By Hilary Westgate and Sam Wittenberg

Each semester since Fall 2015, librarians at Potter Library at Ramapo College have collaborated with the college’s Roukema Center for International Education to create an international Book Club for students, faculty, and staff. The Book Club was traditionally aligned with the Roukema Center’s themed regional years (https://www.ramapo.edu/international/itzn/regional-years/). In past years, librarians chose one to two books per semester, and the Roukema Center purchased copies of the selected titles to give to students for free. Librarians promoted the Book Club at the Student Involvement Fair, by tabling around campus, sharing on social media, and connecting with interested faculty who would then share with their students. We met three times per semester, usually in the library’s conference room, with tea, hot chocolate, and themed snacks; whenever possible, we purchased foods and snacks that aligned with the regional or country theme. We maintained a steady attendance throughout the years with participants joining from different groups across campus, including students, staff, faculty and administration. 

In Spring 2020, when the pandemic began and we moved to remote learning, we had our final Book Club meeting of the semester online via Webex, which was well attended. We encouraged attendees to still make themselves comfortable with snacks and beverages at home while we chatted! Members expressed an interest in continuing on as a group despite the pandemic-related changes to our work and learning environments. 

For Fall 2020, we converted the book club into a themed reading group using free online materials from outlets such as Lightspeed Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Slate and PseudoPod that would still speak to the theme of internationalization, as well as some other sub-themes, such as supernatural stories for the Halloween season, or a focus on a certain genre, such as Africanfuturism. After meetings between the librarians and the Roukema Center staff, we decided to create the Global Talks series, which gives us the freedom to eventually expand the format beyond reading discussion to include things like guest lectures. The Roukema Center created a website (https://www.ramapo.edu/international/globaltalks/), and we set up three virtual meetings for the Fall 2020 semester, each to discuss literary works with a regional theme: 

• Meeting 1: Africanfuturism (works from Nigerian and Nigerian American authors)

• Meeting 2: Latin American and the Caribbean (works from Trinidad & Tobago, Colombia, and the Virgin Islands)

• Meeting 3: Asia (works from the Philippines and Malaysia)

For each meeting, we selected two to three short stories that were freely available online, and also shared links to accompanying articles, videos, and other items such as online conferences. To market the new series, we reached out to past Book Club members, shared with librarians and student groups, posted to the college’s Daily Digest emails, and worked with our college’s Marketing department to develop a digital poster and social media posts to share. 

So far, after two sessions, we’ve had great participation from students, faculty, staff, and administrators! We meet on Mondays during a ‘common hour’ between class times, and we send out the reading materials and supplemental materials via a Google Drive link a couple of weeks before we meet. We all appreciate the chance to read for fun -- especially short stories, which are less of a time commitment -- and the opportunity to discuss and interact with our students and colleagues from all areas of campus. We plan to continue the format into the Spring 2021 thanks to the continued interest of attendees, and the Roukema Center plans to add additional event types into the series, such as guest speakers. We look forward to offering this for our students, faculty, and staff in 2021 and beyond.

Hilary Westgate is the Reference, Instruction, and Outreach Librarian, and Sam Wittenberg is the System and Web Development Librarian at Ramapo College. They can be reached at hwestgat@ramapo.edu and switten1@ramapo.edu respectively.