Reader's Advisory at the MLA Conference

The May 2013 MLA Conference featured a pre-conference on reader's advisory for genre readers, with some excellent ideas for helping people find books they'll like.  The focus in particular was on training library staff to do reader's advisory, which is often a bit intimidating for desk staff.

The presenters, Caroline Barlow and Leah Youse, of Cecil County, have created a wiki with lots of useful information: https://focusongenres.wiki.zoho.com/.   

One of the particularly useful parts of this session was a chance to brainstorm ideas for training activities - creative ways to get people thinking about a particular genre.  These are listed on the wiki at https://focusongenres.wiki.zoho.com/Participant-Ideas-for-Mystery-Training.html.

We also discussed several different genres and different types of audiences.  The discussion of African-American fiction was particularly useful for me, in pointing out a wide variety of popular genres besides urban or street lit.  For example, I was completely unfamiliar with the popularity of church-based romances focusing on members of the congregation and their relationships; some of these have a specifically religious focus and others are more typical romances.

I was particularly struck by the presenters' idea of creating an account for the library at goodreads.com, which would allow us to easily create (and link to) custom book lists for genres, read-alikes, and so on.

We discussed websites that are useful for genre RA, and particular strengths of each:

• likesbooks.com – reviews of romance – has good, specific details on degree of sexuality
• whichbook.net – good for tone, feeling, etc. rather than plot or genre; can specify characteristics with sliders
• allreaders.com – good for detailed search, very specific sub-genres; can search by characteristics of characters, plot
• whatshouldireadnext.com -  read-alikes generator - can be somewhat hit-or-miss
• cozymystery.com – good lists of thematic cozies
• stopyourekillingme.com – good indexing of mysteries

The presenters also assembled a very useful collection of links for further reading: https://focusongenres.wiki.zoho.com/HomePage.html  



-- Bill