Monday Discussion: What Do You Call Your Department?

So today, I would like to include everyone in on a topic I have been working on both on my own and informally with a few colleagues who are also working on the question.

It's an old issue that raises its head every few years or so.

Reader's Advisory is a clunky term; it always has been, but the community of librarians who help leisure readers have yet to have come up with something better.

I am working on a few new big projects (news coming to RA for All soon) and one of those is a re-definition of service to readers.

So for today's Monday Discussion, share with me any terms or titles you either use or wish you used.

Currently, I am gathering terms from other librarians and even a few patrons. I would love some more from all of you.

Here is what I have so far:

• Reader's Advisory [It's what we use at the BPL]
• Reader's Services
• Popular Materials
• Adult Services [which my non-library friends all think sounds dirty]
• Book Pusher [It's what a patron calls me, but it only gets at a small part of what we do]

Here is the one I am most excited about. It comes from a member of my book club who is also a friend and a retired educator. She gave me permission to start using it: Reader's Advocate.

That term is not perfect, but it gets more to the heart of what we do than Reader's Advisory or Reader's Services does.  We are there to advocate for the readers in our communities by creating dynamic collections for them, providing services that they want and need, helping them to discover great new reads with guidance or on their own, and promoting and defending leisure reading as a valuable pursuit at any age.

So what about you? In a perfect world, if you could ditch the clunky Reader's Advisory jargony term, what would you call what we do?

For past Monday Discussions, click here.