As a public library practitioner-turned-academic, I often find the gratifications of being a full time faculty member illusory in an information-science dominated field, but one of the things that has brought me the most satisfaction is the pioneering class in readers advisory services for adults in the public library that I have now taught for eight years at Queens College. Besides the joy, and occasional frustration, of reading "real books," the student class discussions are lively and their insights from the assignments genuine and original. This is the class whose user (secret shopper) assignment to go into a local public library and ask for a readalike generated an article in Library Journal (Chelton, 2003), because the "sins" they encounter are as common as they are legion—no eye contact or explanation, overuse of the OPAC before clarifying the query, automatic assumption that this is the only book by the author the user has read, or worse, that the author only writes one kind of book, or the user only reads one kind of book, regardless of mood, unexplained absences from the desk, etc. I tell them if they repeat these "sins" in practice that I have a generic voodoo doll waiting for their name to be put on it.
The class is structured to alternate actual discussions of real books in various genres, including lately graphic novels, memoirs and travel writers as well as the usual mystery, SF/fantasy, horror, romance, best sellers, inspirational, multicultural and literary fiction. After a lecture on the topic, they are instructed to think about their remarks from the perspective of appeal, with Joyce Saricks' appeal factors in the class text, Reader's Advisory Service in the Public Library, as background. I allow lots of personal comments on how they liked or disliked a book to reiterate points about appeal factors and make them conscious of their own personal reading biases. This semester I also added an option to write annotations using her description of the "language of appeal."
The other pivotal assignment in the class is to select a title unread in a genre the student normally doesn't read and find three readalikes for someone who likes it. This is to teach them that RA reference tools have problems since most of them are not indexed by appeal, and one must learn to read between the lines of reviews, use Boolean searching where available, and possibly take more time than one has available in the middle of a busy reference desk queue. (I am convinced that our mania for answering everything on the spot leads to the commonly reported rates of reference inaccuracy—or just dumping the user to find something for him or herself.)
My most memorable moments in the RA class include the following:
- when we discussed DaVinci Code and half the class was trying to break the code while the other half looked at them like they were crazy for liking such an awful book;
- the male student who said he felt very peculiar being seen on the subway holding a Nora Roberts novel even if he was reading it for class (which led me to think asking people what kinds of books they would least like to be seen with is a great way to identify both personal prejudices and stigmatized genres);
- the immigrant student who reported for his assignment to interview his friends about their reading that they all read the Bible.
This is primarily a practical class, but thanks to the publication of Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals About Reading, Libraries, and Community, which I used as a text for the first time this semester, I have one-volume access to, if not all, most of the relevant reading research contextualized for the LIS field. The class reads and discusses the book and I allude to it repeatedly during class discussions. While I might like to include more theory in the course, consistently getting students who have not read anything popular, or even if they have, share great misperceptions about other genres, seems to mandate the lopsided theory/practice balance in the class.
One of the other gratifications of being a full time faculty member is the ability to influence curriculum. Since I also teach our Information Resources and Services class (basic reference), which is a core course for anybody entering the school, I introduced an assignment there to find a similar book, so we did not turn out students who could not at least attempt to answer such questions at a reference desk. Unfortunately, separate RA departments in public libraries are rare, but reference librarians ill-equipped to do RA are common. In some small ways, I try to change that in both classes.
References
Chelton, Mary Kay. "RA101: Common Mistakes in the Readers Advisory Interview" Library Journal, Vol 128, no. 18. (November 1, 2003), pp. 38-39.
Ross, C. S. McKechnie, L (E. F.), and Rothbauer, P. M. (2006) Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals About Reading, Libraries, and Community. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Saricks, J. (2005). Reader's Advisory Service in the Public Library. 3rd ed. Chicago: American Library Association.
Mary K. Chelton is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies Queens College, City University of New York; where she teaches courses in reader's advisory. Her experience includes work in public, academic, and special libraries.