Thursday, October 21, 2021

Trio of Library Initiatives to Integrate the Arts & Humanities into our Health Community: Ebling's



This lightning talk was presented at the virtual 2021 Midwest/MCMLA Joint Annual Meeting on October 15 by fellow Wisconsinites:   [Posted here with their permission.]

A Trio of Library Initiatives to Integrate the Arts & Humanities into our Health Community. 

Christopher Hooper-Lane, MA, AHIP, and Lia Vellardita, MA, Ebling Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. [Midwest] [First-time Chapter Presenter] [Program Description]

BACKGROUND: There is a growing recognition of the benefits of expanding the arts/humanities in the health sciences. Recognizing this, school leadership tasked our library to develop initiatives to connect the arts and humanities to our patrons. As a result, our library launched three new programs to integrate the arts into our community. 

DESCRIPTION: Our library developed three arts initiatives for our health sciences community:

 (1) a book/film discussion club providing participants at all levels a venue to discuss relevant books and films; 

(2) an onsite recreational reading collection (and corresponding website) offering a browsable collection of popular non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and graphic medicine books with health themes and sub-collections on emergent topics; 

(3) an arts/humanities journal that for our health community to showcase a variety of arts including the written word, visual arts (2D and photos of 3D art), and multimedia audio/video.

CONCLUSION: All three initiatives have been successfully launched. The book/film club has administered 15 online book/film discussions with a total of 220 participants. Sessions are led by a variety of facilitators from our health community. The recreational reading collection now includes 1200 items and is expected to be fully on display and available for circulation summer 2021. A corresponding website is live using book cover images that can be sorted by sub-collections such as well-being, antiracism, etc. Three issues of our arts journal have successfully published 84 works of art from our health sciences community with 2,950 site hits recorded.

Art at Ebling:  Book Club  |  Corpus Callosum  |   Recreational Reading Collection

Link to Conference Papers and Posters

Contact Chris Hooper-Lane or Lia Vellardita for more information.

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