Engaging with campus and community: Insights from a traveling exhibition

Abstract

Exhibitions draw people to libraries. They encourage visitors to engage with objects and media in a public space and provide opportunities for discovery within the library’s collection. Not every library has the resources to create original exhibitions, however. Traveling exhibitions, which arrive ready to set up in the library’s existing space, can alleviate some of the labor involved in creating exhibitions while providing the same benefits for the library. The Penn State University Libraries, Georgia Southern University Libraries, and University of Mississippi Libraries each hosted Americans and the Holocaust, a traveling exhibition from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in late 2021 and early 2022. In this article, we describe the ways each library leveraged the exhibition for community engagement, as well as some of the keys to success that can inform other academic libraries considering hosting a traveling exhibition.