RA for All: Don’t Forget About Reading Maps!

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Don’t Forget About Reading Maps!

It’s Spring Cleaning time on both blogs. Last week I cleaned up the resources page on the horror blog, and today, I went through an old but very useful page that is always available from every page here on the blog-- The Reading Maps archive. As you can see from this zoomed out picture of the right gutter, the Reading Maps link is lives under the heading of “Pages.”

Below I have reposted the entire page here as a blog post so as to remind all of you to check out these excellent resources. While at first glance, these appear to merely be “backlist gems,” I want to point out that there is are reading map to some very current titles such as, American Gods, George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, and The Walking Dead. Also, I just suggested Big Stone Gap to someone this very morning. Hey it was new to her. See, the backlist is always very helpful; it never lets us down. But if you have been a reader of this blog for any length of time, you already knew that.

On a personal note, going through this archive and checking the links was like a walk down memory lane. The vast majority of these were done by my students, many of whom have become colleagues over the years. Looking back on this, some of their first professional RA work, made me even more proud of them.

Here is the direct link to the Reading Maps page, but I have also posted it below with the live links.

If you or your library has some online reading maps that you want to share with a wider audience [so as to help more readers], contact me and I will add them to the page, with credit to you. The more reading maps we gather together, the more readers we can help. It’s all about the compound interest of many RA library workers banding together and sharing the load.

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Reading Maps

Please note that all reading maps are based on this article by Neal Wyatt in Library Journal (11/2006). From that article:

"Reading maps are web-based visual journeys through books that chart the myriad associations and themes of a title via other books, pictures, music, links to web sites, and additional material. Reading maps open up the world of the book for the reader by diagramming the internal life of the book, allowing readers to inhabit the text and its outward connections, and enabling readers to follow threads of interest that stem from any particular part of the work."

While this archive is no longer being added to, the links were last check in April, 2017.

The information, readalikes, and ideas these pages will generate are not bound by time, however. So get clicking.

Berwyn Public Library Reading Maps at the Browsers Corner: