It was a trivia night so good, the university photographer put down his camera and joined a team.
In 2021, Jennifer Pate and Margaret McGuire teamed up to host team trivia nights at University of North Alabama’s Collier Library, where they both worked at the time. While the library “gamified” a number of activities, they wanted a program that wasn’t directly related to academics and would build community. They shared their experience developing this program during “Team Up! Building Student Community with Trivia Nights in the Academic Library” on Sunday, June 30, at the American Library Association’s 2024 Annual Conference and Exhibition in San Diego.
The two based the early events on slides created by Jeopardy! champion and librarian Jen Fiero, then branched out into creating their own themes and categories. Forty-one students came to the first trivia night; over the two and a half years the program was active, there were more than 500 participants, many of them returning. Teams of students would come together or form among walk-ins—one walk-in team even stuck together for an entire year, placing third overall. “We had the most amazing time with them. It was fun. It was loud,” says Pate, now director of OpenEd at Texas A&M University in College Station.
Pate notes that it helps to keep questions broad, with a few niche categories “for the diehards.” “That’s why Jen and I are such a good complementary team, because I write absolutely brutal questions,” says McGuire, now student outreach and instruction librarian at University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.
McGuire used Canva to create slides and advertising materials, noting that it was easy to keep a unified theme across everything. “I went full ham into that, and I wasn’t sure if it was landing with the students for quite a bit,” she says. “And then one magical team trivia night, one person from one of our regular teams looked up at me and was like, ‘I love that you guys go so hard for all of it.’”
Partners within the university community were a key part of growing the trivia nights. While the first year of trivia was library-funded, partners helped support the trivia night by advising on inclusivity and accessibility and providing prizes. “Not only did we want to get free stuff for them to give to our students,” says Pate, “we also wanted to talk to them about ways that we could make sure that our events were accessible and that our events were comfortable for people.” Students are often uncomfortable in the library, and Pate and McGuire wanted students to know that they weren’t just welcome but wanted.
Buy-in from library administrators was helpful, according to Pate, in part because the pair were able to provide feedback and metrics on the success of the trivia nights. While scores were tallied, students filled out feedback forms. In addition to providing a easy way to showcase student support and engagement, according to McGuire, the forms highlighted areas that could be improved, like accessibility (particularly audio problems), and provided snack requests and theme suggestions.
Both acknowledge that this program was a passion project outside the scope of their job descriptions at the time. But, “despite all of that work and all that time and effort, it was always worth it to see those students … enjoying being in the library and doing something fun,” Pate says. Team trivia nights became the most popular and long-running program at the library.
The two have made their trivia slides available under a Creative Commons license to help others get their trivia nights off the ground. “It can be done in a public library, it can be done in high school library, it can be done at a college library,” Pate says. “It just takes a little bit of time and enthusiasm.”
