FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY
Sometimes, all we need is a hero. This semester, University librarians Dawn Frood and Tiffany Follin and the Libraries' marketing team collaborated on an exciting project showcasing medical graphic novels. What started as funny videos showing librarians in superhero costumes, became a bigger campaign involving students, staff, and a certain former NBA star. The resulting videos and poster presentations about the campaign were accepted by the 2023 Charleston Conference and the PNCMLA 2023 Conference. The poster will also be submitted as part of the 2024 Medical Library Association Conference proposals put together by the Medical Library.
At the start of this initiative, the External Relations department already had an established Instagram account that was actively engaging with the university community. The External Relations and Collection Management department also previously collaborated to create two “unboxing” reels utilizing the classic “show and tell” format of removing titles from a box.
The Medical Library had been using designated funding from Library Main to curate electronic Graphic Medicine titles to add to an existing Comics and Graphic Novels Collection. Graphic Medicine novels not only emphasize the humanity found in clinical diagnoses using art, but also highlight diverse personal stories within the topics of illness and health. While virtual titles had been slowly added through the past years, with the addition of physical titles to the Graphic Medicine collection came the opportunity to include them in “unboxing” reels. The goals of this collaboration were to connect to the 18-34-year-old demographic, which comprises 65% of the FAU Libraries Instagram account; humanize librarians using humor and relatability, leverage partnerships, highlight the novels, and most importantly: do it by reimagining the library book “unboxing” experience using creative storytelling.
We had a three-pronged approach for this collaboration: Collection Management acquired new titles using Oasis, signaled when new titles arrived for unboxing, pulled circulation reports, and set up the Comic Collections within Alma. External Relations posted Instagram reels, engaged with students, monitored engagement data, incorporated website engagement, and spearheaded collaboration with the author publicist. The medical library curated the content itself, maintaining a Libguide specific to graphic medicine novels, and later the senior medical librarian jumped on board to initiate an interprofessional Healthcare Book club utilizing a graphic medicine novel, Hyperbole and a Half.
Working with External Relations, the librarians settled on a range of Instagram tags to capture content to promote to specific audiences. Tags were collection/topic specific (#GraphicMedicine, #superhero), utilitarian (#MedicineEducation), audience-specific (#LibrariansofInstagram, #FAUstudents), and aimed to be both broad and narrow in scope.
In creating the reels, it was decided that utilizing trending music would be one method of social engagement. The reel content was made ahead of time, so creativity was independent of the soundtrack. What resulted was Librarians having a bit of fun: we had a general idea of the content and then modified it as we went along.
Our first video used comic content such as “BAM” graphic overlays, elements such as pretending to rundown the catwalk in slow-motion but dropping a book in real-time, and the infamous cape flying scene that panned out to show our colleagues in action.
Our second reel employed an elevator and is one of my favorites as we were able to engage with students riding down to the first floor with us so every take was uniquely different at a level we couldn’t have anticipated doing ourselves. At this point, Dawn leveraged the partnership of Gary Forbes, a former NBA star turned local author writing a series of graphic novels.
We were able to bring the first two of his books into the collection and partnered with him for an “unboxing” video that incorporated a "magic" handoff of a book between the author to the librarians. To date, we have four comic collection reels, with three featuring librarians, over 6000 views in total, hundreds of likes, and great engagement from students.
In the future, we anticipate additional interdepartmental collaborations, such as with the Libraries’ Recorded Sound Archives to highlight soundtracks. We had identified a College of Medicine newsletter opportunity that had to be placed on hold, but we can pivot to lists for Awareness months and days like highlighting a Cancer Awareness Month(s) throughout the year or Depression Awareness Month next October. And finally, we are hopeful for further collaborations with authors and are looking forward to an event with Gary Forbes as he continues publishing his novels.
