Most libraries now have manga titles added to our collections, and they can be very popular with patrons!
If you do not regularly read these titles, it can be hard to know what the best ones might be for your patrons. Asking your patrons about the best, or the titles they most enjoy, is a great way to find good titles. You can also subscribe to listserves for manga fans, check out websites, or follow journal recommendations to get suggestions your patrons would enjoy.
The best way to get familiar with these titles is the same as all Reader’s Advisory suggestions: read them. Flip through the books and look at pictures. Pay attention to characters who appear throughout a series. Continue reading Thinking about manga titles?→
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Back in the olden days, books in the library were available only in paper format.
This is a wonderful format for transmitting ideas in many situations – doesn’t require battery recharging, easy to see in bright sunshine, less likely to be destroyed if accidentally dropped into the tub when reading. It’s stable, and with proper handling can last for many years.
But now we have all sorts of good opportunities to help people read books!
Content is the key; format is a choice. Books are more than their formats; format is just a way to transmit ideas.
I am an enormous audiobook reader. A format more ancient than paper for transmitting stories, sharing ideas verbally continues to be a good way to read books.
When you are doing Reader’s Advisory (RA) work in audio formats, it’s important to know about the reader. A good reader, or a group of readers, can make the book come to life; a bad one can kill any hope of enjoying a book. I don’t know that I would have stayed with Ender’s Game if I was reading in on paper; but the audio version definitely kept me going! I have listened to books I would not have considered, except they were read by Scott Brick, Lorelei King, or George Guidall – award winning readers, and voices I really enjoy across all kinds of books.
You can listen to books as you walk your dog, as you do dishes, as you drive to work, or as you set at your computer doing monotonous and repetitive work. The flexibility of audiobooks means you can get more reading done than if you had to just sit in one place and read. For an omnivorous book reader (raising my hand here!), audiobooks have a good place in my daily reading schedule.
Mediatore, K. (2003). Reading with Your Ears: Readers’ Advisory and Audio Books. Reference & User Services Quarterly,42(4), 318-323.
Check out Overdrive’s services through your local library, or buy books from audible.com (or other sources); and discover the joys of reading audiobooks today!
Any suggestions for good places to start in reading? Any RA tips for audiobooks? Share them below!
“We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature. Occupying a space somewhere between the purely didactic and the nonsensical, most children’s books published in the past few hundred years have attempted to find a line between the two poles, seeking a balance between entertainment and instruction. However, that line seems to move closer to one pole or another depending on the prevailing cultural sentiments of the time. And the very fact that children’s books were hardly published at all before the early 18th century tells us a lot about when and how modern ideas of childhood as a separate category of existence began….
Where the boundaries for kids’ literature had once been narrowly fixed by Latin grammar books and Pilgrim’s Progress, by the end of the 19th century, the influence of science fiction like Jules Verne’s, and of popular supernatural tales and poems, prepared the ground for comic books, YA dystopias, magician fiction, and dozens of other children’s literature genres we now take for granted, or—in increasingly large numbers—we buy to read for ourselves. Enter the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature here, where you can browse several categories, search for subjects, authors, titles, etc, see full-screen, zoomable images of book covers, download XML versions, and read all of the over 6,000 books in the collection with comfortable reader views. Find more classics in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.”
“A decade-plus of Seattle library checkouts. Last month, the Seattle Public Library released a dataset tracking the total number of checkouts for each title by year and month from April 2005 to December 2016 (so far). The dataset isn’t limited to physical books; it also includes e-books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, and more. Last year, the three most popular physical books were Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train (2,355 checkouts), Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies (2,151 checkouts), and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2,134 checkouts).”
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This month we are looking at Reader’s Advisory tools and ideas. One of the best tools for recommending good books is the simplest one to do: Get in touch with your collection!
Knowing what books you have, what is available on your Overdrive account, and where you can ILL books makes everything so much easier for you.
Several years ago in one of my research studies, I looked at different ways library staff provided service. To look at RA work in public libraries I would go to the desk, tell them I had just read the newest Sue Grafton book and really enjoyed Janet Evaonvich’s books, and ask for suggestions on other books to read. Most people responded just as you would expect: they showed me to their mystery collection, or they offered some basic selections.
Most libraries now have manga titles added to our collections, and they can be very popular with patrons!
