On Monday, we gave our first conference presentation: “Making, Managing, and Marketing a Wellness Collection in an Academic Library” at NC Live’s Annual Conference, a conference fittingly focused on Wellness in Libraries! It was a great first time experience for us both in submitting a proposal, and preparing and giving a presentation.

From the time we submitted the proposal to when we gave the presentation represented roughly a third of our new Wellness Collection’s short circulation life. Unfortunately, we didn’t achieve the runaway engagement and circulation numbers during this time period that would’ve proved it to be a resounding success! Instead, we were challenged to slightly pivot the focus of the presentation and include both what worked and what we thought was less successful in order to explain these results.

Of the presentations we caught between setting up and practicing for our own, one of the most interesting and relevant was “Cultivating Resilience in College Students with a Library Wellbeing Collection,” presented by librarians Sydney Adams and Ashley Mills of Davidson College. They recently launched a new collection quite similar to ours, although with some interesting differences:

  • Their collection is heavily focused on board games (which we happily already have!)
  • They did get an animatronic cat (which we considered, but ultimately did not acquire)
  • They also set up a very cool Lego communal project table in the library, similar to the one in the entry of the Wakerspace
  • An interesting item we hadn’t considered that they acquired was a weighted lap pad (similar to this)
  • Their collection is much more physically accessible (or looked that way in the pictures they shared): out on a shelf for people to “browse,” rather than behind a circulation desk and only available by request. Our access model may be hampering awareness of the collection!

We also took the opportunity to avoid the circus of campus on Commencement Day and did our conference attending/prep/presenting all from a reserved room at Wake Downtown. Cannot recommend enough! Our background was so cool that several people asked if it was fake!

Jemma in a conference room downtown

If you can’t find us in the future, we’re likely at our new downtown office!