JKM Library Women’s History Month Display
This Women’s History Month, the Jennie King Mellon Library has put up their annual display empowering women and femmes. Jocelyn Codner, our favorite Reference and Outreach Librarian spoke with me about what this display means to her, and to Chatham.
How long has the library been doing this display?
The in-library Women’s History Month book display has been in existence since before my time here! I have been responsible for displays for the past six years, but the JKM Library has crafted a Women’s History Month in-library book display since 2008. Our Women’s History Month virtual display was created in response to COVID in 2020. Virtual displays can be accessed 24/7, year-round, anywhere there is an internet connection.
What is your favorite part of this project?
I’m such a typical librarian in that I enjoy walking around the stacks, grabbing books that I think would be good to include. I love gathering the titles and seeing the display emerge. It’s kind of meditative! And it brings me joy to highlight the amazing books we have in our collection. I love watching people’s faces light up when they find a book that excites them, and displays can help facilitate that moment.
What parts of the display were most important for you to include?
As for all of the JKM Library’s in-library displays, we always aim to include a wide variety of experiences and identities. There is only so much you can do with a simple book display, but making sure we illustrate the diversity of the topic is important to us. For Women’s History Month in particular, we try to focus on the stories of women of color. We are limited by which titles are available in our library at the time we put the display together (sometimes really good books are already checked out), but we want to highlight many stories. Our current Women’s History Month display has titles by and about women working in coal mines, trans women, First Nations women, and memoirs from women like Toni Morrison and Chatham alumna.
What is in the display people might not have seen before, or expected to see?
While we do the heritage and history month displays every year, we try to include new and different titles as often as possible. This year’s Women’s History Month has a lot of fun memoirs that I think are absolutely worth checking out. In the past, we’ve collaborated with student groups on corresponding Spotify playlists, and we’ve included supplemental information about women of note from the Pittsburgh area (and from Chatham), so it really depends on the year what kind of cool things we are able to include. Our displays are meant to be educational and entertaining.
What do you hope this display will mean to students?
As with all of our in-library and virtual displays, the library hopes to offer patrons convenient access to resources they might not have known existed before, and through those resources, we hope to widen their understanding of the world around them. We also hope that our displays promote inclusion and feelings of belonging in the library and at Chatham! Both of these reasons are why highlighting a variety of stories is so important.
From Lirit:
This display, which can be seen both in-person and virtually, has some of my favorite selections. Personally, I loved seeing a memorable collection of poetry by Lucille Clifton. It is clear this display is a passionate labor of love and reminds us of the significance of Women’s history at Chatham. You can see the Women’s History Month display until the end of March.
Check out more of the other wonderfully curated displays by our librarians on the library website.
Lirit Gilmore is a Creative Writing and Food Studies student. Lirit’s academic focus is centered in food writing and how it intersects with social location and identity. She is from the DMV and the Midwest, and enjoys baking in her free time. See all her work on Pulse@ChathamU here.