The Class I Didn't Take in Grad School

Of course I didn't take a reader's advisory class in grad school! I already worked at a public library. I already read lots of books, watched lots of movies, listened to various CDs in the collection. Didn't I already know it all?

Pride cometh before the fall.

In my interview for my current position, I was surprised to be asked what was the last book I read (Atlas Shrugged. Hunger Games.) and what my thoughts were on trends in the reading public (50 Shades of Gray). Perhaps if I had taken a reader's advisory course, or even any course in public librarianship, I'd have been better prepared. I wrote a thank you letter to my interviewer and let him know that I realized I wasn't strong in this area of library service and that I would resolve to improve that skill. (see Monday, June 11, 2012 entry "so I want to be a Readers' Advisory Librarian (wait... I do?)" and Thursday, June 21, 2012's "Juliet, Naked")

I thought that reading Moyer's 2010 Reader's Advisory Handbook would teach me all that I need to know, namely, the chapter on reading a book in 10 minutes, because obviously what I need to do is expand my exposure to a greater quantity of books and just write those amazingly long write-ups, right? (see Wednesday, June 20, 2012's entry: Moyer's Eight Steps to Reader's Advisory.)

If this is getting too deep... click on the image.

Wrong. I'm in book (and movie) overdose and I need a new strategy. I decided to take a stroll through our professional journals collection and came upon Reference and User's Services Quarterly (RUSQ), a RUSA publication and found some excellent articles (with references pointing to more excellent articles down the rabbit hole) listed in the Bibliography below. This post details some of the things I learned (here is your warning to either stop reading, print this out to take home, or lean back with your tablet and get comfortable.):

The one thing that has come to me through these readings is the concept of advising not just on fiction and not just on books. Williamson's Materials Matchmaking advocated librarians become familiar with all the materials in their collection as well as the resources that support them. Which means, if you want to recommend films, get to know the Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes (already signed into Facebook? RT automatically sets up an account for you and connects you to your FB friends using RT.) I'm not strong in music, so it would behoove me to spend some time on TuneGlue, All Media Guide's All Music section and SongLyrics.com, and as a corollary to sound resources, using the Audie Awards to recommend good productions of audiobooks would be one way to explore the audiobook collection as a production to enjoy and not necessarily as just a different format of an author's work. Williamson ends her article with an example of creating checkouts pairing a book, DVD and music CD around a theme, such as the TV show Lost (with music by Weaver and the book Bad Twin, which may or may not grab Lost fans: (see the Amazon reviews).

What Williamson sees as "cross promotion" of materials based on interests, Wyatt (Reading Maps) sees as an opportunity to explore the "universe" of a library patron's most recently experienced (read, watched, heard) work. Wyatt's proposal certainly is a bit daunting what with mapping out elements of interest in a particular material based on appeal factors (character, story line, setting, and "detail" (think all the stuff you learn when playing a video game and how it develops your learning interests)) and various associations suggested through annotations, discussion questions, reviews and interviews. However, I find it very exciting and much like the goal of creating ontologies or webs of entities of what exists within the world of the work and links out from that world to related possibilities of interest. Wyatt proposes librarians create these maps with the ultimate end goal of maps linking to each other, possibly through catalogs and regular web links. As he states, it would make an excellent project for staff (perhaps across systems?) to share.

So these are ways of looking at and promoting the whole collection at a particular library (though, with ILL and library consortium, is it really so hard to imagine that a collection can be beyond the walls of your branch and system and encompass anything the library is willing to get its hands on for its patrons?), but there's still the issue of what sort of language to use when speaking to patrons about why they liked something. Wyatt's An RA Big Think provides just those sorts of "feeling taxonomy" words with the goal to "make connections among [materials] that [patrons] may not have thought of... to cross genres and to go between fiction and non-fiction [and between books and A/V and more] and to link [creators] in novel and interesting ways."

I am appreciative that Wyatt (Exploring Non-Fiction, An RA Big Think) mentions the traditional entry ways to talking about works with patrons:

• pacing, character, story line (plot), and frame (tone) for fiction, 
• and narrative (does the author create characters, have a story plot, create a setting and employ scene and dialog to build the non-fiction world?), appeal (specifically detail, subject and type), and tone (argumentative, investigative, journalistic, popular or scholarly, etc) for non-fiction

because, as I mentioned before, I didn't take a class on this in school. He is also good with expanding on the "new" entries (refined entry points) for talking with patrons about materials (both fiction and non-fiction):

• assessing the reading experience through an analysis of language, learning/experiencing, and style; 
• thinking further about how content, subject, theme, type (biography, memoir, essay, investigation, explanation), and "sliding" genres (many genres share the elements of adrenaline, intellect, emotion or landscape) affect a work.

As a reader, I already recognize these entries inherently because it is rarely a plot that drives me to experience a fictional work and it is usually a curiosity to learn something that motivates me to pick up an informational work. To get me to pick up an audiobook? I have to be making a long drive or doing a lot of housework with no kids around, but yes, the production quality can make or break the experience. However, I hadn't thought of exploring an audiobook collection based on who narrates the work, even though I enjoy listening to Bill Bryson and David Sedaris narrate their own works and I love Tim Curry reading the Series of Unfortunate Events, and oh, yes, that lady who read all the Jane Austen books on playaway at the Sacramento Public Library, she was great! (As it turns out there were several, but I seem to recall the name Nadia May as being good.) Anyway, this totally illustrates the point that enjoying a work could be based on the director, or the screenwriter or the individual performers and so a patron may want other movies written by the same screenwriter which in some cases is also the director and the performer (hello, Simon Pegg, you are a genius.)

Final take-aways?

• Walk your stacks and find stuff that is in that you liked so that should someone ask for a spur of the moment recommendation, you've got one. 
• Use social networking sites to read how other people write about why they liked a work and use that language to engage with your patrons on their interests and why they like them.
• Don't be afraid of non-fiction or music or the children's collection or...
• Build universes! Make maps!
• Keep reading (viewing, listening, etc): both the books and materials in the collection and books about how to perform RA (webinars, etc)

Bibliography

Materials Matchmaking: Articulating Whole Library Advisory. Williamson. (2011, Spring) RUSQ 50:3 p230.

Booktalking for Adult Audiences. Baker. (2010, Spring) RUSQ 49:3 p234.

Stalking the Wild Appeal Factor: Readers' Advisory and Social Networking Sites. Stover. (2009, Spring) RUSQ 48:3 p243.

An RA Big Think. Wyatt. (2007, July 1) Library Journal (LJ) 132:12 p40.

Exploring Non-Fiction. Wyatt. (2007, February 15) LJ 132:3 p32.

Reading Maps Remake RA. Wyatt. (2006, November 1) LJ 131:18 p38.

Blogs on Books 
RA for All: RA blog by an author on RA Guide to Horror.
Early Word: Info for librarians about publishing brought to me by an editor of Publisher's Weekly and LJ
Stacked Books: blogging about being librarians... and RA stuff too.

Tools:

Reader's Advisory Genre Map

Book Country Genre Map
Sample Reading Map for Jonathan Strange...


Update 2015_01_22: The Neal Wyatt reading map page is no longer active. Instead check out the article by Spratford and Hawn titled Reading Maps Made Easy for more tips and a great Reading Map example for the Hunger Games.