This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.
Last night and then this morning, the American Library Association gave out their book and media awards. For the next couple of days I am going to be highlighting the ones that are most useful to you as you help readers.
Today I am going to start with just two, but there are many more here [and I will write about them tomorrow]. And the two I am highlighting are the most useful to you, not only because of the categories but also because the awards list themselves contain readalikes and annotations and more! Also backlist access is sublime. But I digress...
First up is the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. While you can click through to see the winners, what I love about this award is that Booklist is in charge of creating resources for the award. So if you click here you can find the shortlist, the longlist, and essays by all 6 of the finalists [3 fiction, 3 nonfiction] with further reading suggestions, both ones that pertain to their specific books and authors they enjoy in general. It is a great example of why awards lists are your best tool to help readers.
The Carnegie Medal site and the RUSA site also have easy backlist access to past winners with annotations, so you can build displays and make suggestions with ease.
Second, is the less prestigious, but in my opinion much more useful and fun, RUSA CODES Reading List awards. From the site:
Established in 2007 by the CODES section of RUSA, The Reading List seeks to highlight outstanding genre fiction that merit special attention by general adult readers and the librarians who work with them.
The Council, which consists of twelve librarians who are experts in readers’ advisory and collection development, selects one book from each of eight different categories. The eight genres currently included in the council’s considerations are adrenaline titles (suspense, thrillers, and action adventure), fantasy, historical fiction, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, and relationship fiction. However, the Council is constructed in such a way to be adaptable to new genres and changes in contemporary reading interest.
This year's winners are not up on the awards page website yet, but the announcement can be found here. As it says above there are 8 categories-- all genre based! Each category has a winner. That titles gets an annotation [which you can use to book talk the title to a patron] and 3 readalikes. There is also a short list of other titles as well.
This means that for each of the 8 categories you have 8 titles that you can trust for each genre. That is 64 genre titles at your fingertips just this year alone! And then, take into account that the Award homepage goes back to 2014, and, well, try not to explode with genre resource happiness.
Also, it is VERY important to note that these are genre titles picked NOT by genre specialists, rather by general adult services librarians. That's what I love about this list. It reflects what is most appealing to a wide audience, not just hard core fans of each genre.
Click through to look at the current genre award winners. And then go to the main Reading List web page for backlist access back to 2014. Just a quick perusal of these lists will give you a sense of where each genre is from a public library standpoint. I will be posting the specific, Horror information on the other blog.
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