What I Am Working On

I spent most of last week working on a new Readers Advisory training plan for my staff. Readers Advisory, for those who don't know, is the ability to suggest books that a reader will enjoy (NOT what you think they should be reading) and it is one of my favorite library related things to do. There is more to it than that but you get the idea. Every month my staff will meet to discuss different genres of books. Our first session will be an organizational meeting and then we will jump right in and start with mysteries. During the second meeting we will explore useful tools and discuss the appeal factors of our first genre and then we will have a discussion on a book that the entire group reads together. For the third session each person will pick a book from a different sub-genre and do a short review and book talk. We will continue with the training until all the genres are covered....and then we will start over again.

The beauty of this new plan is that the basic structure of it was a gift from a librarian at the St Louis County Library. Two of the book lists were gifts from library friends on a Listserv. After consulting a Genre studies book, I contacted the author (another librarian) and got some tips from her. The collaboration among libraries is only one of the many reasons I love being a librarian.