Students had the opportunity to meet their perfect match through “Blind date with a book.” Photo Courtesy of: Alicia Vaandering
To get in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, the University of Rhode Island Robert L. Carothers Library hosted a “blind date with a book” event on Feb. 14.
The event, which happened from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the first floor of the library at the computer desk across from the staircase, was decorated with a red tablecloth and four “Happy Valentine’s Day” balloons. The table featured 50 library books wrapped in brown paper, with nothing but a note describing the genre and overlying themes of the books. For example, books only had information like “Sports, nonfiction, interviews” written on the tag.
Students then could choose which book they wanted to check out and unwrap, using their URI student ID to check the books out of the library. According to the library website, books are loaned to students for 28 days before needing to be returned.
Alicia Vaandering, the student success librarian at URI Libraries and assistant professor at the University, said that they came up with the idea for the event after watching other university libraries host similar events.
“We follow a lot of other libraries on our social media and are watching things that they do, and we thought ‘let’s do something like that together,’” Vaandering said.
She continued by saying that this year was the “perfect year” to host this event, since most students have returned to in-person learning and there are fewer COVID-19 protocols, bringing more students in and out of the library each day.
Danielle Butler, an information services technician at the library, said that with the emergence of “BookTok,” a TikTok trend that has caused different books to be wildly popular amongst Generation Z, more and more students have been coming up to the desk at the library asking for the same books.
These trends, amongst other factors such as books with new Netflix adaptations, factored into how Butler and Vaandering chose which books to use for the event. The 50 URI library books used for the event consisted of nonfiction, fiction and children’s picture books. Two hours into the event, there were only 7 books left of the original 50.
“Because of the way our books are organized, like a lot of books that have similar themes kind of end up together,” Butler said. “So there are areas where like popular fiction tends to be kind of clumped. So some of it was things that we looked up in the catalog and looked for things specifically like if they were popular on BookTok and other places. And then other stuff, we kind of went up and browsed the shelves and were like, this looks super interesting, and pulled them that way too.”
Both Vaandering and Butler were happy with the outcome of the event. Vaandering said that all students, even those who never checked out a library book before, seemed excited about their “blind date.”
“It’s been fun to hear the students walk by, even students who haven’t checked out a book from the library before, and compare the books they received,” Vaandering said. “It’s so cute, and we’d been working on this for days.”