Some of the changes that I am most excited about include:
- All meeting notes will be made available to everyone who is reading this. While the meetings themselves are still only open to members, the ARRT Steering Committee voted to open the notes to all interested parties. This means that you can see what we are discussing and use it to help your patrons right away.
- We are beginning with 4 intro sessions-- One overall intro and then three boot camp meetings, 1 for each of the genres [science fiction, fantasy, and horror]. In these boot camp meetings we will tackle the genres in general. That will be our Feb, April, June and August meetings.
- We will NOT break up genres into subgenres; rather we will be using major “doorways” and appeal factors to talk about authors from all three genres at the same time. The details of how this will work and why we are making this key change will be explained today in person and will appear in the notes.
- Due to a member interest in incorporating resources throughout the study, we will present one resource each meeting and then discuss it at the next meeting. This way participants can use the resource in conjunction with what we learned. This will also allow us to really focus on the specific benefits of each resource. First up will be Locus whose annual recommending reading list just came out. This is one of my favorite annual lists. Click here to see me talk about why it is such an important tool both for collection development AND for patron suggestions.
These changes make for an enhanced experience for both our members who join in person AND anyone out there who wants to run their own speculative fiction genre study but does not have the support to go at it alone.
When information is added to the ARRT website, such as the notes or new assignments, I will let you know here on RA for All.
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