Background: After building a circulating collection of Medical/Scientific and Social/Cooperative board games in our Library, we initiated a program of advertising our new collection of games and sponsoring game nights to increase the visibility of the games to our users. This has allowed us to identify interested individuals and groups on campus to increase awareness and create opportunities to promote the further use of the collection at our institution.
Description: Our first effort that generated interest was prominently placing our game collection on shelves behind the Library Service Desk. We scheduled our first Library Game Night to coincide with the annual New Student BBQ. We promoted the event with flyers, e-mails, and social media posts. The event allowed us to connect with an attendee who then worked with us to host a 24-hour game marathon at the Library as part of a national charitable event entitled Extra Life Game Day. Plans are in the works to co-sponsor bi-monthly Game Nights in the Library with the Graduate Student Organization as well as conducting surveys of attendees about new games and preferences for future events. All of our efforts have paid off with every game having circulated at least twice since the launch of the collection last year.
Conclusion: We will continue to examine circulation statistics for the games in our collection and gather information from events where our games are featured. We have been gathering feedback from attendees via surveys sent out at the conclusion of our events. Holding events and then establishing developing relationships with partners in the institution has proven to be a very effective way of promoting the use of the collection. We will continue to seek out new partners and locate funding sources on campus that will enable us to acquire new games and expand the scale and scope of future game events.
