During the spring 2024 term, NOVA’s Loudoun campus library launched a Reading for Pleasure (RfP) pilot project. The project’s goal was to encourage students to read beyond what’s required for their studies. Its impetus was a YouGov poll that determined, “Just over half of all Americans said they read at least one book in 2023.”

The importance of reading

People derive multiple benefits from reading:

• • Increased writing proficiency and broadened vocabulary
  • Expanded general knowledge and better understanding of human and other cultures
  • Greater learning self-sufficiency.

At the close of 2023, your LO librarians brainstormed ways to encourage students to read beyond assigned reading for their courses. Our first experiment was a partnership with EBSCO, one of our e-book vendors.

Preparing for our RfP initiative

Julie Combs, our Emerging Technologies Librarian, created a carousel of book jackets that appeared on the NOVA Libraries homepage. Clicking on the carousel would drive students to a LibGuide Julie created for the initiative containing a link to the EBSCO e-book collection. Once authenticated, the user could search for additional titles in EBSCO’s e-book collection that appealed to them.

Through a series of marketing efforts, including a January 24, 2024 Daily Flyer article announcing the initiative, LO Library promoted the Reading for Pleasure project. Library instructors promoted the project during class sessions. Student Life helped us by posting QR codes around the Loudoun campus to draw attention to the initiative. While anyone could access these titles, this analysis is limited to Loudoun campus-based students.

Findings

Thirty-eight titles rotated in the Reading for Pleasure (RfP) carousel through the Spring 2024 semester. Total access for these titles, Spring 2024, was 36 (vs. 28 during the Fall 2023 semester when there were 470 more students enrolled for classes on the Loudoun campus). Several of the titles were not available during Spring 2023, so no year-over-year comparison can be made.

Nine titles were accessed between two and five times. Privacy issues limit our ability to determine whether these were unique individuals or the same individual accessing a title for multiple times. Nor can we determine whether users finished reading the book. A further anomaly is that one title, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, had an unusually high number of reads (15) in the Spring 2023 semester vs. five during the Spring 2024 term. We cannot say for certain, but we suspect that the book contained a short story that was assigned reading for a course in Spring 2023 as this is an unusually high number of reads of a title within one semester. Total LO Campus usage of the EBSCO e-book collection increased by 5%, Spring 2024 vs. Spring 2023, even though the number of EBSCO e-books available decreased by 14% (1,687 in Spring 2024 vs. 1,954 titles in Spring 2023).