Reader's Advisory Services

In the Catherine Ross text on Conducting the Reference Interview (pg. 237), Joyce Sarick is quoted as having said, “There are fifty thousand answers to the request, ‘Give me a good book’.” Sarick further suggests that the readers advisory interview requires some knowledge development activity before the patron ever arrives. I suppose in the past this was done by reading a lot of books, book commentaries, reviews, etc.. It seems to me that today, this process of knowledge development requires the same activity of reading like it did in the past, although today, for the most part, it is done by using electronic resources. By becoming familiar with the many different electronic resources, a librarian can understand the strengths and weaknesses of each and deftly use the right resource when the requests are made. In this regard, reader’s advisory is exactly the same as the reference advisory, in that knowing the best resource for the real information need makes the advisory process so much more efficient and efficacious.

Sarick goes on to describe the reader’s advisory interview as having a fun conversation about books, primarily by getting the patron to do most of the talking and the interviewer doing some careful listening. This approach makes the process seem much less daunting and after all, aren’t most librarians and information specialists in the field exactly because they enjoy having this kind of conversation about books? What a perfectly appealing way to describe it.

Another key point for me in this weeks’ reading was the cautionary advice to refrain from falling into the trap of responding with one’s own opinions about a book or an author. Although the question sometimes comes out that way, the requester is not really asking for the librarian’s opinion on another “good author”, “good book” or “good read”. What the librarian might like may not be what the requester will like. Staying focused on finding out what the patron likes came across to me as very sound and key advice.