Readers Advisory Toolkit 4: Multimedia Readers’ Advisory

First up was Neal Wyatt, a PhD student and academic librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University, who talked about different 2.0 tools that can be used in readers’ advisory. I wasn’t hugely impressed with her – she was uncomfortable and read directly from her notes in a monotone, which isn’t a great way to keep people awake so early in the morning. She recommended using tools like Novelist and Library Thing, and went on about annotating and cross-referencing every item in your library catalog. There was some good advice, but she was very academic in nature and not very public-library friendly, which seemed odd for PLA.

Next up was Joyce Saricks, who spoke about audiobooks. She writes audiobook reviews and is an avid listener, and she was able to put into words what makes or breaks the narration of an audiobook. As a listener and buyer of audiobooks, I was impressed with her observations. She was right on target when she said that a well-narrated audiobook seems perfectly natural and mimics the experience of reading, but a poorly-read audiobook can ruin the book, and perhaps even the author, for the listener permanently. She gave us some useful links for audiobook reviews, and mentioned that while she believes that downloadables are the future, she thinks they still have a ways to go before people give up on their CDs. I agree with this – I think downloadables need a bit of tweaking before they catch on and finally replace the CD book market. The frustration level is still a bit too high, especially for boomer-age adults and not-so-tech-savvy people.

Last on the line-up was Georgine Olsen, from a rural community near Fairbanks, Alaska, who talked about the process of “sliding” patrons into new reading genres. Her library serves many homebound and rural people, and they have a delivery system. Many of their patrons prefer one particular genre or author, and the library quickly runs out of books that meet their preferences, which can leave patrons and librarians frustrated. I’ve noticed that this happens often with my HouseCalls patrons. She recommends having a specific plan, almost like a marketing plan, for each “slider” patron, to slowly ease them into new authors and genres. It takes some planning, but it saves a lot of frustration in the long run. I found her advice very useful and I’m looking forward to trying out her techniques.

What I took away from this workshop was: 1. Make readers’ advisory a personalized experience by taking the extra time to plan ahead rather than react after the fact. 2. Read more adudiobook reviews and try to get a better sense of the elements that make or break audiobooks for the listener.