Tag Archives: Reader’s Advisory

Coming Soon: Bonus Podcast Episodes of Reading With Libraries!

Last week we celebrated our 100th episode of of our library skills and training podcast, Linking Our Libraries (check it out here!)

And this week, we’re starting to drop some new bonus episodes of our book group and reader’s advisory podcast: Reading With Libraries!

We’re focusing on some of the pop culture happening around us, and suggesting related books! You can get a feel for these episodes by checking out the ones we released last winter: Bridgerton, Soul, The Mandalorian, and Nomadland.

Starting tomorrow, we’ll drop four NEW episodes in our Reading With Libraries feed (if you’re subscribed to the podcast, you’ll get them automatically!) Otherwise, you can always listen to them right from our website!

We had so much fun finding books to go along with some of the summer’s upcoming movies and other entertainment! We hope you enjoy these episodes and get inspired to recommend books to your library community!

Training Tips: Reader’s Advisory tips

Each week we are here to talk with you with a few details about a library topic. We want to help everyone to stay up to date with the information you need to make your library or archive successful in serving your community.

We like books.

I’m guessing you like books too.

Probably some of your community members like books.

Pretty much, our brand is books. It’s what people think of when they think about us. And you may be tired of telling people you work in a library, and having them chortle and say “Oh, I wish I had a job where I could sit around and read all day!”

*gritting teeth*

But we do talk about books – and of course for most of us that’s one of the fun parts of this job!

There are lots of materials online on building your skills, and we will collect a few here for you.

Naturally, we need to give a plug to our book group podcast: Reading With Libraries!

We started this as a way to talk about books, but it is also set up to be a resource for you to use in sharing books.

Each week we cover a different genre, and we provide information about that genre, along with links to all kinds of places to find more books on these books. (We also have genre-related beverages in each episode! That’s for you!) Then we chat with our guests about books we have read and enjoyed, and those book are listed on the show notes page for easy access.

Subscribe today!! Or, just click right here and you can browse all our episodes, and can listen to them right on that page.

What else is out there?

This is a handy PDF from Novelist that you can use to ponder different types of readers, and different skills library staff will bring to the library: Readers Advisory Guide from Novelist. You can find it all on their site, along with other info.

Minitex provides a bunch of good information on building Reference skills in general, and they have a section of information on Reader’s Advisory.

Here is just a quick look at some of their information:

What is readers’ advisory?

  • Find the right book for the right person at the right time
  • Helping readers find the best, most enjoyable reading that matches their needs, interests, and reading level
  • Connecting readers with authors / writers

What skills does it involve?

Books and Beverages Podcast Episode 101: Romance

Angie, Ariel, and Annie on location at St Cloud Public Library

Welcome everyone, to
Books and Beverages Podcast from CMLE!

This is our book group podcast, where we discuss different genres of books each week, while we sit in our comfy chairs and sip our beverages. And you are, of course, an important part of this book group. You might want to find a comfy place to sit, to sip your beverage along with us, and just enjoy being part of our discussion.

Attention: you could win a FREE  romance audiobook!!  Leave a comment on our website! As a special thank you to our listeners, we have two free digital audiobook downloads for randomly selected commenters! We have copies of Because of Miss Bridgerton by Julia Quinn from HarperAudio (we discuss this series!), and The Black Witch (The Black Witch Chronicles #1) by Laurie Forest from Harlequin Audio.  Tell us about a favorite romance book, give us some ideas on new romance book suggestions, or other romance-reading ideas and you will be eligible to win!

This is a very inclusive book group. There are no “right” or “wrong” books to read and chat about for our book group. We want to talk about books – and we want you to share your books. At the end of our time together, everyone should have at least a couple of new things for your To Be Read (TBR) pile!

We love books, so it seems entirely appropriate to start off our book group with Romance books! Romance is an extremely popular genre – and probably much broader than you would generally imagine. There can be romance elements to books in almost any type of book. In this episode we have fun chatting about a a broad range of books we have enjoyed. Thanks to Ariel and Annie for joining Mary and Angie this week! Books are always more fun when you can chat about them with friends.

For more information about Romance books, and lots of suggestions for books you might enjoy or books you might recommend to others, see our full webpage for this episode. All drinks referenced will also be provided on this page, with links to them, photos, and recipes for you to try them for yourselves.

Young Romance Issue 1
romance stories occur across all genres and formats!

Day Seventy One of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

Aarne-Thompson-Uther
Classification of Folk Tales

“There are many different folk tales in the world, but many tales are variations on a limited number of themes. The classification system originally designed by Aarne, and later revised first by Thompson and later by Uther, is intended to bring out the similarities between tales by grouping variants of the same tale under the same ATU category.”

This is a great tool to use as you are looking for all kinds of folk tales and fairy tales! You can use this yourself, or as a very handy Reader’s Advisory tool.

And if you like such genres, you can see it applied in an entirely fiction setting in the Seanan McGuire Indexing series! Fairy tales come to life, in dark and dangerous ways. I looove both of these books, and am anxiously waiting for a third! (I have them in audio format from Audible.com, and suggest that format; but electronic book or paper would be fine if they are more accessible.)

Indexing, by Seanan McGuire

“For most people, the story of their lives is just that: the accumulation of time, encounters, and actions into a cohesive whole. But for an unfortunate few, that day-to-day existence is affected—perhaps infected is a better word—by memetic incursion: where fairy tale narratives become reality, often with disastrous results.

That’s where the ATI Management Bureau steps in, an organization tasked with protecting the world from fairy tales, even while most of their agents are struggling to keep their own fantastic archetypes from taking over their lives. When you’re dealing with storybook narratives in the real world, it doesn’t matter if you’re Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, or the Wicked Queen: no one gets a happily ever after.”

Indexing: Reflections, by Seanan McGuire

“The struggle against not-so-charming storybook narratives isn’t the only complicating factor in Henrietta “Henry” Marchen’s life. As part of the ATI Management Bureau team protecting the world from fairy tales gone awry, she’s juggling her unwanted new status as a Snow White, dealing with a potentially dangerous Pied Piper, and wrangling a most troublesome wicked stepsister—along with a budding relationship with Jeff, her teammate.

But when a twisted, vicious Cinderella breaks out of prison and wreaks havoc, things go from disenchanted to deadly. And once Henry realizes someone is trying to use her to destroy the world, her story becomes far from over—and this one might not have a happily ever after.”

Day Sixty Three of the CMLE Summer Fun Library Tour!

Simple Unknown

Does your library have a comic book collection? Trinity College in Connecticut does! And thanks to a generous donor they are able to share them with the world.

“For more than 150 years, Hartford’s Watkinson Library has been a research hub. Today, the collection housed at Trinity College includes 200,000 volumes dating back 10 centuries, including an 11th-century Greek Bible, a first edition of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” a book about Egypt commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte, John James Audubon’s “Birds of America.”

Now a few more legendary characters fill the shelves at Watkinson: the Silver Surfer, the Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The library recently received a donation of about 10,000 comic books, 200 graphic novels and several comics reference books from a Minnesota collector. Richard Ring, Watkinson’s head curator and librarian, said these are the first comic books in the library’s collection.

“This is a nice starter set for us. It’s exciting. We hope it’s the tip of the iceberg,” Ring said. “I hope they inspire people connected to the college to think, if they have a collection, what they are going to do with it. … If they don’t, it’s still a nice thing to dig into.”

Ring said another promised gift, of several thousand science-fiction novels from a Connecticut collector, will enhance the comic-book collection. “Comic books and science fiction have similar reading cultures,” he said. “I view these as documents of the pop culture of its time.”

Other universities have noteworthy comic-book collections, including the University of Iowa, Indiana University, the University of Georgia, Brigham Young University, Duke, Brown, the University of Tulsa, Drew University, Southern Methodist University, Bowling Green University and Texas A&M.”

(Read the rest of this article here!)