SHUShelf

SHUShelf began as a Buccino Leadership Institute Interdisciplinary Team (IDT) Project. IDTs are the capstone project of first-year freshmen Buccino students. First-year students in the Buccino Leadership program are tasked with creating an initiative that is designed to improve the Buccino program, or improve the university experience of the general student body!

One of our teammates, Samantha Gizzi (Class of '27), came up with the idea of creating an initiative which would facilitate the exchange of textbooks between students as a way to address the issue of textbook affordability and accessibility. With the help of Adreanna Dones (Class of '26), who worked with Seton Hall's Walsh Library, our IDT group was able to broker a partnership between the initiative and the library.

At the end of the 2023 Spring Semester, our IDT group presented the SHUShelf initiative to the Buccino Leadership Council as part of a competition between all the IDT groups to determine the best project. Though SHUShelf did not win the competition, our group hoped to continue what we started, and we initiated a pilot-run of the initiative over the course of the 2024-2025 school year to demonstrate proof-of-concept, and affirm SHUShelf's viability. Even without an official marketing campaign, SHUShelf was able to obtain over 400 book donations and assisted over 25 individual students, all with a 99% book return rate. Going into the 2025-2026 School Year, the SHUShelf team is looking to build on this success and expand our book collection and our outreach to ensure that every student has access to quality textbooks.