One of my major projects this quarter was developing a sampling of reader’s advisory resources, which included bookmarks, reading lists, and booktalks. While I had done similar assignments in classes or for events, being able to do these on my own with no guidelines other than ensuring diversity (which was already in my plans) was a very different experience. While I never got the opportunity to practice reader’s advisory live this quarter, minus one instance where I suggested the Queen’s Thief series to someone wanting more adventure/low fantasy reads, putting together these resources forced me to look at the lack of representation in some genres, though it appears that those gaps are closing with releases in the past two years and those slated for this year. For example, I struggled to find Own Voices books by Black authors in the science-fiction genre, and those that were out are not yet in the Eckstein collection due to their extremely recent releases. I also struggled to find age-appropriate Own Voices Asian representation in the contemporary category, oddly enough, though that may have been my own poor searching.
The first item, the bookmarks, ended up taking the longest because I had to create a template for them, and wasn’t quite sure what size to make them. I ended up borrowing a couple bookmarks that Erin had printed out previously to measure and test and that helped significantly. Narrowing down the books for those was also somewhat challenging, since I wanted diversity, but only had four slots for books on each bookmark. I tried to make it as diverse as possible, with authors of all genders and races and main characters of visible diversity, and had some difficulty resisting putting personal favorites on there, though many of them were also good picks. The searching for books generally took quite a bit of time to accomplish, since I was not only looking for diversity, but also books that were well reviewed and liked by the age range. All these factors made this a surprisingly challenging personal task.
The second item, the reading lists, took much less time because I had been doing so much research for the bookmarks, and was able to put some of the books that hadn’t made the bookmark cut onto them. I had a lot more fun with these, because I didn’t have to try to summarize an entire book’s concept into one or two sentences in 11-point font, and just used the publisher’s blurb instead (with acknowledgement of such at the end). I want to update these with the book covers at some point, but my site was not having any of that for some reason and I chose to get them uploaded in a text-only form over not having them.
The last item, the booktalks, were a lot more fun than I expected. I had had to do booktalks for another class and hated every minute of it (to be fair, they had to be at least 90 seconds, and were incredibly formulaic for a grade), but these I was able to just talk about the book for 30 seconds and be myself, which was a huge relief. I honestly might start making more of these for something like Instagram or TikTok as a summer project to keep me occupied and work on my reader’s advisory and book selling skills!
Overall, while it wasn’t the same as live advisory, this ongoing task helped me explore what is out there at the moment and where improvements might be made in the future to certain genres. It also gave me a more concrete appreciation for collection development librarians who do these kinds of searches every day!