Fraser Hall Library presents “Create, Collect, Recycle, Recreate: The life cycle of print resources”

Photo of students during event courtesy of Charlie Shields

This week, the Fraser Hall Library is holding an event exhibiting the life cycle of print resources and allows students to engage in the last step of the process, “recreate,” by turning out of circulation books into new archival material to be displayed within the college archives. 

In an email sent to students in the School of Education (SOE), Faculty Librarian Becky Leathersich explained that the library is hosting the event from Nov. 15-22. In the library lobby, “materials that represent different areas of the library collections will be in place for students to create new works.” 

According to Leathersich’s email, “Fraser Hall Library would like to share with everyone insight into the behind-the-scenes work that takes place to manage and maintain print collections that support all the great scholarship and teaching that is taking place at the College.”

Head of Collection Management at Fraser library Alana Nuth explained that the project aimed to let students “…use materials that were part of the collection or not and create new works using what we have made available to them. So, some of the books we took out of the collection because they have become outdated or we’ll be buying a new edition, some of them are damaged. Some of them are materials that we just have multiple copies of, like we have copies in different collections, you know it’s just more than we need. So, these are considered duplicates, or excess copies, and some are just gifts that just fell outside the scope of the collection, development policy, or books that we already owned a copy of.”

Students will have access to a variety of arts and crafts materials and can create anything they want to out of the donated library materials. Students are encouraged to find books or other materials that interest them and create their own art out of it.

“We’re kind of thinking of it partially as an exhibit and partially as an activity,” said Nuth. “So we have a bunch of books here; some of them at one point were in the collection, some of them were never in the collection. It’s a hodgepodge of things and materials and we basically have a box out here with a bunch of supplies. We have glitter, we have glue, we have rubber cement, we have a hot glue gun in the office, markers, string, hole punch, all sorts of crafting kind of supplies for students to make new works of art.”

After making something, Nuth said that the pieces students create could either be taken home or kept for Fraser Hall cataloging.

“If there is a title for the work, that’ll be displayed. If the student wants to give us their name or wants to be anonymous, both are fine. And then what materials they use to create their work, that will all be used in the catalog record's description,” said Nuth. 

In this way, students can leave a piece of themselves in Geneseo for years to come, even when their name is not remembered, they still have a part of Geneseo.

Nuth explains that while she and collection management are typically in the background, students often do not realize their role. She said that she wants students to know there is more to the library than just space and books. 

“We’re trying to describe to students the whole life cycle. So, everything from selecting which books to buy, purchasing them, cataloging them, and putting them in the collection, the whole life cycle. Then some books we are seeing, we are using the term ‘retired’, some books we do remove from a collection to replace with newer ones. So, we are trying to describe that whole lifecycle and inform students about what we do,” Nuth said.