Post-It Note Reviews for Adults

Although I cannot find the exact posts, I do know that I have previously mentioned allowing your patrons to write quick reviews of a book they enjoyed on a post-it note and then you slap it on the book for the next reader to find. 

This is an example of Interactive RA Service which is something I write and lecture about frequently. 

I first got this idea from Teen Librarian Toolbox, my favorite resource for advice on how to serve teen readers. Amanda MacGregor works in a school library and has been doing Post-it Note Reviews for years and shares them online.

Click here to see the entire series

The idea here is that you let readers who love a book help you get it into the hands of another readers who may also enjoy it. You can re-shelve the books letting someone find the post-it note on the front cover serendipitously, you can post them on your social media, place these titles face out in the stacks, or you can make a display-- a permanent display of the newest titles with the post-it note reviews.

No matter what you do, these post-it note reviews are a great way to make your service to readers more interactive as you can have patrons helping patrons. A book who cover literally speaks to its next reader with a short review from another patron who already enjoyed it-- this is a RA gold mine.

But I also love the post-it note reviews because with such limited space, our patrons have to be concise in expressing the WHY they loved this book. We can "listen" to our patrons with these short reviews. They are an entry point into us gaining a deeper understanding our patrons' preferred appeal factors, allowing us to better craft our collections, displays, and suggestions to get them more of what we know they like.

Think about it, a normal return gives us NOTHING. The book comes back and all we know is that someone checked it out. 

But a book that has a blank post-it not on the back page with another post-it note asking them to let us know what they thought, or just having a stack of post-it notes by the return bins and encouraging people to participate-- those returns speak to us. Just look at the awesome information MacGregor gets back from readers!

Here's a big question I have though: Why do I only see this practice of post-it note reviews with youth and teen collections? Why do they get to have all the fun [and rich data collection].

Adults would love this. 

Who wants to try? 

If you do, let me know.