Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Starting a Book Club Online

Many of you have mentioned that you have already or are considering starting a faculty/staff book club at your campus. A few of you have also mentioned that you are tying the book into an activity on your campus - your diversity committee, an event, a program, etc. It's fantastic that you are promoting reading and book discussion at your campuses. Of course, this could also be an avenue to bring in local authors and spark new programming, as well.

This morning, I came across a beta site called Book Sprouts. Book Sprouts is an online book club. Sign up is free. You can use the site to join or create a book club, select a book (it appears to be a kind of nomination/voting process), host online discussions and set up in person discussions.

You could definitely use this to enhance your own campus book club. However, is this something we should consider using for a system-wide event (sort of a revival of Rasmussen Reads)? We could do a Diversity focus. That way, we can involve faculty and staff from online and system offices who would not otherwise have the opportunity to participate. Your thoughts?

2 comments:

KarenE said...

I love the idea of a Rasmussen Reads system-wide event with a Diversity focus! I simply don't have the time / energy / additional assistance to pull this off at the Green Bay campus alone!

LisaS said...

I like the idea but there has been some interest here to do something similiar here on our own. We just weren't sure how to start. If the librarian at each campus on board the system wide idea will work. Next quarter I need to coordinate a diversity activity, so I would support this.