A Roundup of Our Reader’s Advisory Posts

Written by: Kelly on October 19, 2013.

We’ve done a number of reader’s advisory related posts at STACKED, and I thought instead of reiterating the value of RA and how much it matters, I’d round some of our older posts up in one place for easy access. I’ll include some of our RA guides, as well as some of the visuals of reader’s advisory projects I’ve done in my libraries, too. I’d like to show the practical, applicable stuff, too. We’ll be back with our Saturday Links of Note post next week.

If you’ve done any reader’s advisory posts or have links to displays, book lists, shelf readers, or any other tools you use as a reader’s advisor, I’d be happy to see them. Leave ’em in the comments — the more that are shared, the bigger a resource this becomes.

“Why does good readers’ advisory matter? Because getting a list of random books that you might like based on arbitrary qualities like publication date stinks. Because there are millions of books out there, and each one has a reader. Each reader has something they want from a book. Because reading matters, and being able to connecting the reader to his/her book and that book to his/her reader only furthers that. Because there is nothing better than seeing a 14-year-old boy walking out of a library with exactly the kind of book he wants to read because you took the time to listen to what he likes and offer him something that makes him excited about reading.” — from Why Good Reader’s Advisory Matters, September 2012.

I’m a big proponent of passive reader’s advisory. One of the projects I finally got to finish recently at my own library are shelf talkers. They began as a collaborative effort with a former coworker, and together, we wrote short “hooky” descriptions of ten books, and it’s my goal to swap the books out every couple of months. I like to think of this as “surprise” and “delight” reader’s advisory; readers discover them when they’re browsing and maybe pick up something they didn’t know they were looking for. You can read more about the project, including what holders I purchased, over here.

And then you can read some more about passive reader’s advisory and the value of it in the piece I wrote with Jackie Parker about passive programming.

Maybe my favorite part of librarianship — or at least one of them — is making displays on whatever topic strikes my fancy. I tend to swap them out about once a month and I try to stick to something thematic to the month, though I don’t make it a requirement. The library I’m at now has space for teen displays. It’s the first library I’ve worked at that has had such dedicated space, and I use it to my advantage. Here’s a look at a handful of displays I’ve done at my current library and at a former one.

This display was from March this year and one of my favorites: it’s a display of dynamic and interesting girls in YA fiction. In honor of women’s history month, of course.

At the end of summer, I borrowed an idea from a tumblr librarian and made a display of books for fans of Supernatural. You can see the idea and the subsequent booklist over here.

This display was at a library I used to work at, in a space I had to carve out. The theme is simply yellow covers, and I made the signage a smily face to mimic the book beside it.

Before I carved out the space above for displays, this is what I was working with. This display was one I loved because the topic was fun — books featuring bands or music — and because I got a teen volunteer to decorate those old albums for me to jazz up the look of it. She got to have a bit of ownership in the display, too.

Don’t have a space to do displays in your library? I’ve utilized bulletin boards to make it happen, too. This was my favorite, a bulletin board reader’s advisory tool all about the Cybils:

If you want to see some of the other displays I’ve done — I’m trying to take a photo every month and update it for my own records — you can check them out over here.

Want reading guides to YA fiction by genre? You probably know about our “Get Genrified” series. Kim’s post this month about dystopia has links to our prior guides and reading lists, which include horror, romance, science fiction, high fantasy, contemporary, novels in verse, mysteries and thrillers, and graphic novels.

Since passive RA matters to me as much as active RA, I’ve made it a goal to develop reader guides to various topics and genres at the library. You can check out out my most recent ones, as well as ones that are a few years old, over at Scribd. You’re welcome to adapt and modify as you wish. (Yes indeed, I have made lists “for boys” and “for girls” in the past, but note that aren’t labeled as such. I took the idea and spun it a bit. I don’t think I’d do that now — I made those lists over three years ago — but there’s one way to take a twist on the problematic trope.)

“Sure, know those best sellers. Know the books that your readers are asking for. But it’s as important — if not more important — to know about those other books. The ones that aren’t getting a lot of press for them or that are backlist titles and have sort of fallen out of the sphere of memory in light of those shiny new titles and those easy reaches. It’s important to go beyond the end cap titles and explore the shelves. To browse. To discover.

Readers who become the best reader’s advisors and the strongest advocates for reading and books are those who seek out the books which aren’t the easy reaches. They’re the ones who can see the value in those titles and know that they’re the books which WILL reach many readers because of their strengths or accolades or the endorsement from well-knowns (Oprah, for example, or in the YA field it’s someone like John Green). That’s not to discredit the books or those speaking on their behalf.

It’s just that they are easy reaches.”

— From Getting Past the Easy Reach, perhaps my favorite thing I’ve written on the topic of reader’s advisory. Of course, this ties back into about everything said all week long both by myself and those who wrote guest posts about their work and RA philosophies.