Ever wanted to shelf-read your favorite professor’s library? Well now you can, if you can guess which shelf is theirs.
This month, the Mossey Library is hosting a “Match the selfie to the ‘shelfie’” competition, where students can peruse pictures of 24 different professors’ bookshelves and guess which prof the books belong to. The most successful “selfie to shelfie” pairs will win a $20 gift certificate to the campus bookstore.
“Some of them do have clues in them,” Public Services Librarian Brenna Wade said. “Some are easier to determine than others. Some are rather tricky. My office isn’t within the line of sight, but I’ve heard that there’s been a lot of interest.”
Inspired by a project found on Pinterest, Wade contacted faculty and staff over the summer, asking for “shelfie” submissions.
“There’s a school in the U.K. that did it, and their tagline was ‘match the selfie to the shelfie,’” Wade said. “I wondered if I could pull that off.”
Participating profs submitted photos of bookshelves either from their offices on campus or at home, and Wade assembled them together into an exhibit, now displayed in the library lobby.
Interested students can pick up a form at the library and submit their best guesses. The contest is open until 9 a.m. on Sept. 14, when Wade will score the submissions and identify the answers on the display.
“It’s a variety of academics,” Wade said. “We have all three divisions represented, and I think 19 different departments, including Bishop [Peter] Beckwith and Alesia Aumock with sports studies. I was really excited with the variety.”
