Alyssa Kowis, Collegiate Librarian & Librarian Assistant Professor
Kelli Anne Gecawich, Assessment Librarian & Librarian Assistant Professor
Dr. Kristina Clement, Assistant Director of Academic Engagement & Instruction, Collegiate Librarians & Librarian Associate Professor
Kennesaw State University
Introduction
Academic libraries continue to expand outreach and engagement efforts in response to shifting student needs, evolving service models, and persistent challenges in making library value visible. These challenges are often amplified in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) focused environments where time constraints, academic workloads, and help-seeking patterns can make traditional outreach programming ineffective. At the same time, academic libraries need outreach and engagement strategies that do not always require a high time commitment from students, or continuous employee mediation, while still generating usable insight that can inform services, collections, and student success initiatives.
This paper examines low-tech, high-visibility passive outreach as a pragmatic response to a central tension in STEM library engagement: the desire for richer insight into students’ library needs and preferences versus the reality that higher-effort or socially exposed outreach methods can suppress participation. Following a brief literature review about academic library outreach, STEM outreach, and passive engagement or micro-assessment strategies, we present two complementary case studies. The first examines #ProjectWhiteboard, a portable whiteboard prompt initiative implemented at the Lane Library on Georgia Southern University’s Armstrong campus, documenting how a simple feedback mechanism evolved into a sustained community-building fixture. The second case study examines the Johnson Library Sticker Survey Project on the Kennesaw State University’s STEM (Marietta) campus, which adapts prompt-based engagement into a sticker “micro-survey” format designed to reduce effort further and broaden participation. Together, these cases demonstrate how pairing an established engagement method with a less-explored micro-survey variant offers practice-informed evidence for sustainable, assessment-minded outreach approaches in STEM-focused library contexts.
Continue reading Participation Without Pressure: Two Case Studies in Passive Library Engagement