potential mentors before the conference even began. Through introductions from fellow librarian Greg MacAyeal, I had the opportunity to speak with several MLA members beforehand. By the time I arrived at the conference, there were already familiar faces in the room.
That small shift made a tremendous difference. What might have been an intimidating professional gathering instead felt relational and welcoming from the beginning.
Music librarianship is an extraordinarily specialized field. It requires familiarity with music publishing ecosystems, performance traditions, archival preservation, metadata standards, and constantly evolving formats.
Yet the expertise present at the conference did not feel guarded.
It was shared.
Sessions ranged from discussions of contemporary score distribution to cataloging documentation and collaborative strategies for collection development in an era of budget constraints. Librarians, composers, and distributors discussed how new technologies are reshaping the circulation of music.
Rather than presenting polished solutions, many sessions invited collective problem-solving. Librarians spoke candidly about institutional constraints—budgets, workflows, and evolving research needs—and the conversations continued outside the formal sessions.
Slides from the presentation “ADA Title II and Music Libraries: Implications, Questions, and Strategies”, Kristi Bergland, Jackie Zook, and Anna Dimoula.
Scholarship, Performance, and Community
The cumulative effect was a sense of shared responsibility, not competition—a model of professional culture grounded in collective advancement, which sharply contrasts with other associations.
One evening event captured that spirit particularly well: Salon Night.
The program featured an eclectic mix of scholarship and performance. There were operatic performances and a playful musical adaptation of Oklahoma! titled Obsolescence, which was hilarious and resonated with our beautiful nerdy hearts. A presentation on queer disco clubs in 1970s New York examined dance floors as spaces of cultural memory and community formation.
Kathleen (Kathy) Abromeit, Head of the Conservatory Library with Oberlin College Libraries, shared work from her new book An Index to Spirituals, , reflecting on how a single reference question in the 1990s grew into decades of scholarly documentation of African American spirituals as both musical and cultural history.
What stood out was not just the diversity of topics but the way people engaged with them.
The room moved easily between laughter, curiosity, and deep reflection—at moments people laughed loudly, and at others they wiped away tears. People spoke about archives, music, and cultural memory with a level of care that extended beyond professional obligation.
Spaces that blend rigorous inquiry with genuine openness were rare in my experience before this conference. It illustrated that professional cultures built around mentorship and inclusivity can redefine how newcomers join, contribute, and thrive.
Confronting the Field’s History
The conference also made space for conversations that confronted the field’s historical foundations. In a presentation on early twentieth-century music librarianship, Veronica A. Wells examined how collection practices helped codify the Western canon in American libraries and ongoing questions regarding designation of “popular” music and the deeply racist, classicist cultural assumptions held by founding librarians.
Those decisions continue to shape music collections today, underscoring how professional cultures can reinforce or challenge exclusion—making intentionality in mentorship and inclusion all the more crucial.
Listening to that presentation, I found myself thinking about Audre Lorde’s essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Lorde reminds us that institutions can claim progressive intentions while still reproducing the structures they inherit.
Music libraries—like many cultural institutions—carry those histories.
The discussion explored how Indigenous musicians, composers, and archivists are reshaping libraries’ approaches to collections, programming, and performance archives. Speakers reflected on the complex musical histories shaped by the U.S. boarding school system, where Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their communities and subjected to assimilationist policies. Within and despite these institutions, students encountered new musical forms and instruments that later influenced emerging musical traditions, including early jazz.
The panel emphasized that these histories must be understood not as products of the institutions themselves, but as examples of Indigenous resilience, adaptation, and cultural continuity. It also underscored the importance of centering Indigenous voices in archival interpretation and programming, ensuring that contemporary collections and performances reflect the perspectives of the communities whose histories they document.
A Profession Built on Conversation
Part of what makes this kind of conversation possible may lie in the nature of the field itself.
Music librarianship is often described as specialized, but in practice, it resists neat disciplinary boundaries. Music moves across formats and cultural contexts—scores, recordings, dance traditions, film, archives, and the ephemeral materials that surround performance.
A question about a score can quickly become a question about performance practice, cultural history, copyright law, or digital preservation.
Supporting this work requires collaboration with performers, composers, archivists, scholars, technologists, and community historians.
In that sense, music librarianship cannot easily operate in silos. The work itself demands conversation.
And perhaps that necessity helps cultivate the intellectual generosity I witnessed throughout the conference.
Carrying the Lessons Forward
Returning to my work at the University of Chicago Library, I have been thinking about what made this experience so meaningful.
Part of it was structural: thoughtful conference design, accessible programming, and mentorship opportunities for first-time attendees.
But much of it was cultural.
The MLA community demonstrated that professional expertise need not be guarded to be respected, and that intellectual rigor can coexist with generosity and care. In a profession often shaped by institutional prestige and credentialed authority, that culture felt quietly radical.
For someone entering a specialized field without a traditional disciplinary pathway—and inheriting a role that has been absent for years—that kind of professional community is not simply helpful.
It is essential.
And in many ways, the message that stayed with me from the conference came down to a single moment.
At the opening session, incoming MLA president Holling Smith-Borne, director of the Wilson Music Library at Vanderbilt University, reflected on their first experience attending an MLA meeting. They shared that when they first attended the conference, they quietly asked themselves, “Should I bring my full self to this space?” Do I belong here?
But they described choosing something different—to challenge that voice of doubt and replace it with another: No. You belong here. No matter who you are.
Listening to that story, I realized that what I had experienced throughout the conference—the mentorship, the intellectual generosity, and the willingness to share expertise—was not accidental.
It was a community intentionally working to make that statement true.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the colleagues who welcomed me into the Music Library Association community with generosity and care. Special thanks to Becca Fülöp, Amanda Dubose, Allison McClanahan, Bruce Evans, Ruthann McTyre, Tamar Barzel, Michelle Rivera, Misti Shaw, Sarah Ward, and Greg MacAyeal for mentorship, conversation, and encouragement throughout the conference.
Belonging is often described as a feeling—something we either experience or lack, as if it is found by chance rather than actively created. In institutions, belonging is frequently seen as incidental rather than the outcome of ongoing relational effort. But belonging is built through care, attention, and the often-invisible work of those who make room for others. Moments of transition make that labor visible, inviting us to pause and give flowers thoughtfully while we can.
This piece is a reflection on what it means to build belonging through librarianship, and on the communities and colleagues who make that work possible. It also asks how belonging is defined and distributed within a profession that is predominantly white and female, and how individual narratives—like my own—fit within, benefit from, and must be accountable to that broader context.
With Intentionality
Within university settings, librarianship and archival work have devoted significant time, energy, and resources to fostering a sense of belonging among students, faculty, and community members—often positioning libraries as sites of welcome, care, and connection within complex institutional landscapes. This was certainly what drew me in to the profession as an undergraduate. At a time when I struggled to understand who I was or what I could offer, librarianship felt less like a calling and more like a possibility. It seemed like it could be a space where belonging seemed not only valued, but intentionally built.
That isolation is not accidental. I’ve always been intensely aware of how lonely a university campus can be, and how much heavier this experience weighs on people who are already marginalized. That awareness drew me to librarianship. I wanted to counter that isolation.
Universities are often described as communities, yet within contemporary higher education–shaped by market logics, austerity, and increasing precarity—that language can feel aspirational at best. Even while benefiting from significant racial privilege, I did not experience the university as a site of meaningful belonging beyond my relationships with library staff colleagues. And even within that space, class distinctions between staff and librarians created points of tension that shaped how belonging was felt, distributed, and sustained.
Measuring success
It was at Arizona State University Library that belonging began to feel less aspirational and more tangible. While libraries are embedded wIthin the same institutional structures that shape higher education more broadly, they can have the possibility of operating through relational rather than strictly heirarchical practices. Care, attentiveness, and responsiveness are not abstract values but daily requirements of this work. And, I genuinely believe, values that ASU Library both champions and accomplishes through direct action. In this environment, belonging has emerged as something built collectively through trust, shared responsibility, and sustained relational labor.
At ASU, I experienced that sense of belonging most clearly through my colleagues. I was trusted to bring my full self to the work, encouraged to take intellectual and professional risks, and supported in ways that made sustained engagement possible. That support mattered profoundly. In a field where emotional and relational labor are often undervalued—and where isolation and burnout are common—experiencing collegial belonging shaped not only how I worked, but how I move through the world. It made the work feel shared rather than solitary, and it affirmed that building belonging is not an individual effort, but a collective one.
This did not mean the absence of tension or inequity. Librarianship remains shaped by the same racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics that structure the academy, including disparities in status, pay, and authority. And yet, within those constraints, I encountered colleagues who modeled what institutional belonging can look like in practice: collaboration, partnerships, and growth rather than competition.
The Potential for Repair
But my ASU story was also about complexity. Even when you believe in the work, it is exhausting to make a change. I discovered how draining it is to care deeply in spaces where change outpaces relationships. And I recognized how tenuous belonging can become when university politics shift around you.
That sense of belonging grew stronger and became real through the work itself, especially by caring for the Theatre for Youth and Community Collection. Working with this collection showed me that archives are not neutral, but shaped by who is included, who is invited, and whose stories are kept, and offers a chance to repair.
This potential for repair became most evident to me in moments when students encountered materials that reflected their own identities, communities, or creative lineages—sometimes for the first time. Watching a student recognize themselves in the historical record underscored how deeply representation matters. Importantly, these encounters were not incidental; rather, they resulted from intentional stewardship, collaborative description, and sustained relationship-building with artists, donors, and communities. As a result, belonging here was not symbolic. It was experienced.
At the same time, while these moments were powerful, they also revealed the significant labor required to build that sense of connection. Activating a collection in ways that feel inclusive, ethical, and responsive demands time, trust, and profound emotional investment. This experience is often in contexts where such labor is undervalued or under-resourced within an institution.
It is important to name the irony here: the sense of welcome and even belonging I found was largely cultivated by colleagues who themselves occupied marginal or precarious positions within the academy—arts faculty, staff members, colleagues with disabilities, and BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ librarians and archivists whose labor has historically been feminized, undervalued, and structurally constrained.
The Cost
Building belonging through librarianship is deeply meaningful work, but it is not without cost. The same relational labor that makes libraries feel humane can also be exhausting, especially when it is unevenly recognized or structurally unsupported. Care, when treated as an individual disposition rather than a shared, structurally resourced, institutional investment, becomes difficult to sustain.
At ASU, I became increasingly aware of the emotional weight that accompanies this kind of work. Advocating for community-centered collections, ethical archival practices, and inclusive engagement often meant navigating institutional constraints that moved faster than relationships could be built. The work required patience, persistence, and a willingness to sit with ambiguity. While I was fortunate to experience strong collegial support, the broader systems in which the work unfolded did not always make time and care for relational practice.
This tension—between the values that draw many of us to librarianship and the structures that shape how that work is resourced—was one of the most difficult lessons of my time at ASU. It sharpened my understanding of how fragile belonging can be in transition, and how quickly care-centered work can slip into burnout. And yet, naming that cost also clarified what I believe the work requires: not less care, but more collective accountability for sustaining it.
Going Grief
Leaving ASU for a new role in early 2026 has stirred a grief I was not entirely prepared for. Stepping away from students whose growth I have witnessed, from collections I have stewarded with care, and from especially colleagues who offered trust, generosity, and challenge in equal measure. This is not the grief of regret, but of genuine gratitude and connection that form when work is shared and deeply invested in.
There is a particular ache in leaving a place where you have poured vision and labor into something ongoing. Much of the work I was engaged in at ASU was iterative and future-facing: collections in the process of being reimagined, relationships still unfolding, students still finding their footing. To leave knowing that some of those seeds will continue to grow without you is both a testament to collective work and a reminder that belonging is never owned by a single person.
That grief is also evidence. It shows that something real was built. The ability to grieve a workplace and miss colleagues is rare and meaningful. It reflects a model of librarianship based on being changed by the work.
Carrying the Work Forward
As I move into my new role at the University of Chicago Library, I carry this work with me not as a completed chapter, but as an ongoing practice. The context will change. The questions will deepen. The communities and institutional cultures will be different. But the commitments that shaped my time at ASU remain the same: to build relationships grounded in care, to approach librarianship as an ethical practice, and to treat belonging not as an abstract value but as something made through daily, collective effort.
Something that I try to think more about these days, is to find meaningful intersections between my current career and the various experiences I had in the past. Maybe it’s due to my lack of confidence due to lack of experience as an academic librarian, but I always find myself leaning on my past experiences whenever I encounter a question that I don’t know, or a new workaround to a problem that I hoping to solve.
One particular experience that comes back to me even throughout library school was my time as a student residence staff (aka a “don”). Residence dons are upper-year students who live on the floor with students who are often in their first years, or on exchange. When I started library school, there was a class called “The Information Experience” which was my first encounter with a whole new side of academia for information science and information behaviour, in particular. The major project for the course was doing our own study conducting information horizon interviews (IHI) with 3 participants who share commonalities between each other and discover their information behaviour. Being freshly out of undergrad and still in my 4th year mind, the first thing I thought about was to ask my friends who were and are still student workers in residence. The interviews and conversations confirmed my gut instinct that indeed, the two professions had more in common than I originally thought.
A Librarian (in a different sense)
One of my favourite memories from working both in student housing and libraries always seem to be from the events that often took a lot of hard work and organizing. From screening the entire world cup tournament across 4 residences, to hosting campus-wide alumni reunion events at the health science library, being able to creatively adapt and proactively start initiatives is something I am grateful that I could pursue. Going beyond the open house booths and orientation day tables, programming combining both departments is something I wanted to bring to fruition.
During final exam time or programming that dons were recommended to host, some ideas that my fellow student staff and I had were around writing, academic integrity, time management, even things like using softwares like OneNote and Notion. ChatGPT and its related academic-AI friends unfortunately? fortunately? blew up after I finished undergrad, but I am sure this would be an interesting topic to tackle in a residence program that could be both fun and educational. Guest presenters were often invited as well, from off-campus housing, academic advisors, writing centre staff, and collaborative sessions across campus with other dons occurred often.
Outside of programs and creative field trips on and off-campus, regular questions would come at my way in the hallway, the shared bathrooms, the cafeteria, on the way to class, through text, through email, and so much more. Being able to direct the student to the correct resource, developing effective workflows depending on the subject area, and being a liaison to academic resources and the student were also just some day-to-day responsibilities (sound familiar? haha).
A Possible Untapped Synergy?
Often during graduate student consultations, library anxiety is something I realized was a phenomenon. Especially for first-year students and even undergraduate students, I realized that there was a hurdle to access resources and become familiar with the building, website, staff, and services. Because I had worked and volunteered in libraries since junior high school, I think that I automatically thought libraries were my comfort space, so I did not even realize this was a thing. So when the first student told me about this back, I was kind of shocked.
After doing more reading on this topic, I realized that there were ways to combat this, such as in-residence librarians (Nicholas et al., 2015). These in-residence librarians would work inside the first-year student residences bringing awareness and breaking down any barriers that may exist. I think that this anxiety is still a thing even for profs and grad students as I always recognize the same names popping up in my emails asking questions or requesting instruction. I love seeing familiar names and faces, but reaching those who have never encountered me or library services is something I would want to try by breaking down this invisible barrier. This extra step would be possible especially through collaborations external to the library, and what better way than with experienced student housing staff who already recognize student needs and wants!
Bringing this to a close, I just want to mention the existence of libraries inside many student residences based on personal experience. In the building I worked and lived in at Western University in London (Ontario, Canada), there was even a huge room on the first floor with a nice “library” plaque. Although the books were either donated textbooks or leftover belongings, the space that it provides for students and residence staff were similar to any other academic library especially during exam season and community building events. The residence at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto where I lived in during grad school was also equipped with an in-residence library with many books on subject areas that the college specialized in.
I hope that this at least sparks some interest and further discussion on being more involved within student housing and student residence staff as the interest is definitely there, and we share more similarities than we might think!
Nicholas, P., Sterling, J., Davis, R., Lewis, J. C., Mckoy-Johnson, F., Nelson, K., Tugwell, Y., & Tyrell, K. (2015). Bringing the library to you!: The halls of residence librarian program at the University of the West Indies, Mona Library. New Library World, 116(5/6), 316–335. https://doi.org/10.1108/NLW-06-2014-0080
