by Rick Roche

“Readers’ advisory service in public libraries should not be the duty of only a few designated librarians, according to the consensus of attendees of the PLA conference table talk ‘Building a Readers’ Advisory Team.’ Thursday morning’s message was that involvement of as much of the library staff from shelvers to the administrator helps build strong publicly-recognized services.

Neil Hollands and Barry Trott, both from the Williamsburg Regional Library in Virginia, led the discussion with a larger than anticipated crowd. With many willing voices, they asked only two of the preprinted questions on the back of their handout, but most of the ten questions were addressed naturally in the lively forum on involving staff from across departments in either synchronous or asynchronous readers’ services. Opportunities abound and the culture of reading service is strengthened by the widespread participation.

Ideas that I thought worth keeping and apply include the following:

• The library may be branded a ’story place.’ Many of the items in the collection deliver stories, even self-help books and videos. Market that emotional appeal as we market services. Help clients write their own story.
• Repurpose every bit of work that is done for readers’ advisory. An annotation for a list can be reprinted on a card on a display and turned into a posting on a readers’ advisory blog. Never use anything just once.
• Online services, such as BookLetters and Good Reads, may be used to collect and distribute reading suggestions from across the staff.
• If possible, kick off an effort to involve staff from across departments at a staff development day. Use an outside speaker with experience in the field to persuade the reluctant.
• Let staff know up front that they will be lightly edited, emphasizing that it is assisting them with their message, not correcting them. Give them training and guidelines from the beginning.
• Suggest materials rather than recommend materials. Suggesting gives clients more involvement in a dialogue aimed at getting them materials they will enjoy. It is harder to decline a recommendation.
• Let staff communicate ‘what I am reading right now.’ It could be a little sign on a desk or even on a nametag. There could be a whiteboard with a current reading list.
• Some more involved staff could even have their own pages on the library reading blog. The blog should be tagged so readers can find reviews written by their favorite reviewers.
• Offer in-depth services, such as creating individual suggestion lists. Make creating a reading plan or just talking about books a specified option for Book-a-Librarian services.

There were plenty of great ideas shared in this lively meeting. The opportunities to broaden the service by involving other staff seem endless. Doing so does require much thought and effort, but it is a feasible expansion of service that requires no or little additional funding, making it appealing in these hard economic times.”

Rick Roche is a reference librarian at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library, Western Springs (IL). He is the author of the nonfiction readers’ guide Real Lives Revealed: A Guide to Reading Interests in Biography, and blogs at RickLibrarian.

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by Sally Bissell

“I can’t think of a better way to begin a conference day than listening to the queens of RA: Neal Wyatt, Georgine Olson, and the inimitable Joyce Saricks! These women have been writing and speaking about readers’ advisory service for years and have embraced the changes and opportunities that new technologies have brought to the library world.

The hall was almost full, which was remarkable when one considers the lineup at Starbucks. First up was Neal whose main theme, I thought, was ‘be ahead of the curve – anticipate rather than react.’ Both she (and the audience, during the Q and A), advocated for librarians being more vocal about getting the changes we need from our technology to enable us to do a better job linking RA tools to the catalog.

Another famous librarian, David Wright, was in the audience and he posited that we should be able to come up with a way to all meet in cyberspace, talk about innovations that we might be implementing in our libraries, and share ideas so that we can stop reinventing the wheel. What works in South Dakota may not work in Florida but might be modified. It sounds so simple but still, someone has to begin the process. We’ll see what happens.

I love Joyce Saricks! She’s such a passionate spokesperson for Readers’ Advisory and this morning she came out of the closet as an audiobook addict. Many of us in the audience joined in the confession. She spoke to us about using her appeal characteristics as they apply to narrator and narration in audiobook format, about how important the right fit between narrator and material is to the appreciation of audiobooks, and she’s oh, so right!

As an audio fanatic myself, I can tell you and share with our customers that the wrong narrator will spoil the experience and turn folks off to audio reading. The right narrator, with an intuitive understanding of the author’s words, the sense of tone, mood and language that the author is trying to convey, can create an incomparable reading experience.

Georgine spoke last about a new (at least to me) tool in the kit. She calls it ’sliders.’ It’s a great term she uses to describe the gentle action of moving a reader to a new genre or format when they’ve exhausted everything in your collection in their preferred genre. I can see that this will become more and more necessary as budget cuts go deeper and librarians are forced to curtail purchases.

The beauty of ’sliders’ is that the customer does not have to wait for the result of an interlibrary loan but is leaving the library with a title in hand that has possibility for them, the potential to unlock an entirely new reading opportunity. The kind of RA interaction that involves sliders is a bit more personal and hands-on than some may be used to but, as Georgine says, the reward is as great for the librarian’s soul as it is for the patron’s.

In an attempt to have a green conference in a fabulous green convention center here in Portland, the presenters of workshops do not have pages and pages of handouts in the back of the room and that’s great. The majority of the handouts are freely available at the PLA Conference website.”

Sally Bissell is an adult services/reference librarian from Southwest Florida. She blogs about books and life at:
http://www.readaroundtheworld-sallyb.blogspot.com.

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by Jenny LaPerriere

Today we have a real treat: a conference report from a session’s presenter. (Hearing the presenter’s point of view always gives conference reports a different twist, I think). Our post today is from Jenny LaPerriere, who presented the session “Merchandising Ease: Tracking Displays and Merchandising with a MDD” on Thursday morning.

“While passionate about merchandising and displays, I’ve been nervous about being a first time PLA presenter. Would the audience be receptive? Would they share my enthusiasm for displays? Would there be a heckler? The following is my preflight checklist, a precusor to my first PLA presentation:

• Presentation saved on two memory sticks, a cd, file copy sent to my email, and mounted on the web – check;
• Bags packed – check;
• typo on 300 color copies of my handout – check;
• and the realization that it is too late to reprint – check;
• oh, and the Denver blizzard that could delay the flight – check.

Happily, we did land without much delay and the session began at 8:30a.m. sharp. By announcing up front that there were prizes for those that found the typo, we pre-empted the risk of it coming up during the Q & A. There were no technical glitches aside from the turtle-slow Internet connection. The crowd was very receptive and even laughed in all the right places.

I’m not sure if my wild enthusiasm for displays came through my bundle of nerves, but there were several folks afterwards who had more questions and praise. Gotta love the kudos. Gotta love those merchandising converts that really “get it.”

For those of you in the blogosphere that missed the show, our book Merchandising Made Simple (Libraries Unlimited) is still available online and hopefully, at your local library!”

Jenny LaPerriere is the co-author of ‘”Merchandising Made Simple,” is a senior librarian at the Schlessman Family Branch of the Denver Public Library, and has been merchanding there for 9 years. Prior to that she has been a catalog librarian at the Rhode Island State Library, Head of Technical Services at the East Providence Public Library, and Director of the libraries in Foster, RI. We reviewed her book a few weeks ago. Thanks, Jenny!

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by Cindy Orr

The presenters at this preconference were Jane Jorgensen of Madison Public Library, Wisconsin, and Barry Trott of Williamsburg Regional Library, Virginia, and moderator Kaite Mediatore Stover of Kansas City Public Library. Jessamyn West of Metafilter.com was scheduled as well, but lightning struck her plane (luckily she wasn’t on it), and she wasn’t able to make it to Portland in time.

Barry opened the presentation with some thoughts on the history of technology and RA:
Since at least the 1980s librarians have been using technologies, but readers’ advisory work is not covered much in library literature. (If you have an idea for an article, see or contact Barry, who edits RUSQ and is actively looking for RA articles.) In 2001, Roberta Johnson listed good uses for the Internet for RA: 1) answer challenging RA questions, 2) as a source for information on authors and their work, and 3) for collection development information. These were Web 1.0 applications.

In the mid-2000s, Tim O’Reilly began talking about Web 2.0: 1) trust users as co-developers, 2) harness collective intelligence, and 3) leverage the long tail. These tenets are very applicable to RA work.

Williamsburg Regional Library has used a form-based reading suggestion service since about 2004. They have a 75,000 person service area and have responded to about 700 forms so far (creating annotations as they go–2000 so far). They have tracked some of the demographics and found that 85% of the users of the form are female; their average and mean age is somewhere in the mid-30s. The most popular genres are mysteries, historical fiction, classics, thrillers, series, then fantasy. Most of the users read about 7 1/2 books a month; 99.9% like the service and would recommend it to friends.

Blogs:
The Williamsburg Regional Library staff has written a blog Blogging for a Good Book, since 2007. They post 5 reviews a week and a list on Saturdays, have 15,000 visitors a month, and use 18 regular bloggers on their staff. They use WordPress as their software, and they find that blogging reinforces the culture of RA in the whole library, crosses division lines, and gets staff talking to each other about books.

Barry’s 5 “F”s of a successful blog include:

• Focus (theirs is a review blog)
• Frequency (regular posts keep readers coming back)
• Fortitude (plan ahead and spread out the work)
• Flavor (develop a voice, and link to your catalog)
• Flexibility (assign editors and think about goals)

Incorporating Web 2.0 Technology in Your Catalog:
When you talk to users about the library website, it’s clear from their answers that they are using your catalog. Use its popularity and make your catalog 2.0! Allow reader reviews. (Chili Fresh is one way to do this if your ILS doesn’t.) Incorporate third party information like Library Thing for Libraries, NoveList Select; try to connect to social networks that already exist.

More notes will be available soon on the PLA Session Handouts Site soon.

Jane Jorgenson then covered “Social Media.”
Jane suggested terms like “proactive” and “reactive” RA (rather than “indirect” or “passive,” or “direct” or “active”). She shared a CNN article about people wanting information from friends rather than search engines; the high usage of Facebook, and Google getting into social networking with Google Buzz.

She also shared findings of a 2007 OCLC report, 2007: Those who use social media sites read more than people who don’t. 28% use the social web while 20% use the library catalog–we should be on the social web!

Jane’s words of advice:
Pick one or two things to start with, then add. Madison began by using Bookletters (although they modified some content), and THEN started their blog MadReads.

Jane’s 4 “C”s of Blogging:

• Content – get ahead
• Contributors – get help
• Commitment – keep it going
• Comments – do allow.

A review of the book Twilight had over 100 comments, while other books (As Simple As Snow) encourage deep discussion. They do post negative reviews, but only of big bestsellers.

After the blog, they added “Book-Alikes” by cooperating with libraries in a seven county region. This is a form-based recommendation service. They use gmail to organize the responses because it stores the same thread together. Their form is online, and they use Base Camp software to save annotations in a database. (Jane suggests looking at using Good Reads as a way to save content instead.) They give 5 – 10 suggestions.

Next up for Madison PL: Facebook and Twitter. Your library website is only found by people looking for it, while Facebook reaches out to users. It’s immediate and interactive. They also have a YouTube channel, and next they will work with a teen volunteer to do vlogcasts and podcasts. Videos by Gerard Saylor on YouTube are an example of a clear “voice.”

Don’t worry about “The Big Silence”…you post something or return a form with suggestions and hear nothing back. Remember, people are lurking out there and they’re paying attention. Think of yourself…how many times do you bother to comment? Consider other ways to measure effectiveness–she watches hold lists to see how many people request books they blog about.

Jessamyn’s slides for the program she was going to give are available on her website.

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