Week 9, Assignment 3

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We hope that this has been informative and worthwhile. Please remember to check your tracking log to make sure that you have completed each element of the course. Also, please complete the online evaluation. If you are interested in doing more and would like some other resources to explore click here for a list.

Week 9 Assignment 3 Summarize your thoughts about this program in a blog post. What have you learned that was helpful?

You know, I do feel as though this was quite a useful learning tool. I have to say that Weeks 4, 7 and 8 were particularly helpful in enhancing my readers' advisory skills.

In Week 4, I discovered new uses for Goodreads, a site on which I'd had only a nominal membership in previous years. Prior to the training, my principal use for Goodreads was not even in accessing the site itself so much as in using the popularity ratings and descriptions that NoveList Plus database incorporated. The assignments in Week 4 compelled me to actually explore the site in a level of detail that I'd previously eschewed. Following my rating exercise I made the foray into customizable classification and found that I quite adore Goodreads as a resources for organizing my own concept of read-alikes. I'm sure we can all remember times when a customer has approached us uncertain of what to read next after they've seemingly consumed an entire genre. Or, in even more drastic circumstances, when a customer has approached us with no particular interest at all! For these customers, NoveList falls short. They've read all the read-alikes, or alternatively, they've no interest in anything they've read to date but expect a good solid recommendation anyway. When dealing with these customers I now find the intuitive classification system of Goodreads to be my stalwart friend in a time of RA need.
I've started creating lists of books that I've read, classifying them by mood, by sub-sub-subgenre, and by other obscure categories that I might in a pinch use to recommend an extraordinary title to the reader who's read it all or to the reader who's read next to nothing.

I leaped into the content of Week 7 with abandon. Already a keenly appreciative reader of many works appearing in our YA section, I'm nevertheless not always up to speed with the very latest and greatest in teen reads. This section provided not only a welcome clarification of the mysterious New Adult Fiction concept (which I had hitherto written off as splitting hairs) it also provided a golden link to the dear Lawrence Library and its comprehensive flowchart of teen reads. Apart from actively using this flowchart in my summer reading recommendations for teens, I also discovered that the Lawrence Library has another new nugget not mentioned in training: the Like, Try, Why posts. These thematic posts are related to the flowcharts in that they recommend additional books based on previous likes and explain why they recommended the new titles. They're a little different in that they're more like snippet charts, part of what could be a whole flow chart in the future, and in that they are more thematic. The current one features Historical Teen Fiction, for example.

I felt that Week 8 was thoroughly worth my time and actually would have liked to see this week appear a little earlier in training, perhaps just after Week 3's discussion of appeal terms. I just LOVED that the focus was on not merely appeal terms, but non-fiction readers' advisory. We have a sizable non-fiction collection just brimming with exciting titles that are surprisingly narrative in format, yet its easy for these titles to get lost or forgotten when it comes to readers' advisory. Though I have often made a point of selecting non-fiction titles for our staff picks display, still, it is easy to forget about the many extraordinary stories that sit, brilliant but humble amidst their more information-rich non-fiction companions. It's really been during Genre Boot Camps that I've discovered or rediscovered excellence in non-fiction, whether travel memoirs, historical dramas, etc. Week 8's assignments forced me to not only refresh my familiarity with classic appeal terms, but to use them in a creative way to persuade fiction-lovers to give narrative non-fiction a chance. This is a week that has definitely influenced my RA style and I plan to incorporate what I've learned from Week 8 into my continually expanding classification system on Goodreads.

The other weeks were fun and informative for the most part. Weeks 1, 2 and 3 were a nice way of easing into the meat of the training. I found the book matching exercise to be entertaining and the appeal factors assignments to be thought-provoking. I've already gushed about Week 4 above. Week 5 was fairly useful and I found some decent inspiration for book-related programs. Assignments 2 and 3 in Week 6 were a little arduous, since any of the sub-genres with which I was not already quite familiar were notably lacking in fan websites. I felt this week could have been a little more user-friendly and perhaps a little more detailed in some respects, like the mashups portion. Still, it was useful to explore a couple of sub genre definitions and generally get a better handle on some sorts of fiction with which I had been less than familiar. See above for my detailed delight in describing the usefulness of Weeks 7 and 8. Week 9 was just plain interesting. I don't really think that book trailers / video blurbs / bideos will influence my RA skills in any particular respect, since I don't imagine I'll refer customers to these resources when I can just give them recommendations from my own font of RA knowledge or using some of the tools described elsewhere in the training. It was an interesting set of articles though and I  did come to my own set of conclusions about the (ideal) future of these book trailers / video blurbs / bideos.

In summary, I consider this training to have been well worth my time and would like to see a variation on this training program in the future with the caveat that for practical reasons it really should be presented at any other time of year other than the Spring/Summer. I thank those who have contributed to the structure of the program and compliment them on having pulled together a quite worthwhile continuing education resource.


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