Abstract:

It is always nice to get a call from the Dean of Arts and Sciences, who has always been a constant library user and promoter. But, it was especially great to get a call last fall (2013) to invite librarians to be in on the planning wave of a new campus initiative called Reading Across the Curriculum (RAC). The committee was to be comprised of Education, English, and ESOL faculty, as well as the Dean, and needed representation from among the library faculty. Would Doris Van Kampen-Breit, the Faculty Development Librarian and I, the Outreach Librarian, join the group? Yes, we said!! The Library is a perfect fit for a reading-awareness campaign. It was envisioned that Reading Across the Curriculum, like Writing Across Curriculum before it, would be a multiple year time commitment and effort, including LibGuide (Springshare) creation, faculty development Elluminate (Blackboard Collaborate) webinar presentations, face-to-face faculty workshops, etc. This is the story of the librarian contributions to the RAC initiative at Saint Leo University in Florida, of what our fellow committee members and audiences learned from our participation as library leaders, and of what we learned from our ground-floor involvement in building a reading-focused community at our university and in our academic library.

Keywords:

Academic Library, LibGuide (Springshare), Elluminate (Blackboard Collaborate), Reading Across the Curriculum, Librarians.