Hopkins Press goes All In to #TeamUP on the University Campus

Being an active part of our university community is a vital, ongoing goal for Hopkins Press. This year’s Democracy Day, held on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, was a great opportunity to accomplish that mission.

The inspiring event, held on a crisp, cool summer day in front of Shriver Hall on the Wyman Quad in August was the fifth year in a row for the day-long orientation event for new students. Sponsored by the Center for Social Concern, Democracy Day brings together students, faculty members, and community leaders for talks, panels, and interactive activities meant to foster civil discourse and collaborative problem solving.

Project MUSE shared an area with two other Hopkins Press divisions, Hopkins Books and Journals, at the afternoon’s community fair. 

To encourage foot traffic to our table, Hopkins Press arranged a book giveaway. Students chose from a selection of books on democracy-related topics, including JHU president Ron Daniels’s What Universities Owe Democracy, Dannagal Goldthwaite Young’s Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation, and Lawrence T. Brown’s The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America. Additionally, copies of some journals, including Hopkins Review, Human Rights Quarterly, and Journal of Democracy were available for students to peruse and take home. As students exited Shriver Hall, they surrounded our tables, interested in the scholarly books, journals, and wide range of digital content we offer. 

Because the Hopkins Press offices are located a few blocks south of the main Homewood campus, Democracy Day served as a welcome opportunity to build stronger relationships with the student population on campus, socialize and interact with them. 

We anticipated that many students might be unfamiliar with our content and our scholarly research platform. Indeed, for many, this was something new to them. The Project MUSE platform is free for students to access, just as it is for students around the world and their subscribing libraries, so we were excited to share MUSE as a resource with them.

But while undergraduate students may be unfamiliar with some of the many tools and platforms like Project MUSE, it was all the more rewarding to share and help enlighten them and to watch, learn, and have them understand what MUSE is and how it can help them in their studies.

While many, if not most of the students we spoke with were in the STEM field, they also are required to take elective courses in fields where the humanities and social science content on MUSE would be an essential resource. We also explained how MUSE can be applied to their STEM Studies.

Connect your University Press to New Students

On a broader scale and for many university presses, it’s good to know that an audience of undergraduates and new first-year students are open and receptive to scholarly content. And, as they are digitally savvy, offering up the Project MUSE platform can be a way to connect your university press with the students at your institution. 

You can help your students understand and learn more about access to MUSE, so at events similar to Democracy Day on your campus, share with them how they have free and easy access to the platform and position it as an included benefit. 

Of course, to make it easy for them to access, and as most will have their phones out and handy, create a QR code so they can quickly and easily scan right to the platform. 

Notably, while the vast majority of interactions at this particular event were with students, one author came by and enthusiastically interacted with the students and shared his book that was on the JHUP book table. 

For fellow university presses, being a part of your university’s new student orientation could also be a great opportunity to have authors and faculty promote their books and articles as a further way of integrating your press into the university culture.

Your university is fortunate to have a press! 

Share yours with them and #TeamUP.