Michael Santangelo is the Deputy Director of Collection Management at BookOps, the technical services collaboration between the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library. Since starting as a children’s materials selector in 2005 for Brooklyn, he has had various positions working with collection development and technical services. He is currently the co-chair of ALA’s Public Libraries Technical Services Interest Group and is on the LibraryReads Board of Directors.See below for his advice and ideas. I have reposted the beginning of his article with a link at the end to the full piece on the Booklist site.
RA ShowcaseMichael Santangelo on How Best to Use the Best
Michael Santangelo
The collection-building tools that are most useful and most needed can be the tools that most overwhelm. This is often the case with those end-of-the-year “best of” lists.
So Many Lists
There are the usual library focused lists: Booklist; Library Journal; Publisher’s Weekly; Kirkus; Foreword Reviews; and LibraryReads. There are the newspaper lists: The New York Times; Washington Post; Los Angeles Times; Wall Street Journal. The magazine lists: Entertainment Weekly; O, the Oprah Magazine; Esquire; The New Yorker; Vogue; Essence; The Advocate; Ms. Popular online publications have lists: Jezebel; The Root; The Daily Beast; NPR; Shelf Awareness. My own institution, the New York Public Library, has a much respected set of lists.
Lastly, there are the lists from RUSA: Notables, the Reading List, the CODES List, the Carnegies, and more, which are released after the Midwinter Meeting.Click here to read the full piece.
Popular lists tend to cross genres, but there are genre-specific lists, too. Most people read these for personal reasons—what should I read next, what should I give for the holidays, etc. We take them in as professional tools, to some extent using these lists to evaluate our job performance: did we miss anything this year? Did we buy enough?
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