Table Talk: The Future of Readers’ Advisory by Neil Hollands and Jessica E. Moyer

Jessica E. Moyer, Doctoral student in Adolescent Literacy at the University of Minnesota and adjunct professor of Library and Information Science at the College of St. Catherine opened the talk and welcomed everyone to the Table Talk. Over 30 participants filled the small space. Jessica noted that the inspiration for this talk come from a chapter that she and Neil wrote together for her new book, Research Based Readers’ Advisory, newly out from ALA Editions.

Neil Hollands, Reader Services Librarian from Williamsburg Regional Library got the Table Talk started with an inspiring list of seven areas essential to the future success and continued growth of readers’ advisory.

Readers’ advisory has been in an ongoing renaissance since the mid 1980s, but how do we ensure that it doesn’t recede to the status of fad? The following recommendations are designed to keep this area of endeavor in the forefront of librarianship.

1) Claim Our Ground
 RA is at the center of librarianship, at the place where patrons, librarians, and collections meet. Those who are interested in its continuing growth should embrace this ground fully.
 We’re more than just chatting with a few readers about books.
 We should strive to serve all ages.
 We should provide advisory for all of our collections
 We should include the proactive steps of developing lists, finding aids, and displays in the definition of advisory.
 We should make sure advisory has a presence on our web sites and catalogs.
 We should include support for book groups in our definition of advisory.
 We should seek to inform the practice of other library departments and services.

2) Promote RA to the Profession and to the Public
Within the profession:
 Every library employee should practice the skills of advisory (in ways appropriate to their specific work).
 RA should be a fundamental of library education.
 RA should be one of the mainstays of daily practice in the library.
 The practice of RA should be extended to paraprofessionals.
 The practice of RA should be extended to those who do not work directly with the public.
To the public:
 We should make sure that advisory is not a hidden service.
 We should create an expectation of expertise, differentiating ourselves from booksellers in our ability to provide advice and information, not just the books.
 We should change signage to reflect advisory skills.
 We should confront people who enter libraries with a variety of appeal-factor based displays, finding aids, readers’ advisory books and databases.
 We should offer the service of producing customized reading lists based on patron profile forms.
 We should promote the language of appeal and genre to our users, teaching them how to talk about their reading.

3) Define Our Terms
 We should reach agreement on what the basic appeal factors are.
 We should define these appeal factors clearly and “unpack� them into component parts.
 We should map the genres more clearly, making differentiations between the books to better match them with readers.
 These improved definitions will allow better communication between professionals.
 These improved definitions will provide a common ground for future improvements in cataloguing, annotating, and databasing that will reflect all of the appeal factors, allowing searchability not just of subject matter, main characters, and settings, but of all aspects of the book that certain readers might enjoy.

4) Marshalling Our Resources
 We should revolution the review world, writing and insisting on receiving reviews that reflect more about appeal and the potential audience for each book instead of focusing on plot and one-size-fits-all judgments.
 We should collectivize our efforts at RA instead of re-inventing the same work over and again at different libraries.
 Examples of collectivized resources now include the Fiction_L discussion list, the Overbooked website, the Library Booklists website, blogs such as Reader’s Advisor Online and Book Group Buzz, various regional consortiums and reading roundtables, and some of the series of RA books (Genreflecting, Read On…, etc.)
 We should look to improve our databases, possibly through wiki technologies that allow collaboration, so that indexing of books includes not just subject, setting, main characters, and genres, but also subgenres, secondary characters, relationships, central conflicts, and information about pacing, tone, mood, and the book’s language.

5) Identifying and Serving Particular Audiences
 We should take service to readers with reader profile forms, online services, book displays, lists, and other finding aids instead of waiting for them to approach us.
 We should stop thinking of RA service as a one-size-fits-all venture differentiating service methods for beginning and advanced readers, the readers of particular genres, or readers of different ages.
 We should expand service to book groups, helping groups with book selection, providing discussion kits & book bags, matchmaking for readers looking for appropriate groups, and the building of reading maps and readalike lists for popular book group titles.
 We should expand nonfiction RA, not only as in the successful recent focus on narrative nonfiction, but also in other nonfiction service, such as reviving the educational variety of readers’ advisory or developing lists to support bibliotherapy.
 We should continue to learn more about how to support audiobook listeners, movie watchers, and music listeners with advisory service.
 We should practice RA with homebound audiences and other groups to which libraries provide outreach.
 We should provide RA service for community groups, supporting them with booklists relevant to their interests.

6) Documenting Results
 We should pursue hard data on how many we serve through RA and how that service impacts them and our libraries.
 How many people are we serving?
 How does this service affect circulation, both in terms of quantity and quality (circulation of mid-list authors, older titles, etc.)
 What are we learning about reading preferences?
 How many database uses and website and blog hits are we generating?
 How do displays affect use?
 How does this service affect satisfaction with the library?

7) Integrate RA into Other Library Departments and Services
Collection Development
 Inform book selections and standing order quantities.
 Promote deserving low and midlist authors and older titles.
Young Adult and Children’s
 Recognize that most queries in these departments are, indeed, RA queries.
 Learn how to best serve these populations and their parents.
Reference
 Include RA service in the reference interview (Would you be interested in reading some fiction or narrative nonfiction about that topic?)
 Revive the educational function of RA, as practiced in the earlier historical iteration of readers’ advisory.
 Use requests for books that are not available that day as a springboard to RA discussions.
Technical Services
 Continue to build catalog references and linkages that support RA (i.e. Library Thing for Libraries, Chili Fresh book reviews, Book Letters, etc.)
 Choose call numbers to best serve the reading audiences that will enjoy them.
Automated Services
 Support online reader profile submission for customized reading suggestions.
 Enhance websites with RA content.
 Support blogs and RSS feeds.
 Enable wiki technology for collaborative work by librarians on shared RA resources such as annotation archives and book list building.
 Help identify ways to push individualized content to patrons based on their preferences.
Circulation
 Shelves books in a manner that supports RA (face out when possible).
 Train checkout staff to identify RA customers and point them toward library resources and trained RA specialists.
 Consider new ways of placing holds on series of books or new books to meet the known interests of regular RA patrons.
Outreach
 Provide RA service to homebound patrons.
 Provide RA service to beginning readers in literacy programs.
 Provide RA service to bookmobile customers.
 Give book talks at senior centers and other outreach visit sites.
Programming
 Use popular appeal factors at your library to inform programming choices.
 Provide an RA component at all events, providing readalike, watchalike, or listenalike lists to attendees to tie the event to the collection.
Administration
 Factor RA needs into building decisions, especially adequate display space and support near the books.
 Prioritize RA skills in the hiring process.
 Enable all of the other provisions listed in these notes.

After this inspiring opening, Jessica moderated the discussion, focusing on three main questions: Question 1: What are the strengths and shortcomings of our current readers’ advisory tools? How should we design the tools of the future? Question 2: Advisory is expanding beyond books to include all of the materials in public library collections. How do we facilitate this expansion? How do we train librarians to support it? Question 3: How should readers’ advisory inform other library practices? Reference? Collection development? Programming? Cataloging?

The lively and informative discussion filled the allotted time and was so exciting that neither Neil or Jessica got to take many notes. Anyone who attended is more than welcome to post additional comments on the blog, and maybe we can continue the conversation.

By Neil Hollands and Jessica Moyer

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Conference Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.