These collections are created through collaborations among librarians, faculty, and students to create an out-of-classroom learning experience expanding on courses taught in the Hayden Concourse classrooms.
Classroom collections
Adolescence
Human adolescence describes the period of development that occurs between childhood and adulthood. Begun with the onset of puberty, adolescence is characterized by marked physical, psychological, and social changes. Understanding human adolescence requires a careful consideration of ethnic, gender, sexual, and social identities as well as a person's family environment and economic class. What characteristics are important for understanding adolescent risk taking, decision-making and intellectual development? What roles do community and service organizations play? What about educational and religious institutions? We encourage you to explore the “Adolescence Collection,” co-curated by ASU librarians and Dr. Sarah Lindstrom Johnson from the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics. This collection, which supports the CDE/SOC 312 course, includes books (academic studies, fiction, graphic novels) and DVDs that explore these questions through multidisciplinary approaches to topics that include health, immigration, social media, and violence.
Cookbooks
Whether you are inexperienced in the kitchen or a culinary expert, food brings people together and is enjoyed by just about anyone. Nowadays, recipes to satisfy any taste and skill-level are within reach. Included in this collection are the inspirations and instructions needed to create meals for just about any occasion and diet: international cuisines, vegetarian, keto, and southwestern cooking, to name a few.
Dust and Shadow
In 2018, ASU faculty and two members of the Copenhagen design team FoAM hiked the Arizona deserts collecting sounds via stereo microphones and contact mics. They shared these recordings with the Library along with their research on how people interact with the natural environment, including how to capture the vast desert landscape using modern tools and technology. The resulting salon featured a vinyl recording exposing students to a learning experience through sense immersion. Visitors to the salon found desert artifacts, maps, and photographs arranged amongst a collection of books expanding on concepts explored in their research. Books curated for this experience range from science fiction to poetry, from photography to philosophy.
Japanese Popular Culture
In popular culture, anime and manga are known for their colorful imagery, exaggerated character features, and complex themes. Through a series of volumes or episodes, audiences are exposed to themes such as love, loss, society, and history. As the popularity of anime and manga continues to grow around the world, their influence can be seen in films, video games, and books. Not only are anime and manga incredibly entertaining, they also provide an understanding and glimpse of Japanese culture. The characters, plots, and themes in this collection all provide insight into Japanese perspectives and cultures. We encourage you to explore this collection co-curated by librarians and Dr. William Hedberg, Professor of Japanese in the School of International Letters and Cultures. This collection supports the JPN 115 course and includes manga, books, and films that address Japanese popular culture.
Language Methods and Assessment
American K-12 classrooms are places of diversity, particularly with respect to race, language, learning styles and abilities, experiences, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Research supports the need to highlight and validate this diversity by making learning relevant to each child. Teachers need to be creative and innovative to ensure that their teaching practices are culturally sustainable and responsive to all students' educational and social-emotional needs. Books in this collection were curated specifically for the EED 433 course taught by Katherine Morris and were selected to provide future teachers with resources for enhancing their understanding of contemporary curriculum development and familiarity with a variety of content that addresses critical perspectives in education. These materials reflect a rich range of cultures and perspectives and can be used to facilitate meaningful conversation in the classroom.
Latin Americana Photobooks
As a genre, the photobook is an art form that fuses short texts and images with critical statements in a catalog-like print publication. The collection showcases photobooks that document daily life and human rights violations in Latin America.
Unwinding Bindings
Explore the work in our Conservation Lab through Unwinding Bindings! Curated by Suzy Morgan, ASU Library's Conservator, this collection explores the science and art of the conservation and preservation of print materials. Learn about bookbinding, book arts, the history of the book, and how conservators work to preserve cultural heritage in print formats. All of the books in this collection are available to check out. Learn more about the Conservation Lab and Preservation.
Lobby collections
Beyond Books
As part of their senior thesis, Alexis Juarez and Carly Golding compiled a collection of resources that explore accessibility and inclusion within libraries and community spaces. The goal of this display is to prompt insight, critical thinking, and analysis of disability and inclusion. By centering disabled scholars and showcasing different approaches to critical disability theory, they hope to stimulate interest and thought about the interdisciplinary, cross-sector challenges facing people with disabilities and to lift up the rich complexities of the disability community. Resources included also discuss the historical importance of libraries and other community spaces as cultural hubs and gathering places. The resources on display have been used to inform a student-led discussion hosted in the library to discuss issues of accessibility in community spaces. Carly Golding is a senior Justice Studies student who focuses on raising consciousness about disability issues, particularly the unique challenges faced by women with invisible disabilities. After graduation, she hopes to build on her thesis research to continue to promote disability inclusion in her local community spaces, her workplace, and beyond. Alexis Juarez is a senior studying Urban Planning with minors in Global and Design Studies. Currently working as a Student Ambassador for the ASU Library, she hopes to continue to pursue a career as an academic librarian. Alexis hopes to use the information gained from this research to help her promote more diverse and inclusive spaces as a future librarian.
Hobbies
Learn more about your current hobby or be inspired to try a new one. Each book has been carefully selected to help you increase your knowledge on a number of activities - indoors, outdoors, locally, or abroad. Some activities in this collection include knitting, gaming, gardening, hiking, and writing.
Horror
Inspired by 19th century authors like Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, books in the horror genre cover themes that speak to our deepest fears. They are unsettling, eerie, dark, and deliberately troubling. These stories often contain supernatural elements and gothic landscapes meant to be full of suspense and captivatingly frightening.
Planting the Seeds of Sustainability
University Sustainability Practices and the Garden Commons are celebrating Earth Month! Earth Month focuses on the importance of sustainability and how we as humans impact our natural environment. The University Sustainability Practices team, student workers, and peers worked to compile this collection of sustainable gardening practices books. A significant portion of the collection focuses on Southwest gardening principles. The books in this collection serve as a great resource for the ASU community by introducing sustainable gardening practices into their indoor and outdoor spaces.
The Planting the Seeds of Sustainability collection is part of the Earth Month celebrations hosted by University Sustainability Practices and the Garden Commons. The Garden Commons, a community garden on the Polytechnic campus, is hosting multiple events throughout the month of April to celebrate Earth Month ranging from volunteer opportunities to free produce farm stands.
More information about Earth Month at ASU.
Staff Picks
As a group of people who choose to surround ourselves with books on a daily basis, we at the ASU Library have selected some of our favorite books to share with you. These books represent works that we can't put down and can't stop talking about, because they are just that good. We hope you'll give them a try!
Utopias and Dystopias
We invite you to explore real and imagined societies and reflect upon existing social and political structures. Through sub-genres such as speculative fiction, fantasy, and science fiction, these books tend to use technology as a lens to explore social and ethical issues. Topics include artificial intelligence, censorship, and explorations of the human condition.
Very Short Introductions
Very Short Introductions is a book series published by the Oxford University Press. These books are written by experts to provide a concise overview of a variety of subjects. If you are interested in learning something new or want an academic summary of a topic, you can start by checking out one of these books!