All day today I am at ARRTCon in Naperville IL, an all day CE event for library workers who serve leisure readers. I am hosting a horror panel featuring Nick Medina, Ananda Lima (who book made the LJ Best Horror of 2024), John Everson, S.A. Barnes, and Gus Moreno-- all authors whose books Naperville Public Library already owns.
But I am also excited to share that Robin Bradford is doing the opening Keynote and it is a refresh of her portion of our popular Actively Anti-Racist Service to Leisure Readers program. We are also using today's presentation to officially announce our new partnership with ALA eLearning as we will be offering this class on their platform in February 2025.
Here are the details from their page with registration links:
Actively Anti-Racist Readers’ Advisory Services
A two-part webinar series taking place on Tuesday, February 18 and Thursday, February 20, 2025 at 2:30pm Eastern/1:30pm Central/12:30pm Mountain/11:30am Pacific.
Increasing the collection and circulation of titles written by underrepresented authors is not just a trend. Providing robust readers’ advisory service that values equity, diversity, and inclusion principles is essential to all library services.
Moving from being a neutral, well-meaning library where systemic racism is acknowledged to an actively anti-racist organization involves in-depth work, some of which can be challenging. In this program you will begin that work and learn tangible skills to help build enthusiasm for reading and strategies for diversifying your materials. You’ll learn how you can strengthen your RA service through thoughtful discussion of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging principles in all interactions with leisure readers and how to be a steward of the anti-racist mindset for your organization.
In this two-part series, collection development and readers’ advisory experts Robin Bradford and Becky Spratford will move your team from talk to action. You’ll learn how to help your entire organization craft an actionable plan to seamlessly incorporate the values of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging into your regular RA practices.
Through your participation in this program, you will learn:
- The distinction between not racist and anti-racist.
- How to identify more diverse titles to add to your collections.
- How to use anti-racist principles in your displays, book talks, and organization of titles.
- Promotion strategies for diverse titles and authors.
- Basic strategies to address politically motivated requests to remove books from your collection.
Robin Bradford has earned a BA and MA in English, an MS in Library Science, and a JD, but has found a home in building reader-focused, popular collections in public libraries. She was recognized as RWA’s 2016 Librarian of the Year and Emerald City Library Conference's Librarian of the Year in 2022. She is addicted to books and dedicated to helping others discover a love of reading. She has worked with authors to help get their titles into these collections and wrote the
Readers’ Advisory Guide to Romance Fiction to further help libraries with their romance collection. She also worked with libraries to push for equal treatment of genre fiction and worked with readers so that they can find their favorite authors on their library's shelves.
Becky Spratford (MLIS) is a Readers' Advisor in Illinois specializing in serving patrons ages 13 and up. She trains library staff all over the world on how to match books with readers through the local public library. She runs the critically acclaimed RA training blog
RA for All. She writes reviews for Booklist and a horror review column for Library Journal. Becky is a 24-year locally elected Library Trustee (still serving), a former Board member for the Reaching Across Illinois Library System, and currently on the Executive Board of the Illinois Library Association. Known for her work with horror readers, Becky is the author of
The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror, Third Edition (ALA Editions, 2021) and the forthcoming
Why I Love Horror and You Should Too (Saga Press, Sept 2025). She is on the Shirley Jackson Award Advisory Board and is a proud member of the Horror Writers Association, where she currently serves as the Association’s Secretary and Co-Chair of their Library Committee. You can follow Becky on Bluesky @raforall.bsky.social
This event will be hosted in Zoom. Automatic captions will be enabled for this event. This event will be recorded, and registrants will receive access to the recording within a day after the event ends.
If you have questions or requests regarding accessibility, contact us at ce@ala.org or at 312-280-5100.
Robin and I are very excited to offer this class through ALA eLearning. Not only do we have our books with ALA Editions (which comes into play with some new information below) but we also have their support to do whatever we want, however we want. They trust us to decide how people best learn and are giving us the space to do our thing. Also, the price is WAY more affordable than hiring us on your own-- $116 members, $129 non-members. It is 3 hours of class with 2 chances to ask both of us questions for that price. And as you will see below, this new version comes with BONUS material.
Speaking of here are a few details to share and clarify.
1. You can do this live or as a recording. For each talk, both of us will be there to answer questions live, but if you can't make the live, register anyway because you will have access to the recordings and....
2. This class will be the first time Robin and I are offering worksheets for participants to use after the class to not only keep their learning going, but to give you tangible exercises to bring back to your places of work. Anyone who signs up gets access to this 6 page workbook. The goal here is to beta test this content with all of you and then work toward a longer workbook to offer through ALA Editions in the future.
3. We will probably offer this class again in the Fall, so if you would rather do live and this timing isn't perfect, you could wait. But honestly, I would get in now. We are both refreshing our material and you get a first look at the worksheets. We will have contact info available if you have questions after the events which we will answer for free.
4. In the face of recent real world events, Robin and I are committed to making this training even stronger. We are not backing off on our strong language; in fact, is anything we are getting more vocal and will challenge you all to work harder. We met recently and let me tell you, we are ready to take everyone on. You don't want to miss this.
Now back to ARRTCon. Robin is first and then I am the last presentation before lunch. Full schedule is here.
[Breaking news: I will also be doing the LibraryReads presentation in the afternoon.]
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