Making Lavery Library More Welcoming for All Students

Students in Professor Arien Rozelle’s Public Relations Research and Planning class are teaming up with Lavery Library to create a PR campaign to help Lavery feel more welcoming for all students, particularly those from diverse backgrounds.

Melissa Jadlos, director of Lavery Library, came to Rozelle with the idea after being inspired by a student run panel that took place on Zoom last year. Jadlos says that the students had “wonderful suggestions, but not anything that we could implement here in the library just because we are a different environment.” Soon after, she added making the library more welcoming to her list of goals for the 2022 year.

Both Rozelle and Jadlos made the decision to have the COMM 472 class spend an entire semester working on this campaign with the library. This decision came easily for Rozelle. “I admire the great work she and her colleagues do, and I knew students would be excited about contributing to their campus community,” she said.

The PR Research and Planning class involves hands-on experience with a real client that takes the students through the process of PR planning. The course is required for media management majors and can be extremely beneficial to students who plan on taking a PR route within the major. 

“I think everybody was super excited to be given this opportunity to work with not just any client but our own library,” said student Jessica D’Amico ’23, adding that students in COMM 472 will see the direct impact their campaigns have because of their client is a part of Fisher.

To jump start the campaign process, the class sent a survey to all students to gain insight into their library use. Both D’Amico and Rozelle said that the survey had an amazing response rate, around 700 students filled it out.  According to Rozelle, their next step is to use those findings to “plan, execute and measure a public relations campaign for Lavery Library.”

With the main goal being to make it a more welcoming space, Jadlos also hopes to determine “better ways to communicate to let people know about our services and learn how to reach students where they are to get them in the building.”

COMM 472 has just started this project and will spend the remainder of the semester meeting their goals. Both Lavery Library and the PR Research & Planning classes are looking forward to the impact this campaign will have at Fisher in the next few years.

This article was written by Bella McEnroe ’24, a media and communication major.