Exhibitions: Resources for Curators of Library Exhibitions: User Engagement Resources

A commuter campus library hosted an art exhibit in November 2019 to increase engagement levels of local high school and university students and to involve them in scholarly activities. The exhibit displayed student, faculty, and staff submissions on campus. The library space on campus features comfortable seating and desktop computers, with a collection robust with virtual holdings, but scant print volumes. Without physical print books, the library lacks the overt visual cues that can prompt students to seek out traditional library services. To increase student interactions, the librarians use outreach efforts to promote library services. Data collected via surveys from the event participants attempted to measure the impact that the event had on awareness of library services by participants.

Academic libraries are finding that involving student employees in collaborative projects fosters student development while increasing library capability and impact. This article validates and builds on Denda and Hunter’s team-based engagement framework. The authors expound on that model with principles of experiential learning that apply to a broad scope of student library work. They demonstrate this approach through creative project examples, including the exhibit “Connection.” Engaging student library employees through workplace experiential learning connects them to people and purpose, fostering skill development and a service mindset for their library roles and future careers.

The term ‘student engagement’ has a broad meaning and is used freely as an expression in several different contexts of academic librarianship. This literature review covers scholarship from across several of these areas and is structured so that four broad themes are systematically addressed: student engagement in learning; students as partners; student voice; methods and techniques for student engagement. The granular review of the literature reveals many sub-discussions about a range of academic librarianship topics and provides some discussion about how they cross over into the area of student engagement. The literature covers different innovations, techniques and strategies for student engagement, and the review illustrates how many techniques and tools are transferable across the different intentions and objectives of student engagement. The review concludes that many academic librarians are very proactive in student engagement activities and that student engagement itself has become a fundamental element of academic library management.

The UC Santa Cruz University Library supports the creation of digital projects which aid student scholarship, enhance on-site exhibit experiences, engage broader communities through online exhibitions, and promote our unique collections. This case study explores the use of a digital tool, ThingLink, to create a virtual 360° tour of a library exhibit space which features material from the Grateful Dead Archive. Librarians and students created this virtual tour () in order to promote the library's collections, engage students in creating new forms of scholarly work, preserve a record of a physical exhibit after deinstallation, and increase use of library resources.

University art museums contribute in meaningful ways to students’ educational experiences. However, many higher education institutions are grappling with the challenge of engaging a new generation of students. This investigation sought to understand what motivates Gen Z college students to seek out encounters with art and engage with their university art museum