Hello there!
This is the 2024 to 2025 Library Ambassador review, written by Amira Said and Elizabeth Whitmore. Both of us have just graduated from being students and Ambassadors, and we were on the team for 4 years together! We hope that our combined experiences and knowledge will make this year's review a valuable tool for future Ambassadors and an interesting read for anyone else. Use this as a source of inspiration for event planning, but also as a way to learn from our successes and mistakes.
The Student Library Engagement Ambassador Team (2024-2025)
The 2024 fall semester kicked off with two traditional events. Party for Your Mind and Postcards: Party for Your Mind is a library wide event that Ambassadors can join, in which different teams within the library celebrate and advertise their work publicly. Postcards is an event in which Ambassadors host a table of free postcards and swag. Students write their messages and we send them off, internationally and domestically, for free. Both of these are beloved events by Ambassadors and students alike, as they are a great way to introduce the student body to the Library Ambassador team! Moving into October, we celebrated International Pronouns Day with pronoun pins, allowing students to create or grab pre-designed pins. Halloween at Hatcher came next, offering students snacks, crafts, and a haunted tour of Hatcher Library’s many oddities – (seriously… that place is odd).
Alyssa Wakefield, a current Library Ambassador, participates in Halloween-themed activities
Sip n' Paint, NAP, and Therapaws took center stage for the second half of the semester. Sip n' Paint is Amira’s personal favorite event, with fun (non-alcoholic) drinks and paint making for a relaxing break during exams. NAP, or Night Against Procrastination, is the opposite of that and we encourage students to study at the library by opening up new study spots and offering food! Finally, at the tail end of the semester, we assisted with Therapaws. Ariel Ojibway, an outreach librarian who primarily plans Therpaws, has partnered with us and Wolverine Wellness for many years to promote student well-being. Therapaws has become a staple of every semester and allows us to meet other librarians and organizations. This has fostered a love of partnering with others to highlight library resources. Overall, the semester was a success! “Teamwork makes the dream work” held true here, as our successes came from each Ambassador. Many events had multiple activities to facilitate and were only successful with the coordination of each Ambassador.
The new year started with us planning for Cafe Shapiro for February and CVGA Night for March. Cafe Shapiro was an annual event where undergraduate writers, who were nominated by their professors, got to read from their creative works. They also got highlighted in a published anthology and our Cafe Shapiro website. CVGA Night was a collaboration between the Ambassadors and the Computer and Video Game Archive (CVGA). The Ambassadors and CVGA provided video games, board games, and food to help students take a collaborative break from studying. We also provided Lego Botanical Sets as raffle prizes for anyone who stopped by to play games. In February, we hosted a Blind-Date-With-A-Book event with all different genres of books to please all readers. Additionally, in March, we hosted a Short Film Fest to highlight U-M student filmmakers and free movie resources available in the U-M catalogue.
A group of students unwind from their studies with board games and snacks
Like Fall 2024, Therapaws and NAP complimented the tail end of Winter 2025 to make stress-free environments for students. During this time, we participated in our once-a-semester Instagram takeover of the @umichstudents account. On Instagram, we highlighted past events, unsung library study spaces, and book recommendations. In the future, we hope to be even more active socially via the U-M Library Facebook, BlueSky, and through the @umicharts Instagram to feature more resources the library offers. Through these efforts, we hope that the library will eventually have its own Instagram account. This way, we can continue our outreach of the library to the U-M community and the Ann Arbor community at large.
Any problems we did face came from and were solved by necessary experimentation. More specifically, this came from determining how, when, and whether to limit event participants, creating a newsletter to promote our events, and exploring new ways to make each event great experiences. Additionally, communication and transparency was and is key. Sometimes emails would fall through the cracks, especially during never-ending midterms. However, everyone made a consistent effort to follow through with assigned tasks and respond on their completeness. In turn, Elizabeth, who had the role of the Student Coordinator for the 2024-2025 academic year, gave timely updates on behind-the-scenes work that occurred through Zoom meetings and email.
For me (Elizabeth), being an Ambassador was a quintessential part of my growth in undergrad. For four years, I was trained in teamwork in a work setting. Planning and advertising events was not a one-man job, especially in 2021 and 2022, when individuals were more wary of in-person events. However, with every iteration of the Ambassador team that I experienced, we learned how to make our events more accessible and what patrons wanted from the library. As the Coordinator, I had the invaluable opportunity to extend my confidence by liaising between library staff, the Ambassador Team, and patrons in order to illustrate how beneficial the U-M Library (and all libraries in general) are to the student and community experience. Throughout this past year, I spoke with many students, parents, and community members and how they appreciated the resource we were highlighting at the time (e.g. diversity and art through student writers). Those patrons ended up joining our mailing list and bringing friends to future events to make sure they could take advantage of the resources at the library.
And for me (Amira), being an Ambassador was my daily dose of sunshine! Every event acted as a unique opportunity to connect with the many people our university’s library system brings in. I am beyond grateful for all the moments of joy I shared with the team and with the lovely participants of our various events. Those interactions acted as my fuel for the development I experienced as an Ambassador. To echo Elizabeth, teamwork is integral to what we accomplished and in general, is an invaluable skill. I wholeheartedly believe that my experience as an Ambassador has contributed to every success I have had in team based environments in the past four years both in and out of the classroom! On top of that, learning how to advertise & directly speak to larger audiences, planning large scale events, and experiencing real time feedback of our work has built up a confidence in my abilities that no other role could have. It truly was a one of a kind experience!
Even though our time as Ambassadors has come to an end, we have full faith in the upcoming team for the 2025-2026 academic year! The new team, with a mix of new and experienced Ambassadors, will be led by Thomas Gala-Garza. Thomas has contributed many innovative ideas that have increased our engagement and outreach, most notably being our newsletter with 600+ subscribers. He helped us both coordinate student writers and the website for Cafe Shapiro. Throughout the entire year, he went above and beyond to respond to external and internal feedback to improve our events. With him as the new Coordinator and with fresh and accomplished ideas from all the current Ambassadors, we will be able to continue a legacy of libraries serving their communities.
End of the Semester dinner with Student Library Engagement Ambassador Team
Signing off (but will visit as newly enlisted alumna),
Elizabeth and Amira