Cultivating the Living Room of Campus: Lessons from Tredway Library’s Wellness Initiatives

Augustana College’s Tredway Library takes pride in its moniker of being the living room of the campus. However, like many others, the library faced a decrease in student engagement in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic; moreover, situational factors such as reduced campus communication outlets and several curriculum redevelopments compounded the situation by limiting both messaging opportunities and library capacity to respond to student needs. Survey data collected from senior students over the past five years underscores an initial decrease and steady regrowth in self-reported sense of belonging within the library, aligning with the pandemic and post-pandemic library engagement data.

Tredway librarians prioritized the development of targeted wellness-related collections and programming centered on giving students resources and spaces to simply be, rather than be in an act of becoming, in response to expressed gaps in student support. These projects, ranging from the expansion of a leisure collection to include self-care materials to curating lego sets for passive community programming and even to the present reimagining of a defunct computer lab into a wellness lounge, have each invited and engaged students throughout the development and realization processes. This presentation will overview Tredway Library’s path to developing our wellness initiatives with this active student buy-in, along with some pros, cons, and advice regarding each of the projects we have undertaken so far.

Presenters:
Kaitlyn Goss-Peirce (she/her) is a Research and Instruction Librarian for the Humanities Division at Augustana College's Thomas Tredway Library, where she also serves as the Library Instruction coordinator. With prior experience in public libraries and archives, one of her passions is enriching the library's role as an accessible third space. She earned her Master's of Library and Information Science from Simmons University. 

Garrett Traylor (he/they) is a Research and Instruction Librarian and Assistant Professor at Augustana College's Tredway Library. He is the library's outreach coordinator and liaison to the Arts & Communication Division, to the business, Spanish, and Swedish programs, and to the Augustana Prison Education Program. He previously worked at Illinois College for five years after earning his master's from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Traylor's varied research interests have led to publications on topics such as video games, Scandinavian cinema, adaptation theory, and poetry, and presentations on AI, wellness, and zines. Happy husband, dad to two, and dog dad.