Spokane’s Health Sciences Library Builds Supportive Study Space for Students

The Health Sciences Library in Spokane used this past summer to give students a supportive and more inviting study space, including the addition of a new “Mindful Learning Collection,” new lighting and artificial trees, a puzzle collection for checkout, and the continuation of a leisure reading collection.

This past summer, Spokane’s Health Sciences Library added improvements to study spaces, such as new lighting and artificial trees, to make the library more supportive and inviting to students. Photo courtesy of Ann Dyer.

“We’ve been focusing on making the library a welcoming, supportive place for students to study and providing materials that help them study in a healthy and beneficial way,” said Ann Dyer, director of the Health Sciences Library.

The Mindful Learning Collection offers various items for one-week checkout, including a light to guide breathing, whiteboard and marker kits, Pomodoro kits for time management, light therapy lamps, phone lock boxes, weighted lap and neck pads, fidget kits, and two types of timers. Through another collection, students can also check out puzzles for four weeks at a time.

New lights throughout the library improve lighting quality and the space’s appearance, Dyer said. These include several green banker’s lights for many of the library’s carrels, along with some table and floor lamps. Artificial trees also enhance the area.

The library will also continue to offer its 250-book leisure reading collection, with titles for mysteries/thrillers, fantasy, outdoors, memoir/autobiography, historical fiction, horror, science fiction, history, romance, young adult fiction, true crime, poetry, graphic novels, art and leisure, cooking, short stories, and e-books.

“I’m particularly pleased with this collection, as we’re seeing more people in the library that didn’t used to visit us,” Dyer said. “The goal with this collection is partially to provide easy access to recreational reading, but also to improve the reading skills of our students, who often come into our programs with some degree of worry about the reading load.”

All improvements are funded through donor contributions. To learn more about the Health Sciences Library, please visit its website.