From Good Ideas come other Good Ideas…

In my last post, I mentioned that part of my job description falls under ‘outreach’. As such, I’m always looking for new ways to ‘reach out‘ to students and promote the library in a positive light. Fortunately, librarians are wonderful at sharing their good ideas, and the library literature is full of stories about successful programs. Last year, I read an article about innovative ways to reach out to students (citation below), and one of the programs mentioned in the article caught my eye – having a ‘stress-free zone’ in the library during final exam time. This past December, I created our own ‘stress-free zone’ at the University of Lethbridge to provide a space for students to relax, have a coffee and a snack, play games, and, on certain occasions, even get a free five-minute massage from the on-campus massage therapist. Administration gave me the go-ahead to run the program as a pilot project through our December exam period: 10 evenings from 7 – 11 p.m.

I was able to get campus food services to donate coffee and tea (no small feat), the massage therapist kindly donated his time on three different evenings, and library administration provided a small budget to purchase food and games. The library PR committee helped make signs & publicize the event throughout campus. I was very nervous on the first evening: would anyone come? Would students throw raucous parties in the room, creating noise, mess, and general havoc? Would library and caretaking staff hate me for creating a monster?

Fortunately, the answers to these questions were: yes, no, and no. Everything ran exceptionally smoothly, and comments from both the ‘official’ comment form on the library web site as well as anecdotal comments supplied by staff and student assistants seems to be that the room was well-used and much appreciated by students studying in the library. Apparently at 7 p.m. there would be a group waiting for doors to open, eager to get their caffeine fix; the food disappeared quickly, and earlier in the day, staff fielded questions about when the ‘zone’ would be open. No noise complaints were received and in general, whenever I or others went by the room, it appeared to be a very quiet and calm atmosphere – students sat talking quietly, played cards or chess, or grabbed a coffee and left.

I was very lucky to have great help from my fellow PR committee members as well as library staff, who had the student assistants who were working do hourly checks of the room as well as setting out the food and tidying everything up at the end of the night.

A bonus was that the ‘zone’ caught external media attention, thanks to a news release sent out by university communications; the story appeared in our local newspaper as well as two local news channels. The university is always looking for ways to promote themselves to the community, and apparently this ‘good news story’ did the trick.

Overall, I think this pilot project seemed to be a great success, and will hopefully become a regular event in the library during final exam periods. I have been wondering, though - are other libraries doing this, as well? I have only heard about libraries in the US who have similar programs, but I imagine other libraries in Canada do something like this too. If so - do you have good/bad stories about the outcome, ideas on funding sources/partnerships/ideas for improvement?


Karle, E.M. (March 2008). Invigorating the academic library experience: Creative programming ideas. C&RL News, 69(3), 141-144.