Library Guides: June Madness: A Month of Book Bracketology. ALAO poster: About

Introduction

In the summer of 2020, University of Dayton Librarians were seeking a way to engage with our suddenly remote population in a low-pressure, passive manner where the user could dictate their level of involvement. Following the lead set by Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, on May 26 we began working on the framework for June Madness, devising book lists and mechanics of the event. We created a custom LibGuides CMS guide with embedded LibWizard elements for the week-to-week voting and book list information and a Qualtrics survey for the bracket predictions. The event ran from June 1 through July 13, with Lois Lowry’s THE GIVER as our winner.

Components

Book List: We divided the list of titles into four regions based on geographies on the UD campus. Each region represented a category of books--Mysteries/Thrillers, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Non-Fiction, and Modern Classics. Each book in the list was linked to the item either in our catalog or that of our regional statewide consortium catalog, OhioLINK.
Week One Voting: Using the images populated through the LibGuides “Book from the Catalog” feature, we created four LibWizard surveys with eight questions each, representing the first-round matchups in all four regions. As each week’s voting concluded, it was simple to identify winners and pull forward the HTML for each new pairing in the bracket.
Bracket Visualization: We used a Google Sheet exported to PNG and PDF for screen readers to visualize the whole bracket.
Predictions: An embedded Qualtrics survey powered the predictions and bracket submission portion of the event. Through this, we determined who had a correct prediction for the champion book and who had the best overall bracket (a co-author on this poster and the Dean of University Libraries, respectively).

Engagement

A blog post was written in coordination with the Marketing and Outreach Team to announce the beginning of June Madness. A plan was devised for a future blog post to close the loop, announcing the winner and indicating plans for future uses of bracketology.
Social media reminders were planned with the University Libraries’ Coordinator of Marketing and Engagement to keep the community invested in the project as the tournament progressed. Internal emails were sent to library faculty and staff, and an announcement was made on a university-wide internal platform.
The goal of the project was to create a passive program which allowed faculty, staff, students, and the community to interact with the library while exploring the library’s Leisure Reads collection, and also learning about library borrowing services like OhioLINK and SearchOhio.

Postgame

June Madness 2020 was created and executed by Heidi Gauder, Zachary Lewis, and Jason Wardell. Special thanks to Ann Zlotnik for the amazing graphics, Maureen Schlangen for blogging expertise, and Katy Kelly for all things marketing!

Jason Wardell can be reached at jwardell1@udayton.edu or @jasonhwardell on Twitter.
Zachary Lewis can be reached at zlewis1@udayton.edu.
Heidi Gauder can be reached at hgauder1@udayton.edu