RA Crutches Katie Polley

Basic RA Tips

You need to read! While this one might seem like a no-brainer, there are a surprising number of librarians (public librarians! youth service librarians!) who DO NOT READ. Which…does not make sense. If talking about books and recommending books and being knowledgeable about books is a big part of your job you need to be able to talk about books and recommend books and be knowledgeable about books. This easiest and best way to do this is to read books.

You need to read widely! Ideally, you need to read more than the same genres and authors you have always read. I get it: your time is precious, and realistically speaking you can only read so many books. It is an absolute and unassailable fact: THERE IS NO WAY YOU CAN READ ALL OF THE BOOKS BEFORE YOU DIE. However. There are ways you can maximize your reading. The obvious way is to try something new—it can be as simple as trying a new-to-you author, or a book from a genre you don’t normally read. There are also a million (slight exaggeration, but not by much) challenges online that you can modify to suit your reading needs. For example, Book Riot does a #readharder challenge every year that is very customizable and a pretty non-threatening one to start with. A few easy examples if you want to make your own personal challenge are to stay in the genres you’re comfortable with, but only read authors of color, or only translated books, or only graphic novels. See? Totally easy! And you’ve expanded the boundaries of what you read, which will help you with RA at the library! You can make this sort of challenge as elaborate or as simple as you want, but the point is to expand what you read, not to make yourself miserable.

You need to read professional review journals! If your library subscribes to professional review journals such as Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, Voya, Horn Book, or similar, it really is a good idea to look through them. Because—remember!—there’s NO WAY YOU CAN READ ALL THE BOOKS BEFORE YOU DIE. You cannot. But reading review journals will help you be aware of new books that are coming out. That way you can either explode your own personal TBR (to be read) pile or just have a vague notion of things in your head so that when a patron comes in looking for something you can hopefully remember that there’s a book coming out that just fits the bill. And also it’s fun to see all the books that there are!

You need to read blogs/social media! This is the one that I know is going to be divisive. Yes. The Internet. It exists, it has opinions, and while it can be a raging dumpster fire, there are actually parts of it that occasionally don’t suck. Because again, remember: YOU CANNOT READ ALL OF THE BOOKS BEFORE YOU DIE. Nope. So I recommend you find a couple of blogs that you like, maybe in genres you do like, or maybe in genres that you aren’t familiar with, and follow them. Twitter is also good for book news, although it can occasionally get ugly quickly, just based on what it is. Instagram is fun, and there are a lot of book bloggers there, but you have to work a little harder to find content that is more than just “oh hey look at these books they are so pretty!” (Which is fine, and we all need that too, but it’s not always so helpful for RA. But if you want an easier social media rabbit hole to start with, IG might be the better choice. Unless you have a high tolerance for arguing.) If you really really really cannot cope with social media, at least take some RA webinars. They are offered FOR FREE by many of the same professional outlets that publish those professional review journals that I was just harping on about. Usually they are an hour long, and are focused on a very specific topic, like upcoming series romance titles or forthcoming teen fiction or international thrillers published in translation or hot super hero graphic novels for all ages or what have you. You can even sign up for them and watch them when you have a free hour if the scheduled time doesn’t work with your availability.

You need to track what you read! This one isn’t really a “rule” so much as a really helpful suggestion for your own personal sanity. It can be as simple or as complex as you like—just a list of titles and authors in a notebook or Word document all the way up to a full blown review blog. I personally use Library Thing, which is an online cataloging tool, to keep track of what I read. This allows me to use tags, and also means that I don’t (necessarily) have to clog up my actual library hold list with all of the neat books I see after I’ve done a bout of professional review journal reading—I can just sling them into Library Thing and they can molder there forever or until I read them, whichever comes first. If I am participating in a reading challenge, the tagging option is a helpful way for me to track my progress. Good Reads is another popular option that many people use. I don’t usually add notes, whatever tags I added are usually enough that I can find what I’m looking for, and then from there I can go to either NoveList, the catalog, the internet, or horror of horrors, Amazon to get whatever additional information I need for a patron.

LibraryThing

LibraryThing: tag view

LibraryThing: cover view

LibraryThing: list view

LibraryThing: add books

LibraryThing: reviews

NoveList

NoveList: series listing

NoveList: title read-alikes

NoveList: author read-alikes

NoveList: series read-alikes

NoveList: read-alike lists from the main screen

NoveList: reading lists

NoveList: reading lists

NoveList: reading lists

NoveList: reading lists

NoveList: how to do/find more

NoveList Book Squad newsletter

Thank you!

katie.polley@co.dakota.mn.us