Do young people still read for fun?

The idea that "the kids just don't read anymore" is a tale as old as time. And, it is something that Elizabeth decided to investigate head-on in her role as an academic librarian. The results of the research study she designed and ran, interviewing just under 100 university students in the U.S. and the U.K., were published a few months ago and we talk about them in this episode.

Spoiler alert: young people (even when they're in college and even during the semester) do still read for fun! We get into the details of the study results and talk about what they read, how much they read, how they find new books, what they want from their reading lives, how they see themselves as readers, and more.

We also figure out that a conversation we had in 2019 about this study design was actually the seed that led to us starting this podcast! It's a very full-circle moment <3
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Books we're reading in this episode:

Main Character Energy by Jamie Varon
The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell
Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
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Sources:

Brookbank, E. 2023. “It makes you feel like more of a person:” The leisure reading habits of university students in the US and UK and how academic libraries can support them, College & Undergraduate Libraries, 30:3, 53-94, DOI: 10.1080/10691316.2023.2261918 

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Intro and outro music: "The Chase," by Aves.

Do you have thoughts, questions, or ideas for future episodes? Email us at allbooksaloudpod@gmail.com. And if you want to learn more about the podcast, visit our website at allbooksaloudpod.com.

If you liked this episode, please consider leaving us a review to help us reach more listeners.

And if you'd like to see more bookish content from Martha & Elizabeth, follow us on Instagram and TikTok @allbooksaloudpod.

Read on!

Transcript

[All Books Aloud intro and theme music]

Martha: Hey Liz, how are ya?

Elizabeth: Hi Martha, I'm doing well. How are you?

Martha: I'm good. 

So, what are you reading right now?

Elizabeth: I just finished last night Main Character Energy by Jamie Varon, which I talked about last time that I was reading and I Absolutely loved it. It was such a delight. It's just oh, it's [00:01:00] so great. Such great messages about loving yourself no matter what and allowing yourself to be happy and live the life that you want even if you're not the perfect version of yourself, I guess

is the way that I would describe it.

I don't want to give too much away, it's just such a great book. I highly recommend it

Martha: interesting. Well, I'm excited to read it. So what else are you reading?

Elizabeth: I am listening to a book called The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell, which is, basically The Great British Bake Off, but with a murder.

Martha: Oh.

Elizabeth: And, they have transferred the Baking Show to America, to New England. they've changed enough of the specifics, but it's essentially about if there was a murder on the great British bakeoff. And so you get, the perspectives of all of the main characters, basically all the contestants and then the hosts. And I actually am not loving the narration thinking about our what makes a good audiobook narrator

Martha: Mm.

Elizabeth: episode. It's an [00:02:00] ensemble narration and I just. They all have this very like game show announcer quality to them.

Martha: Like they're overacting.

Elizabeth: Yeah, but anyway, I'm still listening to it because I just love the book so much so that goes to show you that you can get over anything.

 I'm not very far into it because you know how slow I am but I'm liking it so far.

Martha: it sounds really good.

Elizabeth: What are you reading?

Martha: I am reading the Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. I brought this home with me the last time I visited you

Elizabeth: Mm hmm.

Martha: And so far I'm really liking it.

It's, it's cool. Each member of the book club gets their own chapter where they host book club and then we get some insight into their lives. iT's really cute and Thought provoking, too. Not really what I thought it would be. I don't know what I thought it would be.

I didn't look it up or anything before I started, which is kind of fun, but yeah, it's really good. And I'm listening to Harry [00:03:00] Potter. It is my Harry Potter season, and I just finished. The Prisoner of Azkaban. I'm laughing because I just started and I'm already done with the first three books. Um,

Elizabeth: so fast

Martha: but yeah, that's what I'm reading.

 So our topic today is about do young people still read for fun? Because Liz just had a research article published on this topic. So we want to dive in and go over Liz's research, what she found, and what it all means. 

Elizabeth: Yes. This is my vanity episode. No, it is obviously very related to what we, talk about on this podcast. Just to give a little bit of background to the topic and how I came to the topic, So when I was in library school, I really wanted to do reader's advisory, which I've talked about on the podcast before is what librarians call the suite of activities [00:04:00] around helping people find what to read.

So, having conversations with people at usually a reference desk where they say that they're looking for something to read and you ask them questions about what they like and try to figure out something they might like. That's called a reader's advisory interview I guess and then also those all sorts of other activities like putting little shelf hangers on the shelves with book picks and doing digital pairing activities with people who go on the website to do it.

So all of the activities around Reader's Advisory. I really loved, because I've always loved reading, but I also wanted to be an academic librarian. That was pretty much 

the 

area of librarianship that attracted me from the very beginning.

 And I realized as I was in library school that those two things didn't seem to go together.

Martha: Hm.

Elizabeth: Academic librarians weren't really thought of as the type of librarian that does reader's advisory, and academic libraries, at least I was given to understand, [00:05:00] didn't have books to read for fun, they were purely academic, and so it seemed like I needed to choose between those two things, and actually it was a little angsty because I didn't know which one I wanted to do more, and so I did a quarter, where I worked at the Seattle Public Library with the Reader's Services librarians to see how I would like being a public librarian that did Reader's Advisory, and then I also worked at the library on the University of Washington campus so that I could see how it would be to be an academic librarian and spent the two years trying to figure out which one I wanted to do.

And ultimately, obviously, decided to become an academic librarian, but I couldn't let go of the idea that I felt like I should be able to do both of these things. Because I knew that when I was in college I read for fun, and so I didn't really understand why it was not a service that academic libraries provided to 

Martha: students

Mm hmm.

Elizabeth: But I just thought, that was, The way that things were.

Martha: Hmm. Well, [00:06:00] I think this is a good opportunity to talk about something that people have asked me a lot when I talk to them about the podcast and what you do specifically, because people just don't really know. So what is the main difference between a public librarian and an academic librarian?

Is it this reader advisory piece? Or is it more than that? 

Elizabeth: No, it's definitely more than the reader's advisory piece that is the difference. Really, there are a lot of differences, but the main, I think, crux of the difference comes down to who you are serving, basically, because as a library, you're a service.

Institution, right? And public librarians are serving the public. And so that means that all of their activities are geared toward What the general public wants. , if you look at the general public, of an area that a public library serves, you're going to have Families with kids that need story times, you're going to have, teenagers that need somewhere to go after school.

You're going to [00:07:00] have adults who, like to check out their books from the library or can't afford to go to a bookstore and so they use the library. You're gonna have people who look to the library for social events, or for speakers or people who want to come in and, see if they can find out a little bit about their grandpas or, have a question about their neighborhood in the 1960s or something, right?

 Light research, questions, whereas academic librarians are serving the university, the institution that they are within, and so they're serving the faculty and the students that go to that institution. And so even though they might be in a place like I am in a small town where the community, is there and they do have children and there are teenagers and there are all of those different elements in the community, but that's just not what we're serving.

 That's not the way we're funded. That's not who our audience is. And so for academic librarians, our mission is to provide academic support for the university community. And so that means that most of what we do is [00:08:00] provide support to students to succeed in their classes, to be able to do their research assignments, to be able to access the research that they need to do those assignments, to print out their syllabi and to print out their papers and to, have a place to study.

 And for the faculty, for the professors that work at the university, we also provide access to the research that they need to do their own research or that they need to plan their classes. We're the academic support for the institution. So, it made sense in that way a little bit that one of our main services is not necessarily providing books to read for fun because , our mission is academic.

In nature and driven by academics. But, it did seem to me like there was at least some place for it.

Martha: yeah,

Elizabeth: Or at least I wished that there was.

Martha: uh huh,

Elizabeth: And so the other difference actually coming specifically to what we're talking about here between academic [00:09:00] librarians and public librarians is that Not all academic librarians are this way, but some academic librarians are faculty at their institutions, and that is the case at my institution.

And like other faculty, I'm expected to do research into my area of expertise, and, that scholarship is part of my job. 

Martha: Uh huh,

Elizabeth: I teach students how to do research for their assignments and I help, the faculty and everything that I just said, but I also have to do research into, different areas and do research studies like the one that we're going to talk about today, which is the only reason that I ended up, being able to explore all this because that was part of my job, whereas a public librarian, that's not part of, what their job is.

 Again, because they're serving the public, they're not serving a scholarly community.

Martha: yeah, cool. I love how got the opportunity to research this topic that you're so passionate [00:10:00] about , and now I'm curious, if there was a librarian doing Reader's Advisory when you started at Western, or if you kind of created that role.

Elizabeth: That's a great question. So basically that is essentially how I got started on this. When I was in library school, I had the sense that , ne'er the twain shall meet, I have to choose

one or the other. And so I chose to become an academic librarian, and those are the jobs that I applied for.

And, when I got the job where I'm working now at Western Oregon University, I, found my delight that they actually had a recreational reading collection, which is a books to read for fun. And I was like, what? Okay. This exists. This is a real thing. And then also, I actually found out later that , the university that I went to library school at, the undergraduate library actually has a popular reading collection as well, but I just,

Martha: You didn't know.

Elizabeth: into the undergraduate library because I was there for graduate school and the graduate library is a separate library and I just didn't know.

But I got [00:11:00] to Western and saw that we had that collection and of course at the time another librarian was in charge of it. But over the first couple of years that I was there, I asked her so many questions about it and was so obsessed with it and was constantly trying to think of things to do with it and asking her if she's ever done X, Y, or Z.

She eventually was like, do you want to just do this?

Martha: You're like, yes, I do.

Elizabeth: Bless her, yeah. I was like, oh, I'm sorry if I , and she's like, no, no, you're obviously way more passionate about it than I am. It wasn't at all with any bad feelings, but she just saw that I was way more into it than she was, and so

Martha: Cute.

Elizabeth: she let me take it over,, and so at that point, I felt like I actually had a reason for that to be one of my research threads, because I was managing this collection, and One of the first things that I did when I took over the collection and started managing it is that I looked into the history of these collections and tried to figure out, do other libraries have [00:12:00] these, is this just a Western thing and of course found out really quickly that it wasn't.

 And through doing some of that research got connected with other librarians across the country, specifically a librarian named Megan Lacey, who invited me to help with a book that she was putting together about the topic of, popular collections in academic libraries. 

Which really started me off on a little bit of a mission to debunk this idea that popular reading and academic libraries don't go together, when I was working with Megan she shared with me some research that she had done about the fact that these reader's advisory activities used to be very much a part of what academic libraries did.

So in the, late 19th century, early 20th century world of academic libraries, there were a lot of activities that academic librarians did to outreach to students about books that they, could and should be reading for fun. So there was [00:13:00] a little bit of, a moralizing element of it, students were much more thought of as, not as children, but as young adults that were very much under the care of the people at the university and that those people, including the librarians, were molding their. so, obviously, that element of it has shifted, but part of that did include reader's advisory things like book lists or book talks or articles in the student newspaper about books in the library, book displays, campus book clubs. There generally were. , specific rooms in the academic libraries, browsing rooms, where students could just go in and browse the, books to read for fun and sit in there and read them they were, lounges for lack of a better word. And there were even examples that I found of librarians teaching, , whole courses about recreational reading to students. So it was much more of a thing. And so then, of course, [00:14:00] my question was what the heck happened, right? And. There are a lot of different theories about what happened. It seems to have started changing around the 1950s.

 Some explanations for this are that 

there were trends in building. The libraries and remodeling the libraries that eliminated the separation between the collections and took out those browsing rooms.

And so that meant that there was a decline in the idea of that being something that students did in the library. There's a little bit of writing that is, that talks about like how the sort of counterculture. Movement of young people in the 60s moved away from the idea of trusting recommendations from authority figures like librarians.

That's a little bit of

Martha: It's kind of a 

Elizabeth: putting two and two together. I mean, there might be something to it, but it's hard to say how widespread that was. One thing that we do know for sure, because there's writing about it, is there was an effort by some in the library community to make academic [00:15:00] librarianship more quote unquote serious. And more respected by putting an emphasis on the role of supporting the college curriculum. So supporting the classes and student research activities and less effort into recreational activities, recreational reading, which were seen as less serious, right? ANd then of course, one of the reasons, as is always the reason for a decline in any type of service, especially in libraries, is money, right?

 There was definitely a decline of budgets, as the 20th century went on, and, the story of libraries always is, our budget is shrinking and we're being asked to do more with less and that's always been the case. And so it might not necessarily be a nefarious plan to, take this out of libraries.

It just is something that happened naturally for all those reasons. But, the thing that boiled my blood a little bit is that there were people that were writing and it was, [00:16:00] mostly men who were entering the field of librarianship which generally to that point had been a woman dominated industry.

And we're trying to make it more respected, quote unquote and serious by taking out these pieces of it that they thought weren't serious and respected, and then coming in and becoming the administrators of academic libraries, which to this day The vast majority of librarians, something, in the high 80 percents, are women, but most of the administrators and the people in charge of libraries are men. And so there's also, a sort of gendered element to the way that our society has evolved over the 20th century to this as well.

 So That's a little bit of the history of that.

Martha: So I'm wondering how many colleges have a leisure reading collection?

Elizabeth: Well it's funny you should ask that, because the next research project that I did, [00:17:00] after I looked into the history of these collections, that is basically the next question that I asked. I was like, okay, if all these academic libraries used to do this, how many of them are still doing it, or how many of them have started doing it again?

And my assumption, based on, the messages that I got in library school, around this, was that it would be very few, that there wouldn't be very many, that had these collections, because I was surprised when I got to Western and there was one. But then I did a research project with, two other librarians, one from the University of Washington and one from the University of Oregon, and we surveyed, academic libraries across the country.

And we actually found that 68 percent of the libraries that responded to our survey, had these collections, which I was really surprised that it was that many,

Martha: Yeah,

Elizabeth: Because I expected it to be very few.

Martha: well, and that's funny because from my perspective, knowing what you do. I would [00:18:00] assume that every college had a leisure reading collection.

Elizabeth: Oh, really?

Martha: or most of them, more than 68%. So it's funny how different our perspectives are

Elizabeth: yeah. That's really interesting, actually.

Martha: Well, because I 

Elizabeth: do you, why would you have expected that?

Martha: well, I don't know, I kind of feel like with the cost of tuition, Yeah. It kind of just seems fair to have a leisure collection, if that makes sense. I just see it as part of the perks of attending school. I kind of imagine students looking back at their time fondly and thinking like, Man, I could get any book I wanted to read, it was so awesome.

 Kind of how, you know, you have like a badass gym that not everyone else can use and you're like, Oh, I could go to the gym whenever I wanted and I don't know.

Elizabeth: Yeah, that is very true. It's just so interesting to hear it from an outsider's

Martha: Yeah.

Elizabeth: because yeah, I mean, knowing what I did, I didn't expect there to be hardly any, but yeah, when you put it that

way, I might [00:19:00] add that to my list of reasons to justify these collections.

Cause yeah, it is sort of a perk, , when you go to a public library to get the newest. release that's really popular. Often you have to be on a waiting list that's 50 people long, even if they have multiple copies of the book, which usually public libraries do. And in my collection, the population of people that are using it is small and everyone has different interests.

And so that means that the book that you're excited about, you could potentially just walk up to the shelf and grab it. There's no waiting list, you just get it. And I have heard people say that before, where they've been surprised that we had, whatever the hot book at the time was just sitting on the shelf

waiting for someone to check it out.

So yeah, it is kind of a perk that we should have, I agree with

Martha: I say that, but then, I think back at my time at college at UAA and Matsu College and I couldn't tell you if we had a leisure reading collection, but it's been a long time. Who knows?

Elizabeth: yeah, well if we're doing honest full disclosures, I don't know if, [00:20:00] Middlebury had one,

Martha: Yeah.

Elizabeth: but I was an English major, so I was reading books for all my classes. So maybe that's why I never looked into it, but yeah, no, I have no idea. Which actually is something that, is partially what motivated the current study that we haven't even gotten into yet that we're going to start talking

about now.

But, partially what motivated the current study is that I was like, okay. I have debunked the assumptions that I came into this with, that, these things are new to academic libraries, they're not, they're old. Academic libraries have had them for a long time.

 It's also not the case that hardly any academic libraries have them. So I don't necessarily need to be going on a crusade to convince academic

libraries to get these things because, 68 percent of them already have it. So then I was like, okay, then., how do we go deeper than just, we should have these, they're good, right, I wanted to know, how do we make it so that students know that they're there, how do we make it so that students [00:21:00] use them, if you look at it as a service, like any other service that the library is providing, how do we make sure that we're meeting the needs of our users, the people that, we're trying, to reach with this collection.

And so that's part of what motivated the current study is that I wanted to go deeper than just what I had seen, to be honest, in the scholarly literature so far, which was basically just all about, our library has one of these, it's so great, or These things are actually really good.

We should have them and, we already have them. Why are we still having this argument, with ourselves almost, it seems, trying to justify these collections? Can we just say, yes, we should have them. They're good. Let's, move on to something deeper. Right?

Martha: Yeah. Like, 

what's 

Elizabeth: I know why. 

Martha: what's the student's relationship with them?

Elizabeth: Yeah. And you know, I mean, I just said I while you were talking, I interrupted you and said, I know why. And the reason why is because a lot of a lot of places that want, them or even already have them have to [00:22:00] justify it in the budget. So they're sort of constantly in that, like, defensive mode of, like justifying its existence, because budgets are always getting cut.

But I think, I thought, and I still think, and it's why I did this study, that if we had better data on, what students wanted from them and how they were benefiting students, then that is going to help us make the case, if we're ever called upon to make the case for why they should exist in our libraries, much more than just saying, hey, look, everyone else has one,

Martha: right. 

Elizabeth: that's what I tried to do with this current study that I started before the pandemic and has just been published. 

Martha: Yeah.

Elizabeth: if people want some indication of the scholarly research cycle and how long it takes.

Martha: It's a lot of work, and it takes a lot of time to collect all the data and then sift through and decide what it means.

Elizabeth: Yes, it definitely does. The [00:23:00] title that, I came up with for the article is it makes you feel like more of a person.

The leisure reading habits of university students in the U. S. and the U. K. and how academic libraries can support them. There's so much we're not going to cover it all here. So if you are a listener that is really interested in this and, maybe you're a librarian or maybe you just want to read more about this.

I do have some free e prints of the article that I can give out to people, because the article is published in a scholarly journal and so that means that basically in order to access it you have to pay for it and academic libraries pay to have access to these articles that their faculty write.

Don't even get me started on what I don't know what a scam that is, but, if you are at a university, if you're a librarian or, a teacher or whatever that's at a university, you should be able to get access to it. But if you're not and you would like access to it, go ahead and email us 

, [00:24:00] allbooksaloudpod@gmail.com

Martha: mhmm,

Elizabeth: So this study was born of wanting to go deeper into this topic and continue to debunk some of the, what I think are misbeliefs about the topic. Because basically after reading the scholarly literature in this area for, five or six years at the point that I started this study, It seemed to me like there were a couple of things going on that made it difficult for, academic librarians who wanted to have one of these collections or who wanted to go beyond the surface level defensiveness over why they have it, right?

There are two misbeliefs that were at play. The first being that People just don't think that the kids read anymore, people just don't think that university students, especially traditionally aged ones that are 18 to 24 years old, read for pleasure anymore. Or at least they think that this is an activity that's rapidly declining.

And, , This belief in the non [00:25:00] existence of reading among university students, is very thorny and very seemingly tied into the rise of technology in our society. So it goes back to a little bit what we were talking about in the episode where we are talking about attention spans, 

it's part of this narrative that we have as a society that Technology has made it so that things like reading are old fashioned and, kids aren't interested in that anymore, etc, etc. , and then the other core misbelief, I believe, is this idea that we've been talking about, which is that leisure reading collections are not core to an academic library's mission.

 Even though 68 percent of academic libraries have these collections, they're not thought of as core to the work of the library. They're thought of as low priority extras, right?

 An extravagance. So getting back to that idea that,, there's such a thing as a guilty pleasure or an indulgence, that's the equivalent of what these collections are seen as, that are outside the serious work of [00:26:00] supporting the academic curriculum and the students needs as learners and the faculty's needs as researchers.

And so those were basically the two core beliefs that I started my article with and I was like, okay, I'm going to do a study where I try to dig into What's behind these two things to try to, well, my hypothesis was that I was going to find evidence that neither of these things were true, but of course I didn't go into it saying I'm only going to accept evidence, , that I want, that's not how you go into an academic study.

So

Martha: Your hypothesis could be wrong, right?

Elizabeth: I wanted to see what was going on here. I wanted to investigate the core of those two beliefs. So that's what started the study.

Martha: It seems so silly to me, especially after all of the discussions we've had on this podcast about the benefits of reading, why the argument that kids don't read anymore is used against [00:27:00] the leisure collection. I would think that if people were really worried about kids reading, kids, young adults, is what we're talking about, that they'd be doing everything they could to encourage leisure reading.

It, it just seems completely opposite to me.

Elizabeth: yeah, that is a very good point. As with the other point that you've made, I'm like, Yeah, why don't we think about it that way? I don't know. From an outsider's perspective, that totally makes sense. I mean, I think that what happens is that Again, everything comes back to money, so there's a return on investment thing, right?

And there can be the argument made that if students aren't going to use it, then it's not a good use of their tuition money, basically, that funds the library. Also, I think that there is a little bit of a shifting of responsibility between different educational institutions because, like we talked about in one of the episodes, that love of reading, if you're going to be a reader, quote [00:28:00] unquote, it tends to happen in the 9 to 11 years old range.

And so I think that there is this, I don't, this isn't something that I, that was part of the research, but just in me thinking about your question and thinking back to the things that I've read about this topic in the scholarly literature. I think that there is an idea that like, oh, well, that's something that the schools are supposed to be doing.

 Once they get to college, we can't have any effect on that. Either they're a reader or they're not. And if they are, they're gonna, get their books wherever they're gonna get them. There's a little bit of an abdicating of responsibility in that area, I

think. Because it's supposed to be something that they get, when they're younger in school or whatever.

 But yeah. I think that my... Whole, not to do too much of a spoiler, but my whole conclusion from this study is that I think that academic libraries actually do owe it to their students to treat them more than just learners and researchers, right? Because it says it right in the title, they are whole [00:29:00] people who have lots of different needs.

And It is unlikely that if they want something to read for fun, they're going to go to another library to find it, there is actually some research about whether university students use public libraries and the answer is essentially no, , they have a library. It's on their campus. Why would they go to a public library?

 They don't understand why there would be certain books that their campus library doesn't have, especially because there's so many books in the campus library, that's not something that is apparent to students that there would be

books there that they 

Martha: That's so silly. And when you're talking in terms of campus life, you hear campus life, campus life. Why would they need to leave campus to get a book that they want to read? So silly.

Elizabeth: Yeah. But, I think that there are just so many overlapping factors at play. I did go through, though, and look at the research into this area to try to get a sense of where all of this was coming from.

 In the article I talk a lot [00:30:00] about the research into the benefits of reading, which there is a ton of, we have already talked about that a lot on the podcast, so I won't go into that too much, but, exactly what you said, there is so much research that indicates that the activity of encouraging recreational reading or leisure reading, whatever you want to call it, is very worthwhile, 

for everyone. And yes, of course, it has a more overall positive impact if it can happen when people are children, but that doesn't mean that there is no positive impact to encouraging that once people are young adults or adults, because there is research that shows that , university age students, who read recreationally, have greater academic achievement and overall student success.

 There's also a big element of emotional and mental well being, that runs through the research that, reading for leisure helps people [00:31:00] to, reframe negative thoughts

Martha: Mhm.

Elizabeth: And I don't know the specific psychological name for that, but that's basically what they're doing, and that that results in, a higher level of emotional and mental well being.

It also fosters creativity, which really helps with mental health. And, there are all sorts of studies about how bad The mental health of college students can be because of all the pressure that they're under, the financial pressure, the academic pressure, When I started looking into this research, I remember that there were a couple of high profile, suicides on college campuses of people who, people didn't realize, but they were really struggling.

And, , there was a lot made in the media about the. higher rate of psychological distress, among college students than the general population. And it's just one element. Of course, we also need other things, like mental health counseling, which most college campuses have now and things like that.

But encouraging reading actually [00:32:00] can really help with things like that. As actually the results of my study, indicated, there were , several students who talked to me about their mental health issues that reading helped and that they thought of it as part of their mental health, self-care, mental self-care.

That stuff is really important.

Martha: So, at this point, you had spent five to six years reading other research, and you shared your hypothesis with us, so I was wondering if you could share your methodology and what your research looked like for this article.

Elizabeth: Yes, I can do that. I used qualitative methods, which I think , I've talked about a little bit before, but basically that is where you do things like interviews or focus groups and you're getting people's experiences in their own words. So I,, designed a study where I would be interviewing university students.

And also observing their [00:33:00] interaction with the collection as a complete bystander no intervention observer, I just observe what they're doing and take notes.

Martha: So, you were just somewhere in the library kind of spying. Ha

Elizabeth: Yes, lurking in and around the recreational collection. And of course, I hope that this goes without saying that I should say that I got all of the. required approval for all of these activities. I went through my university's institutional review board, that looks at research that has human subjects and all of that, got all of that approval before I started doing this.

 And part of the reason that 

I 

decided that I wanted to talk to students in , both the U.S. and the U.K.. is that I noticed when I was, keeping tabs on this topic in the literature, it really seemed like the U. K. wrote as much about these [00:34:00] leisure collections as the U.

S. did, and there is very much in the U. K., more so than in the U. S., a culture of reading, reading is, I would say it's more venerated in the UK just popular culture wise. And there are some numbers, although it's hard to get reliable numbers that, people read more in the UK than they read in the US just overall, not only young people.

And so It felt like a natural pairing, those two countries and a way to broaden the reach of the study because I wanted something that could be seen as generally applicable. So I didn't only want to interview people at my university because then it's like, okay, great.

You talk to people at this little. Four year comprehensive university in Oregon. What does that have to do with me? Right? And so the trade off, of course, is that I didn't talk to very many students in any one university, which also [00:35:00] has its downsides. But essentially, I visited ten universities, five in the U.

S., which were all in the Pacific Northwest, because geographically speaking, right? We're

talking about, countries with very different, 

Martha: Yeah.

Elizabeth: aRea sizes. So five universities in the Pacific Northwest and then five in the UK. And really all across the UK. The five were in very different parts of the UK.

And I talked to nine to 11 students at each campus. So overall I did 98 interviews. The very last campus that I did interviews at, I actually only got five done because it was quite literally the day before the UK went into lockdown for COVID the first time. 

Martha: Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. That was so crazy. And also kind of a relief that you got your research, at least that part of it, done before everything shut down.

Elizabeth: Yeah, because if I hadn't gotten the interviews done, then it just all would have been

Martha: For not.

Elizabeth: stymied. Yeah, but [00:36:00] I did manage to get those last interviews in right before. And so then basically I spent the rest of the lockdown in my research sabbatical, which is how I was able to even be in the UK doing the interviews in the first place.

I had a research sabbatical for my work, analyzing the data and looking at the responses. And I have the full interview, the set of questions in the article if people are interested in it, but basically it was 10 questions that each had, prompts depending on , what the interviewee said and probes for them to give me more information that were again all approved ahead of time.

 The first half was about their reading habits, and the second half was about their use of , the leisure collection at their library. I only chose campuses that had leisure collections, as sites for the research. I did gather some demographics. I was especially interested in the ages of the participants because, part of those narratives that I talked about in the beginning that define the way [00:37:00] that this is all thought of, are very age dependent and, , so I did gather those demographics and I found that most of the people that I talked to were that traditional college age.

 67 percent of the participants were between 18 and 24 years old and then 18 percent were 25 to 34 and then just smaller numbers as the ages went up. And so most of the people that I talked to were in that young adult range

so much.

so 

Martha: what did you find out about their reading habits in 

Elizabeth: Um, 

Martha: Yeah,

Elizabeth: The first thing to say is that of the 98 interviews that I did all except 6 of the participants, said that they do read for pleasure. 

 I did, take pains to, try to [00:38:00] mitigate the potential that I was getting a skewed sample, I didn't only stand in the library to get interviewees, 

I went to like common areas of the university. I made sure that I, in each university found the university commons or the student union or a place where I could be sure to find a broad demographic of students at the campus, to recruit the interviewees.

And there are no prerequisites to participating. And in fact, when people would find out what the interviews were about , a few times people were like, Oh, well, I don't read, so I shouldn't do it. And I was like, no, no, that's not a

Martha: we need you.

Elizabeth: do

Martha: We need you too.

Elizabeth: So I did really, obviously it's not a randomized sample. So it could have, certainly been a little bit of self selection bias.

But. I did do as much as I could to mitigate that. So I feel like there is a broad generalization that we can draw from that, which is at least that more young people than we give credit [00:39:00] to, do read for

fun, right? 

Martha: at least at universities. I mean, I would expect that same age group as a whole outside of the university world, right? There might be less readers overall, but that's the point of your study. You were looking at college and university students. You weren't looking at, people outside of the institutions.

Elizabeth: Yeah, yeah, totally. That's a good point. I do, though, think that that assumption could go both ways, because I've also heard And there is some of this in the writing, too, that university students are less likely to read for fun because they have so much reading that they have to do for their

Martha: For school. Oh, yeah.

Elizabeth: yeah, that they don't have.

And so that is one of the things actually, that's one of the narratives the academic libraries use as a way, as a reason for why they don't need these collections is because they're like, even if they wanted to read for fun, they don't have time to read for fun, right? And so it's hard to know. But yeah, obviously, The study was centered on a specific community, [00:40:00] which was university students.

 Something else that I found that was really interesting that I think goes against some of the narratives that exist is that the vast majority have a preference for print books.

Martha: Mm.

Elizabeth: And so again, I think that there is that narrative that like, oh, young people love their technology and , print books are a thing of the past.

They're like the dinosaur. They're going out of fashion. And I just did not find that to be the case. By far, most people that I talked to preferred print books. Almost exclusively, there were some people who said that if they couldn't get a print book, they would use, Um, and that was interesting. And and even more the minority were people who preferred audio books or ebooks exclusively.

, there were also some people, as you might expect, that said that they read the other two formats in certain situations, like when they're commuting or whatever, but that otherwise their preference was for print. So that's something else that I think was just really [00:41:00] interesting in that Bucks, some of those common narratives.

 Is that print is still king , among this study population.

Martha: That is really interesting, but , I get it as a reader, our ebooks and our audiobooks are great accessories, but it's just really hard to take the place of the feeling of reading a physical book.

Elizabeth: Mm hmm. Yeah. And that's what people said. As you might expect, there was a lot of responses about the print book as a physical object. Which I could go on a whole rant about, but I won't. And of course I didn't. There was no judgment when I was talking to the participants.

I very much practiced my, neutral, interviewer face while I was doing this. , but yeah, there was a lot of like, the way that print books smell, the way they feel, the way that I can, curl up with them and go back and forth between the pages. And there also was a lot of connection between the format of the book or the genre of the book, which we've talked about before, [00:42:00] or just the activities that these people do when it comes to reading that was very core to who they were as a person, to their identity.

Martha: Mm hmm.

Elizabeth: And that also went for the formats that they read in.

Martha: Now that we're talking about this, it's jogging my memory, and I feel like this really was the start of our podcast, because I think that you interviewed me with your research questions

Elizabeth: Oh, yeah.

Martha: you started doing your research, almost like as a practice run, and I remember I was kind of like those people who were self conscious about it because I was like, Oh, I don't know.

I'm not really a reader. Like, I listen to audiobooks. That doesn't really count, does it? And you're like, What? Yeah, of course it counts. Um, yeah. Yeah. Mm 

Elizabeth: forgot about that.

Yeah. That is that was that conversation where I was like, you are a reader. Why aren't you calling yourself a reader?

Martha: Mm hmm. Yeah. Funny.

Elizabeth: Yeah, that is, [00:43:00] that's cute. I love that. It's full circle.

Martha: Mm hmm. 

Elizabeth: So let's see. Other results that I found, some of them were pretty, in line with what you might expect. I asked people about how they found what to read and, Most of them said that they got recommendations from people in their lives, their friends or family.

 Very few people said librarians,

Martha: hmm.

Elizabeth: They also talked about Browsing in a bookstore, or a library, or the marketing and promotion on a book, that type of thing.

 Another area that I found some really interesting results in were when I asked people why they read for pleasure or for fun. Some of the responses were maybe what you would expect. The most common responses were things like entertainment, self improvement, escapism, things like that.

But this is where some of the responses that were, , a little deeper and for that reason, more interesting to me, came in. And so several [00:44:00] respondents said that reading helped their self improvement. Things like improved writing skills, success at university, strengthening their faith or spirituality.

 One student, which I have a long quote from in the article that I want to read, said that they read for personal development. It gives you that chance to think about things from new perspectives, which is what I like to do as well whenever I can. I like to see things from a different point of view, and I think reading novels or any type of other literature Not for school gives me the opportunity to do that.

So that reminds me of, what we talked about in the genre episode and in the very first episode about the benefits of reading and it being something that increases your empathy and widens your view of the world. That's something that, young people still feel from reading and still feel like they get from reading.

Martha: Yeah, I think it was so cool to have this inside look at people's relationship to [00:45:00] reading that came through in your research. It was so personal, and it felt really special, some of the things that people shared. Like, the part where, respondents were talking about how reading makes them feel something, similar to that quote that you just read.

And even some of them talked about how it inspires their art, that they were artists. And that reading sometimes gave them ideas and acted like a muse for their art, which I thought was so cool.

Elizabeth: Yeah, it was really cool. It was a very cool experience. And I've had this experience before, not to get too cheesy, but feeling honored to have people talk to me about this thing that is so important and personal to them. But this experience really brought that home to me and it made me think about how when I was in library school.

Nancy Pearl.

Martha: Nancy.

Elizabeth: Here she is. It took a while to get to her this time. But, Nancy Pearl used to [00:46:00] talk to us as students about how being a librarian is sometimes like being a priest or if you're not religious, being a therapist or something like that, , there's a trust relationship there.

 People are coming to you as someone who they trust with. Yeah, sometimes there's very personal information about them and that there is a privilege there. And I really did very much feel that way, doing these interviews. You spoke to a couple of the examples, several students also talked to me about how reading really helps with their mental health and their self care, 

it was so personal sometimes, people talked about it as helping them to get rid of their anxiety, to deal with depression, 

Martha: mm hmm.

Elizabeth: to, to lessen their stress. wHen I'm really stressed and I want to just go into another world, I turn to reading, one of them said. So, yeah, that part was, really meaningful to me as well.

[00:47:00] Yeah,

Martha: You said one interviewee was on the autism spectrum and they explained that they find it easier to interpret and understand characters emotions in books, which rely on much more explanation than in movies or real life, which rely mostly on body language, facial expressions, etc.

So, not only mental health, but accessibility, and that sort of thing too. Mm hmm, mm hmm,

Elizabeth: yeah, I'm so glad that quote stood out to you because it's another example of how there were things that I expected to come from these interviews and there were things that really surprised me. And one of them was how many people, without any prompting just self disclosed to me their mental health.

and challenges that they deal with, and the way that reading helps them. And yeah, that one that you pulled out was a great example, but there are several others too , how special, and how important for me as a librarian and for us as [00:48:00] librarians and libraries to address that need in our students who we are, charged with.

supporting. There's not as much of a moralistic tone to the way that universities take care of students anymore. , they very much are viewed as adults. But, we do have a duty of care to these young people that are living in our university and learning there having their whole lives, not just learning.

 And Yeah, that example was one of the things that really brought that home for me for how important this is. Another set of the results that I thought was really interesting, even though not quite as touching as the ones that we were just talking about was, I did ask people about their genre, , preferences as well, which I want to bring up just because, of course, we had the genre episode.

And so I had, again, if you're interested, you can see in the article, I had all sorts of different genres that I asked about, and I have tables that show how many people said they read [00:49:00] each genre. And those genres are based on, the same thing that we talked about in the genre episode about the sort of industry standards of the different genres that books fall into.

Um, fantasy young adult were two of the most popular. I was surprised just to hear people choose short stories and classics pretty often. The least popular were genres like westerns, which wasn't surprising because that's just not a genre that is really in fashion anymore. , I also asked about nonfiction because in the publishing industry, the general wisdom is that nonfiction actually sells better than fiction, that it is more popular in the sense that more people read it.

And so I did ask about nonfiction as well. And the most popular genres there were biography, history, cooking, and self help, which, those all tend to be pretty, popular. So that wasn't that surprising. But those tables are pretty interesting to look at

Martha: yeah. Again, [00:50:00] because we're so used to our own POV, was really surprised to read that the general wisdom is that nonfiction is more popular than fiction because I just read so much more fiction than nonfiction. So that was interesting to see your tables too and how that all played out.

And you talked about, How much readers within their genre, how much they read per week in terms of hours, right? And I was surprised to see that mystery and detective readers read more on average per week. And I wonder if that's because they're story driven page turners, if we're going back to our reading doorways.

I mean, I don't think we'll ever know for sure, but just something that crossed my mind.

Elizabeth: No, unless I do another study where, or someone else does, right? Other people, please pick up this research thread. It does make sense, though. I think that it's not too much of a leap to make, the type of books that keep you up [00:51:00] until 3am, even if you didn't mean to, especially when you're young and can stay up till 3am without it

Martha: Mm 

Elizabeth: completely destroying the rest of your week.

Yeah, I could see that for sure. Another thing that I found that was genre specific that reminds me of that same, sort of correlation is that, , the one genre whose readers were less dedicated to print than the others were romance readers. So it was still most romance readers preferred print, like 60%.

 But that was the lowest percentage, and ebooks were much more popular among romance readers than Any other genre, which I also, , I don't know why, and one of the frustrating things about the way that scholarly research has to be structured because of the very good rules about human subject research, which are there for a reason, because before we had them, and it was the Wild West, researchers were just, harming people left and right with their [00:52:00] experiments that they were coming up with.

So, , I don't want that, but one of the things that's frustrating is that you have to get your questions approved beforehand.. And so that means once you start doing the interviews, if you realize that you left something out that you really want to ask, it's too bad.

 You can't ask it. So there were a lot of things that I'm like, oh god, I wish I could ask you this now, but I couldn't. So it'll have to be for a future study. There are also some interesting differences, speaking of the amount of time that people spent reading, between the different countries. A higher percentage of the UK interviewees chose the 7 plus hours per week option than any of the US interviewees.

 Especially at two specific universities, double the number of respondents chose that, highest option, , compared to any of the U. S. institutions. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there were two of the U. S. colleges that chose less than an hour per week, and that was double the [00:53:00] percentage of that option in the overall pool,, and those were specifically at community colleges.

And so again, I don't know why that was, but I could certainly. Put forth a potential explanation, which is that people who are in community college tend to have a lot more demands on their time, it's people who are also working full time, also have a family and are going to community college sometimes.

 And so that could be pArt of the reason for that difference, but I did think that was an interesting difference between the countries, which for most of the other questions, even though I chose to interview people in both countries, I actually didn't find that many differences between the interviewees in the two countries.

 Except that I figured out that apparently extra credit is not a thing in the UK.

Martha: Oh, huh.

Elizabeth: Because one of the questions I was asking was , , if libraries could do something to incentivize them to use the collection and I had a bunch of different ideas for things that might incentivize students. And in the first few interviews that I did in the UK when I came to the extra credit, [00:54:00] idea, they were like, what is that?

What are you talking about? And I was like, oh, whoops.

Martha: Oh, it's not a thing here.

Elizabeth: Apparently, I should have done a little bit more research into whether all of these things make sense. But anyway, that's just part of the process. 

the other thing about the amount of time that people spent reading for fun, thinking back to that core belief about young people not reading for fun. This is one of the questions that I was really looking to answer that question, 

 whether that's true or not. And, overall, of course, people said that they read more for fun over the summer than during classes. 42 percent of the respondents chose one of the options for reading that was more than three, three or more hours per week. So there was one option that was three to five hours.

And then there was five to seven, seven plus. And so almost half of the respondents chose one of those three plus options, which was way higher than I had [00:55:00] expected. And then the highest number of respondents, , chose the one to three hours a week, which was way It's still, pretty close to what I read for fun now,

I want to say, and I'm not, taking four or five classes.

So I was surprised by just the amount that people read as well. Pleasantly surprised.

Martha: Yeah, definitely

Elizabeth: the other thing about the time spent reading, so after I asked the interviewees to choose one of the categories that they would put themselves into, for how much they read per week, I asked them. How they felt about the amount of time that they spent reading. And

I just wanted to bring this up because I feel like it's so related to a lot of the things that we've talked about on the podcast. And so remember that, , most of these students are reading over three hours a week, which is a good amount of reading, but almost all of them, when I asked them how they feel about [00:56:00] the amount they read for fun, I coded their responses as negative. So when I say I coded their responses, just, I realize now that I didn't explain this earlier on, which I should have, I'm doing these interviews and collecting qualitative data, right? And so I'm not just counting numbers. I do have some questions where I asked them to, put themselves into a numerical category, and so it was easy to count those.

But then with the open ended questions, like this one, how do you feel about something, I basically then had to go through all of the responses and read them what felt like a million times, so that I could put them into different categories that were still, respectful of and representative of what they said.

And so, the way that you do that is called qualitative coding, and I'm not going to go into all the nerderific details about it, but basically, with this question, the way that I coded the question was that, in, in various different ways, so the highest level way that I did was that I coded the responses either as [00:57:00] negative or positive.

 Either they are happy with the amount that they read or they weren't happy with the amount that they read, basically. And, 65 of the, you know, remember it's 92 people who said that they do read for pleasure, 65 of those gave a result that was coded as negative. And 62 of those said that it was because they felt it was too little.

Three of them said that it was because they felt like they read too much and that it was taking time away from their studies, which I, yeah, which was adorable. But most people. talked about, even if they read over three hours a week, that their perceived lack of reading enough was a personal failing.

 There was a lot of like, oh, I really wish that I could read more. I know that I should read more. I know that it's better than sitting and watching TV. I know that it's better than scrolling social media, of course, came up a lot. I really wish I could read more. I know I should read more over and over again.

And [00:58:00] so on the one hand, It's great that this is something that people want to do, but on the other hand, it gets back to something that we've talked about before, which is that this activity of reading is so loaded with all of this morality and all of these shoulds attached to it, and that I really think that that is just overall a negative thing for people, because even people who are reading feel like they're not doing enough, and I just have to think that Ultimately, that is a bad thing, people shouldn't feel guilty about, about this, 

Martha: mm hmm,

Elizabeth: just wish that we could shift, I don't know how, but I feel like it's my personal mission in life to figure out how to shift this narrative into like, all reading is good, that it's positive, you don't need to worry about not reading enough, or if you are reading the right things, or if whatever, whatever, you know?

Martha: We're just so hard on ourselves. I wonder if you could, differentiate between [00:59:00] the students in the UK and the U. S. and if Well, I think because students in the UK in general read more, maybe they didn't have a negatively coded response that like, Oh, I wish I did read more because they already were reading a lot.

But I'd be curious to know if it's a cultural thing in the US that more US students were like, Oh, I wish I read more than UK., or maybe it's a Western thing in general. I'd just be interesting to know.

Elizabeth: that is a really good question. I should have talked to you when I was splicing up the data because I have the

data to do that. I just didn't look at it that way. There's a billion different ways that you could cut up the data and

compare different data points, you know there certainly had to be some UK people that said that because if it was 62 of the 92.

People who said it. At least some of them had to be from the UK. But yeah, I wonder, I could look at that and get

Martha: Yeah.

Elizabeth: you. I still have my

Martha: back into that research, Liz. Yeah.

Elizabeth: I still have my Excel [01:00:00] spreadsheets. Well,, It took so long to do and so much work, I have this data now and there are researchers that go back to data like this time and again and pull out different

threads and publish different things about it.

 I think that part of the reason that I'm a little hesitant to do that is because all of the data was collected before the pandemic. And so I just am so curious about whether the pandemic fundamentally shifted any of these habits that people were talking about. That I'm eager to, do another study now or in a couple of years to see if there were any permanent shifts,

if people just went back to the way that it was before.

 Because we had such a huge global event happen, but normally that wouldn't be the case and so I could just go back to this data over and over and

Martha: Yeah. I think a lot of people did come back to reading during the pandemic with all of the, if you want to call it free time that we had in lockdowns and, and stuff. So that would be really interesting to see and compare.[01:01:00] 

Elizabeth: Yeah, that's part of the reason why I didn't feel like any of my data was not relevant anymore, because everything that I read indicated that if anything, it was just more. So what my data was indicating is that yes, students do read and they read more than you might expect for longer than you might expect, even during classes.

And so since that was the message that was coming out of my data, it felt like, and that's probably even more the case after the pandemic, because all the signs point to the pandemic actually increasing the amount that people read.

So yeah, I am really interested to see if there were changes from that though.

Martha: Mm hmm. 

Elizabeth: hmm.

Martha: about what your research showed, as far as the student's relationship to reading for fun. And you mentioned briefly, one respondent's Relationship to the collection at least so let's dive more into what you found about the students relationship with the collection at their college

Elizabeth: yeah, sure, there are a [01:02:00] lot of takeaways in this for other librarians. So if you are an academic librarian that's listening and you have a collection like this or you want one, there are a lot of practical takeaways. Because what I found is that, Even though many of the students are reading, it does not follow that they're using the Leisure Collection for that purpose, unfortunately.

 As much as we might hope that it would, we have to do more to proactively promote those collections, make sure that they are to what students actually want, there are all sorts of things that I think that academic libraries need to do better to position those collections so that they're used by students.

 But

Martha: Bring back the reading 

Elizabeth: lounges 

get more, yeah, the reading lounges. That is actually something that I asked about. Remember 

92 of the 98 said that they do read for fun,

a little over half of them knew about the leisure reading collections in their university library, even knew about [01:03:00] it, and it was even fewer who actually had used the collection, so 55 percent of the respondents knew about the collection, and actually that's of all the respondents, so of the 98, because I asked the people who don't read these questions as well.

So 55 percent of the respondents knew about the collection, and of those that knew about it, of the half that knew about it, only 30%, that's 16 total people, had ever checked out a book from the collection. Even if the libraries have these collections, students are not necessarily using them.

That's not because they just don't want to, though, which I think was one of the things that when I started, looking at these results, I was like, oh man, is this actually, I had to be open to it, but is this actually going to undercut my whole argument that Libraries should have these things because students read.

 I don't think that it does, though. There are some people who, just prefer to get their books from bookstores. And that came out in [01:04:00] the first half of the questions where I was asking, how do you find out what to read? Certainly some people did say that. But there were other responses that indicated to me that there's a lot more that libraries could do to make the...

 Collections better and make them something that students will use. When I asked about reasons that they didn't use the collection, some of the very common responses were things like the location isn't convenient. I don't really use the library or, I didn't know that it was there.

 A good number of people said that the collection wasn't relevant or sufficient for them. Either it was too small, the books weren't interesting, they didn't seem updated, that type of thing. And then there were some people that, like I said, they just didn't know that it existed and so it needs to be more prominently displayed.

 There are people who,, need and want that collection though, there was one, particular quote that I pulled out because it was, , a really good [01:05:00] example of this, where the student said that, the books that they want to read are not really within their reach, they're too expensive.

And so, they look At the library for those books, but a lot of the books in the library are quite old. They're from 20 or 30 years ago. So if I want to read a current book that's come out in the last five years, it's just really expensive and I basically can't do that. I think, that's a really good argument for, we're talking about accessibility, we're talking about equity here.

 If we're going to have one of these collections, we want it to be. something that students will use. And that means it has to have books that they're looking for, right? Not only genre wise, but also recency

Martha: so that's actually a really great argument for more funding for the Leisure Collection because in order to stay up to date Obviously, you'd have to have a decent budget to be able to make sure that the new releases that the students want to read are available to them, [01:06:00] but that would encourage so much more usership at the library.

So it seems like the investment, it would be a positive. Turn on investment if you want to think of it in those terms, otherwise, if they're not going to use it at all because it's outdated, ,. I could see that they don't if they think, Oh, yeah, it's a leisure collection.

But all I'm going to find in there is stuff I read in high school, then why would they bother?

Elizabeth: Yeah, exactly. So then it, like you said, so then it becomes a self-fulfilling

prophecy. Right. So then they don't use it. And so then people are like, oh, well they're not using

Martha: So we don't need it. Yeah, but they would if there were things they wanted to read. Yeah.

Elizabeth: Yeah, some of the other quotes people said things like they're usually books that the staff or someone has donated, you can tell that someone has already read them and that they're a cast off, right?

 The things that are in there aren't my thing. This is my fifth year here and it's only just this year that they've gotten some new books for it. Students are paying attention to things like that. And if they see that the collection is [01:07:00] not up to date is not. Speaking to them, they're not going to use it, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't use it if it was relevant and current

Martha: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Elizabeth: you know, meeting their needs.

 Students also talked about things that would, have their support or enthusiasm in terms of ways that the library could promote the collection. I have a whole table of ideas for improving the leisure collection that I asked people how they felt about it and then again coded their response.

 On a scale from enthusiastically positive to enthusiastically negative, and, things like having librarian and staff pick recommendations the way that you do in bookstores have staff picks with those little signs that come off the shelves, people love that, having more and better displays and promotion of the collections, having book lists Having face to face help deciding what to read from librarians.

There were a lot of people that were really enthusiastic about that. There's, let's see, 50, 60 of the respondents were either [01:08:00] enthusiastically positive or positive about

that idea. And so again, that's sort of that old school reader's advisory that academic libraries have given up on, but, students actually 

want someone Who knows about books, telling them, yeah, giving them recommendations for what to

Martha: So you just proved that your whole idea of wanting to do Reader's Advisory at an academic librarian is something that the students want.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I feel like I did. Again, it's like, oh great, you know, confirmation bias, but I definitely feel like this study confirmed for me that Yeah, that the things that I wanted to do were things that students also want. And part of the reason that I am so enthusiastic about this is because I have gotten good feedback from the students at my institution that I've talked to about it.

 I've given some examples on the podcast about the one student that came in and, really wanted to read that, [01:09:00] the Kardashian sister book, but was too embarrassed to ask, and when I told her that we had it, she was, , over the moon. I've had some really good interactions that anecdotally indicated to me that there was a need for this.

But yeah, , seeing it on this larger scale has confirmed for me that these are services that, That really resonate with people and that people need and want it at universities.

Martha: I'm assuming after you conducted this research Liz that you took away Some of these suggestions and brought them back to your library.

Have you implemented any of these changes to make? More people aware of your collection?

Elizabeth: Yes, I have, some of them I was already doing, but I certainly have used it , in conversations about the budget for the collection, or, there is some push that it was really important that we have other formats in the collection, and I was able to say, actually. Most people really just want print, right?

So having that data has been [01:10:00] really, certainly really useful for me and my library. I do do things like put up the little shelf. hangers with the staff pics and have done that way more since I did the study and every time I put one of those up, a new one, the book is gone. I feel like I put it out and I go buy it the next day and it's gone.

 So I can hardly even keep up with those. I always try to get more more and more people from the library to get their pics for those. I have put a form on our website where students can ask for book recommendations from me and I'll write them based on what they say they like.

I'll write them a little email with some suggestions from our collection., the one thing that I've wanted to do since I did this study, but haven't quite been able to implement yet is change the way that the collection is organized to be more genre based, because I didn't talk about that result, but that is one of the things that, was in the list [01:11:00] of things that I was asking students, , would you like it if libraries did x, y, or z to change or improve the collections?

And a lot of people said that they did want the collection to be organized more the way that a bookstore is organized, which is by genre. But , we talked about on the genre episode how difficult that is to do in an academic library, because The way that we categorize the books is just totally different, but I have gone back and forth about how to do that.

Now since our conversation about reading doorways, I have stepped back from that a little bit and wondering if I could implement

Martha: Reading doorways, 

Elizabeth: vision of the reading doorways charts. Remember in her article she talked about how her ideal vision for a library or a bookstore was where. The sections are actually

 By reading doorway and then each book has a little chart that shows the biggest doorway and then the other doorways and what percentage they have.

 It's just so much work though and this isn't , even close to my main responsibility in my job. So, [01:12:00] I haven't managed to do that

yet, but I have done a lot of these other things.

Martha: I envision that, you could keep the way that you catalog the books the same on the shelf, but maybe have some breakout tables, kind of like Barnes Noble, where you can have, , popular book talk books, or new fantasy, or or you could do it by doorways and say, , if you Love a page turner, here's Liz's recommendations this month.

But then you don't have to redo the whole collection, but just highlight, what you think people might be into.

Elizabeth: yeah, , that is actually something else that, has changed in the last few years. We do have a permanent display location in the library now. That's not always books from the Leisure Collection, but often I steal it for that. This month, it's Native American Heritage Month.

And so here are books by indigenous people or about, those sort of topics. And so there will be different themes. And I do use it for the recreational collection a lot.[01:13:00] Something else that I've done that came out of this study is I have made it so that I have many more shelves that are the flat slanted shelves so that I can put books face out on them. Which takes up a lot more room, obviously, but I got approval from my dean to, take over this, whole section of shelving where the collection had been before, and so now it's more spread out, and more of the books are face out because something else that people said that I didn't go over, there are so many results that I didn't go over, , but something else they said is that when you just see all the spines of the books, if you're browsing, it's harder to Have any of them catch your attention?

 You almost have to pull out every single one to look at it. And so something people also said about wanting it to be more like a bookstore is that they wanted more of the books to be facing with the cover out. 

Yes.

Martha: We do.

Elizabeth: I mean, that's part, that's what [01:14:00] the cover is for, right?

Martha: Natural. It's only natural.

Elizabeth: Yeah. So yeah, those are just a few of the suggestions, but there, are many more. So

like I said, if you are a practitioner, do get in touch with me and I'll give you all the details.

Martha: Yeah. I really do encourage anyone who's interested in this topic to read the article. , it's not a difficult... read. I think it's super interesting.

Elizabeth: Academic writing is not the easiest thing in the world to read, but I do, because I also write in another capacity, I think that my academic writing is less academic y.

Martha: Yeah,

Elizabeth: Sometimes to my detriment, I've gotten feedback from reviewers that it was a little bit too casual, but I do try to make it more readable, so I think it's easier to read than some might

Martha: yeah, I think that's what I was picking up on. There is a lot of data, but it's still accessible to the average person who wants to read it.

Elizabeth: Good.

Martha: So, is there anything else that you think we should [01:15:00] know in conclusion about your article or the research in general? Any takeaways you really want to highlight?

Elizabeth: I think that we've touched on a lot of the things that I had as the biggest takeaways for me. I think that the most meaningful thing is thinking about it from that perspective that we've talked about a little bit already, which is how personally meaningful this is for students and how it's such an important thing, whether it's Helping them, with the stress of their lives, helping them with their mental health, helping them be more empathetic people.

 It sounds a little grandiose, but it just, really does do all of those things. There was no better indication and encapsulation of that than the answers that I got to the very last question of the interview. So that probably is what I would point to for us to end on.

 The last question of the interview that I asked was whether the interviewee thought that it was a good thing that their library had a leisure reading collection and why are we not? [01:16:00] My idea behind this question, and I did word it in such a way that it was as open as possible to both, either you think it's a good thing or you think it's not, but the idea behind the question was to attempt to capture students attitudes toward leisure reading separate from their actual habits or the time that they had to read, right?

 I wanted to get a little bit more of a meta, what do you think about?

Martha: Mm hmm.

Elizabeth: as you might expect, most of the people said that they thought that they were a good thing, something like 90%. A handful said that they weren't sure and mostly that was because people weren't sure that it would fit in the academic library because they just thought of it so strictly as a place that only, was for academics.

And so that's not the part that is necessarily surprising or meaningful, but people tended to, without me prompting, elaborate more on the reason for their answer. And talked a lot about how good it was [01:17:00] for the collection to provide a break for students, to give them an escape.

 One student said that they thought it was really important that reading was seen as fun and not just academic. While another one explained, I think that high school and college can definitely beat the joy of reading out of you pretty quickly, and so trying to get people back into enjoying reading is a good idea.

 And other people said similar things, another respondent said, I think a lot of people in college hate reading. So it's nice that the library has that balance of reminding you that you can actually just enjoy this. And then the last quote in my results section in the article, which is the one that I felt encapsulated everything the most and is the reason that I used it for the title, the person said, it's fun to explore your interests.

It makes you feel like more of a person when the library has, those resources for you to, explore more than just your academic. So that for me is [01:18:00] the bottom line. I want the students at my university to feel like I see them as a

person, and not just as a student or just as a, unit of ROI where I'm trying to get them through college as quickly as possible into a degree and out of my world, 

I don't want them to feel that way. I want them to feel supported and seen. For their entire being, and yes, that includes their academics, and that is what I spend most of my time on, but it also includes this other piece.

Martha: Mm hmm. I love that. I mean, 

Elizabeth: Yeah, so that's it for

Martha: Yeah, it just seems like common sense that students might enjoy a break now and then, right? And that, it could make them more successful academically in the long run and, , like we've talked about before, more empathetic people and that's just better for all of us in our society.

So, thank you for doing this research, Liz.

Elizabeth: Yeah, yeah, I'm really glad that I did it, [01:19:00] and I think it's really important. And universities know that students need breaks, there are other parts of the university that during finals will give study breaks and, have cute animals for students to pet and things like that.

 It's not as if the university as a whole doesn't get this, but I do feel like academic libraries specifically have let other people, you know, we'll let other people do that. We'll let the Student Affairs Office take care of that.

 We're just the academics here. But there is a role that we can play , in that duty of care for students as well and seeing them as whole people. So I hope that that will be the effect of this, is that more libraries will take that

Martha: Yeah, I love it.

 I enjoyed reading the article. I love getting an insider's look into what you do and the difference between an academic librarian and a public librarian. I think it's great. Hopefully you, the listener, enjoyed it as well. Make sure you email us at allbooksaloudpod at [01:20:00] gmail.

com if you'd like to read Liz's article. She has limited copies left to share, so email us.

Elizabeth: Or if you have any questions. , it doesn't have to just be to read the article, if there's something you're curious about and you don't want to read the article and you just want me to answer it. I can do that too.

Martha: hmm. Or if you're looking for some reader's advisory, 

Liz can help you with that, which is something we've shared before on our social media accounts. So if you're not already following us, on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. We're all booksaloudpod on those platforms. And make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode.

And if you feel so inclined, please leave us a positive rating and review because it helps other people find us. And as always, read on my friends!

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