By Cindy Orr
We’ve just passed the six month anniversary of this RAO Blog, and since it’s the New Year as well, it seemed a good time to review where we’ve gone since our first blog entry on June 20, 2007—and where we plan to go in the near future.
The team originally set a couple of goals for the blog.
1. To Create a Center for RA Dialogue
We wanted to create a central place to quickly publish tips, short articles, genre insights, timely eyewitness reports on live RA programs, and other information of use to practicing readers’ advisors who are always so short of time, and who are doing such important work helping readers find good books that match their tastes. Between this Reader’s Advisor Online Blog and our sister publication, The Readers’ Advisor News, and thanks to such outstanding contributors as Diana Tixier Herald, Sarah Statz Cords, Rebecca Vnuk, Jessica Zellers, and others, we’re sure we’ve begun doing that.
In fact, we’d like to expand and recommit to this particular area of the blog, so if you have something you’d like to share, please don’t be shy about submitting it via email to rablog@lu.com—or, if it requires a bit more length than this blog can accommodate, consider submitting it to the free quarterly online newsletter The Readers’ Advisor News. In fact, if you haven’t yet seen the brand new issue of RA News, click here for one of the best ones yet, and sign up for a free subscription while you’re at it. And even if you’d like to write an article or a blog entry but don’t have an idea, contact us anyway…we have a list of possible topics!
2. To Be a central News Hub and Digest for RAs
We also wanted to be the place where library staff could go every Monday morning for a quick weekly news update of RA concerns. RA Run Down pulls the juiciest news tidbits from a scan of over a hundred blogs, newsletters, magazines, newspapers, television and anyplace else we can think of that might have relevant information. From the response we’ve had, this is a successful feature, and we’ll continue to do this each week, always increasing the number of sources we scan for you.
We’ve also posted our weekly Bestseller Mashup and New This Week. The goal for these entries is to alert you to the books that your patrons will be requesting. With that in mind, the Bestseller Mashup averages several bestseller lists so that you only have to look in one place to see the top in-demand titles rather than checking several bestseller lists from different sources each week. On the other hand, New This Week lists hot and notable titles destined to hit the shelves in the next seven days.
After experimenting for six months, we have come to realize that the New This Week titles often end up on the Bestseller Mashup the next week. This wasn’t really a surprise—assuming that we were doing a good job of identifying upcoming hot titles, it makes sense that this would be the case. Both lists identify the hot titles that patrons would like to read—one based on sales, the other on our predictions. So, we have decided to combine the two lists each week into one called “Most Wanted.” This list will be just what it says—the titles your patrons want the most right now—this week.
After thinking about it, the team felt that we were missing an opportunity to feature what The Reader’s Advisor Online, with its content based on the Genreflecting Series, is best known for—suggestions of good books in various genres. So we are adding a new feature that will list great titles in various genres, and these lists will be created by experts you can trust. These books will be the cream of the crop, the top of the line, the overlooked titles which may never be bestsellers, but are definitely worth reading and suggesting to your patrons. This has been the strength of the Genreflecting Series all along, and is one of the reasons the series has become a standard for readers’ advisors. So…look for our new “Under the Radar” list when it debuts next week.
Okay, as Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride, “Let me ’splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”
Beginning next week, you can look forward to the following features and changes:
• RA Run Down – all the news you need in one place • More blog entries with tips, fun stuff, genre information, reports on RA programs and more.
Every Monday morning:
• Most Wanted – the top titles your patrons will be asking for in coming week
• Under the Radar – lists of notable books in various genres
You’ll also find throughout the week:
Finally, and foremost, we’d like to remind you that this blog is the front page for The Reader’s Advisor Online. As Carol Tenopir said in Library Journal, the “ability to find what the experts think about related titles is the real strength of The Reader’s Advisor Online and what makes it a unique tool for libraries and bookstores.”
This is a new year, and your library hopefully has a new budget. You can get even more out of this blog if you subscribe to The Reader’s Advisor Online. The price is very reasonal—less than some reference sets—and remember, the RAO electronic product includes the content from the Libraries Unlimited Genreflecting series of books, as well as selected essays, plus information for book groups. This content is not available anywhere else.
Just as a reminder, here is a list of the titles in the Genreflecting series:
• African American Literature
• Blood, Bedlam, Bullets, and Badguys
• Canadian Fiction
• Christian Fiction
• Fluent in Fantasy
• Genreflecting
• Historical Fiction
• Hooked on Horror
• Jewish American Literature
• Make Mine a Mystery
• Now Read This
• Now Read This II
• The Readers’ Advisor’s Companion
• The Real Story
• Rocked by Romance
• Romance Fiction
• Strictly Science Fiction
• Teen Genreflecting
• Nonfiction Readers’ Advisory
The following new titles will be in The Reader’s Advisor Online soon. New content is loaded at least monthly, more often several times a month. The goal is to double the content this year.
Encountering Enchantment (YA Fantasy)
Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Literature
Genrefied Classics
Graphic Novels
Read the High Country (Westerns)
Reality Rules (Nonfiction for Teens)
If you’d like to give RAO a try, click here for a free trial subscription.
So, Happy New Year! Watch for our new lists next week…and be sure to let us know what you think of the blog and how you think we could improve.
Oh, and if you’re going to PLA, we’d love a few volunteers who are willing to send us email updates on any RA or author programs so that we can keep those poor Left Behind souls (just kidding) from feeling left out of the great programs. Seriously, it’s great to be able to read live reports from a conference if you haven’t been able to attend.
I’ll be talking to you again next week as usual. Keep up all the good work, and Happy Reading!
