Article Review on Readers Advisory
April 26th, 2006I’m in voracious reading mode, which means my eyes are more attuned to posts about readers advisory. Today, Angel over at The Gypsy Librarian reviews an article from LJ titled, A Reader at Every Shelf. The article deals with moving beyond bestsellers and how to use Web tools to do so. A wonderful piece. I especially enjoyed the section on using blogs for RA:
“Miriam Bobkoff, a reference librarian at Santa Fe Public, uses her library’s blog—called Icarus because, she says, Santa Fe is a “technological low-flyer”—to draw attention to wallflower titles by pulling cover images from the catalog or posting short bibliographic essays under such headings as “More Non-Fiction Pleasures,” “Terrific Titles,” and “Ripping Good Stories.” The blog has spurred interest in titles she recommends or discusses: patrons stopsby her desk to talk about books they’ve read at her suggestion. Icarus gets approximately 500 hits a month and is, says Bobkoff, Santa Fe PL’s fourth most frequently accessed library web page. Network coordinator Diedre Conkling of Lincoln County Library District, OR, which arguably flies at a higher altitude technologically, admits that what she likes most about her library’s blog is the RSS feed. “I think that it’s because of that that there were over 20,000 hits on our blog last month,” she says.”
Of course, libraries who want to provide online RA services should look at social tools like Library Thing. I have found more recommendations from LT than any book review guide, online or off. Also, any RA service without RSS capabilities is useless, IMO.
Disclaimer - I know I probably don’t have to write this, but I received a free lifetime membership to LT. Have these disclaimers gotten a bit out of control?