I Am Presenting a Huddle at ALA Annual with Lila Denning on Better Book Displays

Next week, I will have a full post with my ALA schedule including my signing block of the Bram Stoker AwardⓇ winning WHY I LOVE HORROR at the S&S Booth on Saturday and the Library Insights Preconference Friday, but first, I wanted to let you know about my one presentation during ALA proper. It is a huddle with Lila Denning:

Connect Lounge Huddle: To facilitate discovery and circulation, how can libraries make their reading collection displays more engaging?

Sunday, June 28, 2026

11:00 AM - 11:20 AM CDT

Location: McCormick Place, ALA Connect Lounge, Hall F2 Lobby

The humble book display is often not used to its fullest as the discovery tool it can be. And we often forget how much it can drive increased circulation. But in a world where patrons use the library as both a physical and digital space, and with an understanding that patrons crave interactive experiences, discussion leaders Becky Spratford and Lila Denning will share their decades of experience as librarians and trainers to help huddle participants break down how to create displays that spark conversation, bring patrons of all ages into the library, and have them leave not only with a few good books to read but also a plan to return soon to get some more.

Moderated by Becky Spratford and Lila Denning

 Lila is an expert in passive RA and crafting book displays that help books fly off the shelves. Her secret-- not decorating them and just choosing good books. We are excited to invite anyone, those who serve all ages of readers, from any library type that has a popular reading collection (school, public, academic, even special) to join us as we share some expert tips and gather your ideas. 

I will be taking notes and will have a write up after ALA as well, so even if you cannot make it, I will get you the key information.

As Lila and I have been preparing for the huddle, she posted the slides for a short presentation on 5 Book Display Basics. We are going to use this as our starting point since we only have 20 minutes. (Although, her and I are willing to move the conversation somewhere else to keep it going if needed.)

Again, you now have this information via this post or her blog. Along with the notes I will post and the general reports I will write up from ALA in general, I am committed to making sure that those of you who cannot come to Chicago next week still get as much learning from me out of the event as possible.

Wuthering Heights and the Opportunity You CANNOT Miss (with help from me to get you started)

Whether you personally love it or hate it, the Wuthering Heights movie is getting people who don't normally talk about books, talking about books. And in fact, it is more than just talking about books, people are debating and discussing a book (and not just the adaptation) in spaces where you don't always see book conversation.

In other words, book discussions of this book are the hot topic of the moment in a wide audience. And here's where we need to pay attention, this attention is making book discussions in general a popular topic as well.

This recent article from PW talks about this phenomenon.

Now in relation to all of us, pay attention to what I am about to say...We need to seize this moment.

Again, I do not care what you think of the movie or of the motives as to who is reading this book. What matters is that people want to read more classics because of this movie. And they want to talk about them. And once they start reading one classic, they will look to others (the PW article mentions that as well). And who has more classics....us!

Once readers start enjoying the classics, they will be drawn to retellings by today's authors. And that leads to reading books that are readalikes for said classics, and before you know it, these readers start a regular book habit.

I want to remind you of this study which I posted about here where they found that people are trying to make a habit of reading in large numbers. It is already happening. The Wuthering Heights viral moment we are in was primed to happen already. This is not surprising to me, nor should it be to you if you follow RA for All. This is something we have been building to. You can see more about this in my 2025 Year in Review program as well (see my predictions for 2026).

And when reading becomes a habit, it gets too expensive to feed it all the books they want to read, leading people to use the library to borrow the books they have pre-paid for with their taxes.

Look, not everyone who is obsessed with this viral Wuthering Heights moment will become a library user, but you don't need everyone. You need a small fraction. But you have to do something. You cannot just wait for them to come on their own.

I cannot stress enough how important it is for you to take advantage of this moment. But how?

Well, first things first, throw together a quick Wuthering Heights book discussion. Make it in person, offer a zoom option, and run a slow book club through social media. Do not let other places (social media influencers, bars, book stores, etc...) take this away from us. Promote the book discussions you already offer as well.

If this option viable for your library (I get it, especially if you are small and/or understaffed). Offer a program where people who love the movie or the book can come to gather and talk to each other. Offer food. Moderate conversations. Steer it toward readalike options. Have carts of books in the room for them to browse. And feel people out about starting a book club.

You should also throw up a quick classics book display. You can use this recent post from Goodreads to help you expand your definition of classic. Again, you get people in to read more classics and they will come back for other books. We are playing the long game at the Library. You come for 1 book, you like it, you return it and grab another. Then you come back and maybe grab 2. And every time you come, you grad another book. It becomes an affordable and enjoyable habit that becomes part of your regular routine. And before you know it, you have a regular patron. Now if they tell a friend it repeats. There is compound interest of new users to be be built off of this moment. Again, DO NOT MISS OUT.

My final advice is something I post about constantly. Use the Wuthering Heights buzz to make a conversation starter to display. What are your questions to here in order to build a useful display? I would go with a few and see which ones capture your patrons.

I would begin with the most specific. What other classics would you love to see remade into a film ala Wuthering Heights?

But you can expand it out to be about people's favorite books to movies. I would save this for post-Oscars and the release of Project Hail Mary. (March 20).

See if people reply. You should ask in the building, with a book mark in every book on the holds shelf, and in your online spaces. Click here to read more about how to make this happen. 

To end this post, I know what I am saying can be a bit overwhelming to many of you. I understand. But to be clear, I do NOT want you to do all of these things. I want to offer as many examples as possible for how you can seize this moment-- when a book (and not just its movie adaptation) is being discussed across many spaces (especially ones that are not only about books). Maybe none of the things I offer work for you. And that is fine. But I hope you have been inspired to do something.

Again, Project Hail Mary is right around the corner. And that book is already a viral and critical fav. We can build from Brontë to Weir-- a statement I could not have predicted but an opportunity not to miss.

Just do something. That is all I am asking. Reel those readers in to the library, where they will become part of your reader community.

Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: Awards for Titles You May Have Missed Edition

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.

I spend a lot of time promoting awards lists as a way to stay up to date on major genres, to use them for collection development, displays, and suggestions, but there is another reason why some of these awards lists are vital to our work-- Discovery-- and that is showcased with the lists I have today.

Both awards are the perfect example of why awards lists are vital to our work. These are book you might have missed without their nominations.

First up, the Philip K. Dick Award. From the Locus Magazine announcement:

The award is presented annually to a distinguished work of science fiction originally published in paperback form in the United States. The award is sponsored by the Philip K. Dick Trust and the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, and the ceremony is sponsored by the Northwest Science Fiction Society.

This year’s judges are Jim Aikin (chair), Kim Antieau, J.D. Goff, Abbey Mei Otis, and Lisa Swanstrom.

The winner and any special citations will be announced April 3, 2026 at Norwescon 48, to be held April 2-5, 2026 in SeaTac WA.

The nominees this year are:

• Sunward, William Alexander (Saga)
• Outlaw Planet, M.R. Carey (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
• Casual, Koji A. Dae (Tenebrous)
• The Immeasurable Heaven, Caspar Geon (Solaris UK)
• Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, Thomas Ha (Undertow)
• Scales, Christopher Hinz (Angry Robot UK)
• City of All Seasons, Oliver K. Langmead & Aliya Whiteley (Titan)

This award is genre (SF) and for paperback originals. The paperback original part is key for libraries as many prioritize buying hardcover do to it standing up to more checkouts. But these titles are worth an add to your collection as they are deemed the best of the best. Each of these titles is a perfect addition to all public library collections.

Thankfully, Locus also makes it easy with the awards database for you to find all the past nominees and winners of this award right here.

Next up is the most prestigious award for short story collections, The Story Prize:

The Story Prize, now in its 22nd year, is pleased to honor as its finalists three outstanding short story collections chosen from 114 submissions representing 72 different publishers or imprints:
 

Other Worlds by André Alexis (FSG Originals)

Atavists by Lydia Millet (W.W. Norton & Company)

Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Library patrons read short stories at a higher rate than the general public. They also appreciate finding new authors through their stories and get very excited when they also have novels to explore.

Speaking of that, the backlist of nominees and winners is also a great place to find excellent story collections to add to your collections along with the three above. 

You can access the backlist by year through a drop down menu entitled "Winners" from the main page.

Take a look at these 2 awards to help you find titles you may have missed. Order them, use the backlist from the last few years to order a few more, and promote them with displays so readers can find them. 

Lesser known awards in general make for eye catching displays. Why? Because you are highlighting great reads that your users would never know about without your help. And that is how we show them our worth and expertise. You will make a lot of readers very happy, but only if you get those books out in front  of them.

Story Prize and Philip K Dick Award displays are a great idea anytime of year and with the backlist options so easily accessible, you can keep them full as the books get checked out.

U.S. Book Show Recap

Earlier this week, Publisher's Weekly presented the US Book Show in NYC. From the FAQ page for the event: 

In its fifth year, the U.S. Book show is an in-person conference for publishing professionals. The conference will feature rich panels and discussions around issues impacting the industry. By design, there will be plenty of time to network during the day with an end-of-day networking reception planned.

Click here to see the full schedule of the topics explored and the speakers included.

PW had two detailed reports on the show:

• U.S. Book Show 2025: The State of Book Businesses Past, Present, and Future
• U.S. Book Show 2025: AI Looms Large Across Publishing Sectors

Now why I am posting about this event that already happened? Well, as we are all about to have the American Library Association conference later this month, I think it is important to be aware of what our cohorts in the publishing world are talking about at their meetings. We overlap in many important ways, and seeing their concerns and reading reports on what they discussed, only helps us to understand their side of our shared equation.

There is a lot of useful information for those of us who serve readers at the library in those reports. It is like a crash course in the biggest issues in book publishing right now.

Take a moment at the end of your week to catch up on the issues that were discussed at the U.S. Book Show. This is an easy opportunity to see things from the publisher side.

Back Monday to talk about all of those "Best of the year so far" lists.

Be a Gate Opener: Using the The Library of Congress' National Book Festival Highlights Videos To Fight for More Patron Friendly Cataloging

The Library of Congress has been holding the National Book Festival for 25 years and they are celebrating with resources for you. Well to be fair, they always have resources for free because there are our National Book Festival and like our National Museums in DC, it is free.

This year's event is coming in September and on the LOC Blog, they started their promotion by releasing videos from EVERY YEAR in the past.

Here is the intro from that post:

The Library of Congress National Book Festival will celebrate its 25th year on September 6, 2025. For this year’s festival information, visit the 2025 National Book Festival website.

To honor the occasion, we are taking the 24 weeks leading up to this year’s festival at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center to highlight two videos each week from past National Book Festivals, from the festival’s first year in 2001 to 2024. Each week, we’ll highlight a past festival year with a video from an adult writer and one from a children’s writer. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Check out videos from the first 2001 festival here.

The videos they are sharing in this post are from George RR Martin and Meg Cabot.

We are always looking for author content to share with our patrons. Ways for them to connect with their favorites. Well, this is a great easy and FREE way to do that. Add these videos to your websites and socials. But today I want to focus on an even better spot to link these videos of conversations with some of our most popular authors-- YOUR CATALOG.

We do not leverage the power of the link in our catalogs. I know there is resistance in some larger systems, but this resistance has NO MERIT. Yes, even when the department in charge gives you a very good reason, I am telling you--- THEY ARE WRONG.

The number of times I have been told by those above me, especially in tech services, that something I want to do that helps my readers, that puts them first, well, it's a lot. I have said more times that one on this blog and to people in person-- the library rules you claim are intractable are not. They are arbitrary rules that we have made about how books are organized. They are not a law and changing them-- even in large shared systems -- will not take the entire library cataloging system down. And most importantly, there is no library jail. 

Many of our rules also work against our readers and their library experience. Many of our rules are actually meant to keep books on the shelf rather than get them into the hand of our readers. And the fact that people get so mad when you demand they allow you to add things that engage readers and connect them to your collections to your catalog, shows their true colors. They would rather everything be neatly organized on the shelf than in the hands of a reader.

Let's take an example from the real world. I started talking about shelving books in series order NOT alpha order back in 2018. As I argued then, no one reads a series in alpha order, so why do we insist on shelving them that way. (I know why but again, it is a dumb librarian preference and is the opposite of getting books into readers hands more easily).

At the time, very few libraries did this and MANY people told me to be quiet and stop instigating, that it could not be done. Well, guess what? It could. And these days MANY libraries shelve their books in series order. What did it take? It was not some huge software upgrade. It was simply those of us serving readers working with our catalogers to improve discovery and come up with a solution.

Never take NO for an answer when your goal is to put the reader and their experiences first.

So, the people who tell you that you cannot add local information to your OPACs are also wrong. I have talked to people at a few large consortia and while they agreed that the first instinct is to say no, they are 100% ways to add reader focused info like links to author interviews or to locally made readalike lists and more.

Ask why they are saying no. Is it because you will ruin the record or make it messy? That reason is not valid. Fields can be created in all OPACs for links to be added. Is it because they don't want to go back and worry about fixing dead links? Again, not valid. Records need to one edited all of the time. Arguing to not use the technological advantages of an OPAC to engage with your readers because some time in the future the link will be bad is not valid. Here is your counter-- that is like saying we should not add any new books because one day they will be weeded.

Yes it is that simple. 

I am using this post today as the start of a new series I am calling "Be a Gate Opener." I will have a longer post describing what I mean by the term "Gate Opener" soon, but today I am beginning the conversation with you so that you can start the conversation at your library. The ultimate goal is to create a new program on this topic as well. But baby steps. Start with these excellent, free videos that we, as citizens of this country, own so they can be shared without copyright worries.

Click here for more information any time of the year via the homepage for the National Book Festival. But use this as a great chance to fight for adding more discovery power to your OPAC.

Using Awards Lists As A RA Tool: Wonderland Book Award and In Praise of the Power of Smaller Awards

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.  

When I do these awards lists posts, I often focus on bigger awards, but I don't want you to forget the smaller awards, those that honor up and coming writers. 

Today I want to focus on the Wonderland Book Award. These awards are given out each year at BizarroCon to honor books in the Bizarro genre. But what is Bizarro? Well those that run the con have an amazing website with an extensive "About" page. From that page:

WHAT IS BIZARRO?

1. Bizarro, simply put, is the genre of the weird.
2. Bizarro is literature’s equivalent to the cult section at the video store.
3. Like cult movies, Bizarro is sometimes surreal, sometimes avant-garde, sometimes goofy, sometimes bloody, sometimes borderline pornographic, and almost always completely out there.
4. Bizarro strives not only to be strange, but fascinating, thought-provoking, and, above all, fun to read.
5. Bizarro often contains a certain cartoon logic that, when applied to the real world, creates an unstable universe where the bizarre becomes the norm and absurdities are made flesh.
6. Bizarro was created by a group of small press publishers in response to the increasing demand for (good) weird fiction and the increasing number of authors who specialize in it.
7. Bizarro is like:
   • Franz Kafka meets John Waters
   • Dr. Suess of the post-apocalypse
   • Takashi Miike meets William S. Burroughs
   • Alice in Wonderland for adults
   • Japanese animation directed by David Lynch

Even though the Bizarros are underground cult outsiders they still have gained an incredible amount of respect in the publishing industry, having been praised by the likes of Chuck Palahniuk, Christopher Moore, William Gibson, Jonathan Lethem, Piers Anthony, Cory Doctorow, Poppy Z. Brite, Michael Moorcock, and Charles de Lint, to name a few, as well as the publications Asimov’s Science-fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-fiction, Fangoria, Cemetery Dance, Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Details Magazine, Gothic Magazine, and The Face, among many others. They have also been finalists for the Philip K Dick Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Rhysling Award, the Wonderland Book Award, and the Pushcart Prize.

Bizarro isn’t just weird fiction, it is DAMN GOOD weird fiction. And it grows exponentially every single day, so, love it or hate it, you’ll be seeing a lot more of it in the years to come.

The page goes on to list a starter pack of titles. This is a great genre because it crosses over with so many popular genres. And MOST IMPORTANTLY, there are some big name people who have won their annual award. Take a look at this list of all past winners over on Goodreads. One of the authors who has been nominated for and won this award before is Gabino Iglesias, now a mainstream, critically acclaimed author who is ending up on numerous 2022 bests lists for The Devil Takes You Home, his Big 5 debut. 

This is a more niche award that clearly has quite a track record as you can see from their about page and past winners.

I happen to personally know this year's novel winner as he is a library worker here in Chicagoland and a member of the Chicagoland Chapter of the Horror Writers Association with me-- Michael Allen Rose-- who won for Jurassichrist (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing).

More about the author: 

Michael has been involved with the bizarro community for over a decade. His first book, "Party Wolves In My Skull," was published by Eraserhead Press in 2011 as part of their "New Bizarro Author Series," a program meant to introduce new authors of the weird to a larger audience and give them their first professional book publication experience. Since then, he has worked with a number of small presses in bizarro and adjacent genres, most notably horror and humor, and had six more book published in addition to appearances in several anthologies and publications. He has hosted the "Ultimate Bizarro Showdown" event in Portland Oregon for over half a decade, which is the entertainment portion of the Wonderland Awards Ceremony at Bizarro Con. He also makes music under the name Flood Damage, and enjoys good tea and cats. You can find out more about him and his work at www.michaelallenrose.com

I asked Michael to share his thoughts about his book with all of you, to give it a proper introduction by the man who wrote it, but also as a library worker himself, as he understands all of us and our needs as well. Here is Michael Allen Rose on his award winning novel:

"Jurassichrist is the ostensibly story of the second coming of Jesus. Since he's a deity, however, and time and space don't really apply to him, he ends up missing entirely and landing in the Jurassic period, fighting dinosaurs. He discovers that dinosaurs are nothing like what we assume they were, fostering bizarre civilizations and advanced technology, but they are in danger from the burrowing creatures called mammals that have somehow been gifted as-seen-on-tv products from the far-flung future they could not possibly access. J.C. uncovers a cosmic conspiracy to put mammals on the top of the evolutionary ladder, and has to find his way back to the heavens to figure out who or what messed up the plan of creation, and might be bringing about a new apocalypse.

Nikolas P. Robinson actually summed up the plot extremely well in his review here:

https://meltdownmessiah.com/2021/04/13/jurassichrist-by-michael-allen-rose/"

I highly recommend you add this book to your collection. It was published by one of my trusted independent horror publishers, Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing. You can access my full list of trusted Horror small presses here. 

You should also consider making a display of past award winners and nominees. This link will give you access to all prelim and final ballot titles to build a list or display. As you could see from the information I posted above, this is a genre that will attract a lot of readers. Why not highlight it by showcasing those who have been considered among the very best in the Bizarro community.

One final note. Michael Allen Rose has a very cool title dropping later this week. It will be of high interest and the entire book and its release is super fun.

I asked him to share it with you. It is a graphic novel entitled, The Last Five Minutes of the Human Race. You can see the record for it on Fantastic Fiction here. 

It is releasing 5 minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve-- 12/31/22. Michael describes it as " A horror book, an ABC primer for adults about all of the existential terror that comes from witnessing the last 5 minutes of the human race in 27 entries (26 letters and an ampersand).

I for one and super excited for this one.

Back tomorrow with my personal end of the year Best List and then off until 1/9. More then.

Think Like A Reader: Book Discovery in Socially Distant Times via Book Riot

We are all looking for ways to connect with our patrons, to help them discover their next read despite our socially distant times. Book Riot had a great post this week, directed at readers, listing 10 Ways they can find books even though they really can't browse physical shelves right now.

Don't worry, the library is one of the 10 options.

Click here to read the article, "How to Find Books to Read: 10 Ways."

After reading it, I have two ways you can use the information.

First, and this one is obvious, take the ideas from the 9 places that aren't libraries and use them to help you find new titles or get ideas on how to present them to your readers.

And second, and this one is more important, look at how Book Riot writes their posts. Their authors address their audience reader to reader. The content creators think like the readers they are, they speak to the readers who clicks they are seeking. This is not a criticism. This is me saying we need to be more like them. 

Book Riot writes in a conversational tone. They are making friends with the reader. We write in a formal style or as if we know better and talk down to our audience. We need to be more about connecting with our patrons as the readers we all are, not about holding ourselves above them.

Read the article and learn from the content and how it delivers it.

Writers to Watch via PW and General Comments and Ideas Around "Debuts"

I am a big fan of debut authors. I love reading books by new voices almost as much as I love a new title by my favorites. I love debuts so much I am the jury chair for "First Novel" for a major award [and have been chair or on the jury for many years]. 

This week PW published  "Writers to Watch Spring 2021." Click here or on the image below to read about these authors and their upcoming titles. They seem great and I am already planning on which to request.

Consider adding them to your collections, yes, but also consider making a display [in person and/or online] of debuts. Both new voices as one display, but another fun idea I always enjoy, is making lists and displays of super famous author's first novels. 

Take your most popular authors and make a display of their first books. Even James Patterson's first book is a gem-- he won the Edgar for best first novel for that one.

Start with some of the authors who appeared on all the best lists. [Here's a link to LJ's Best Books 2020 portal to get you started.] I have done this before and patrons love it. It's like you unburied a treasure for them.

I have also had great luck using debut novels in book club, especially if the author is super popular now and their debut was more than 5 years ago. The chance that most participants have read something by a popular author is high and their previous experience with that writer, enhances the discussion.

So let's start with the up and comers of 2021, but while we wait for those books, let's look back on debuts from the past.

Click here or on the image to meet the authors and read about their upcoming books.

Curbside Patrons And Discovery

I am working on my annual Year in Review presentation where I recap the year that was in RA Service and Adult Leisure Reading. That presentation is on January 27th. Details are here.

One of the big problems in 2020 [among many] was rethinking book discovery in a social distant environment. I have an entire slide on this issue and have offered suggestions throughout the year on this blog. However, as I was looking through past posts, I realized there was something I have been saying in presentations but never posted about. Today is about rectifying that.

When you provide curbside delivery of requested items, you need to think about more than the transaction in front of you. Think about their next visit. Think about helping them find something else to put on hold. Think about promoting more titles and services. Think about their overall library experience. Or as I like to put it more succinctly, think of your curbside patrons as a captive audience!

Look passive RA is the idea that you are providing avenues for discovery and reading options without the patron engaging you directly. Think displays, lists, shelf talkers, etc.... In the before times, when our buildings were open, we all had tried and true ways to do this; many things we did without thinking because they were working.

And then....everything changed.

Obviously, early in the pandemic our concerns were very immediately-- how to increase our access to digital materials, how to keep providing services, how to be safe. But once people got curbside going and figured out their quarantine procedures, a few started upping their game when it came to passive RA.

The most common of these has been the "surprise bag." Many libraries are doing this for adults and children. The patron fills out a basic RA preferences form and the staff grab a bag full of books. With fines obliterated by most libraries because of the pandemic [temporarily, although I will have a post on that issue later this week], this was easy to do and lots of patrons loved it. Also, people can't browse in person, so this allows them to browse at home. It's been great way for libraries to boost circ stats during closures, yes, but it is also recreating a bit of the fun and serendipity of a trip to the library for leisure readers, a way to recapture a bit of joy of the in person experience from a safe distance.

But here's the real talk. Your curbside patrons are not only your most committed and engaged users but they are also A CAPTIVE AUDIENCE. We should be focusing our passive RA, heck, all of our promotion, on them.  Here are some very easy to implement actions you can use to engage your curbside patrons. Some are very simple, others a bit more complicated, but all can be done easily as long as the entire staff is working together:

• Add a list to every package. You can have general list of new materials for the interest areas covered by the books in the package or genre specific. Or just general lists of books that are on display in the building. Just something to let them know of other titles. 
• Make these lists in a bookmark format and have a place where people can check any titles they want placed on hold. They can write in their info so you can place the holds for them when they return their curbside items.
• Place a comment card in each book. Make an index card size form asking patrons to review the book. You can mass produce these to be easily stuck into the book. Just ask for name, card number, a star rating [give them stars to fill in] and 2 sentences about what they thought. If only 1% of your curbside people return these, you have enough titles to make a "Patrons Recommend" list online and a physical display in the building. Also, the practical information you get back about helping that specific reader is invaluable. If they include their card number you can put books on hold for them. [I would add a check box to say they are okay with that.]
• Make fun conversation starter cards. Create a stock of various questions printed on quarter sheets of paper and leave room for answers. Crowdsource the entire staff to come up with fun, open ended questions. The team building opportunity alone on this endeavor is worth the work, but then you can also use the answers to create more resources to help others. You can even use the conversation starter prompt as the title of a future list or display. Ideas to get you started: 
• What is your favorite type of book?
• What is your least favorite type of book?
• What book do you recommend to everyone you know?
• If you had to start your personal library from scratch, what is the first book you would buy?
• What is your go-to bookish gift?
• Where do you get book recommendations for yourself [other than the library]?
• If you could only read 5 books ever again, which 5 would you choose?
• Promote your other services, especially virtual programming and book discussion meeting. If you have an email service to let people know that their curbside is in, these virtual events are best shared in that format as links can be included. 
• And speaking of emails/texts to alert patrons that their curbside is in, you can also use that to share any of the items listed above.

There are three morals here. The first is the one I have been repeating: take advantage of the captive audience of curbside patrons and use it to up your RA game. The second is slightly more subtle and more about your staff. Curbside is hard on the staff running the service. As a Trustee I have been kept in the loop about the entire process. Our frontline staff are working very hard to sort, quarantine, pull, and fill orders. Like a lot of you, they are doing this while we are also opened for limited in person library service.

Now, to ask them to also provide lists and conversation starters is too much. These are activities the rest of the staff can work on, both creating and compiling. This will help bring the staff together around serving patrons and help us all to make curbside more fun and personalized, something we are all feel is lacking now that this socially distant service has dragged on.

And third, you need to understand that we are going to have to keep doing this forever now. Even without a pandemic, people are now used to curbside and are not going to let you shelve it [pun intended]. If you could do it during a health emergency, you can do it all the time-- so they will think. Obviously it gets much harder if we are at full capacity, but I would argue that it helps your RA service and circulation numbers to keep curbside going, especially if you are checking out those surprise bags which up the circ stats from 1-2 books per visit to 4-5.

Right now we all need more chances to reconnect with each other in a way that is more meaningful than just the transaction itseld, and a captive audience is a great way to recapture some of what we have lost.

If you already do some of these [or other] passive RA services through curbside and want to share your experiences with my readers, let me know.

And see some of you at my presentation on the 27th. Slides will be available for everyone that day. 

Are You Ready For Some.....Reading with the Andrew Luck Book Club

The NFL Season opens tonight and I will be in a seat at Soldier Field for the Bears-Packers game with my Father, Son, and Husband. No matter how you feel about the NFL, it is hard to argue against the fact that it brings people together.

Not only will my son get to be with his Dad and Grandfather for the night but my husband, son, and I are all in a fantasy football league together with old college friends. Relationships that persist over 25 years because of a silly game. [Side note, son was added last year when someone dropped out and he then went on to kick all of our butts.]

Many NFL players, past and present, use their affiliation with the league and their knowledge that it incites strong feelings in the fans to promote their personal causes. We see players like JJ Watt and former Bears' player Charles Tillman, [among countless others] do great things with their athletic celebrity.

But some, like the recently retired Andrew Luck, use their celebrity to promote BOOKS! And even though Luck isn't playing this season, his book club is still going. And what better way than today to remind people of it.

The Andrew Luck Book Club picks a kid book and an adult book every month, or as they call them Rookie and Veteran reads. The books are not linked, but what I love about the program is that it gets the entire family reading a book a month. The parents and kids can use their excitement about football to finds a book to read.

I also love the fact that it has been going on for a while now, so you can use this backlist to make a display or recommenced reading list. Seriously, lots of libraries will put up literal football themed displays this week, why not put up a football player inspired list to stand out? Also, these are titles most libraries already have and are probably on the shelf. Let's get those backlist titles off the shelf and into readers' hands.

There is also an interactive social media aspect to this book club which makes it fun for families or even the library to follow along.

And last,  but definitely not least, because it is about titles for kids and adults, this is a great opportunity for Youth and Adult departments to work together. [See Becky's Basic Rules of RA Service, Rule #8].

This is a book club that will appeal to the entire family-- all ages and genders. It is also a wonderful book discovery tool for patrons who may not know where to begin.

Again, not matter how you feel about the NFL, Andrew Luck is trying to help us help readers, and I for one am willing to take advantage of his celebrity for my purposes.

Click here for all of the details on the book club, how to participate, and for the list of past books.

Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: Lambda Literary Awards

As I have mentioned many times [but first here], awards lists are among my favorite RA tools. Of the four ways I outline on how you should rethink your use of awards lists as a tool to actively assist readers, my two favorite, the two I use regularly to help readers, are "Collection Development" and "Resources."

Today I want to talk about those two uses for ANY awards list but I will use the announcement of the most recent Lambda Literary Award Winners as the frame for this post.

Let's start with Resources. In general the webpage for any group giving an award is the BEST PLACE to go for information on that genre, format or special reading area.

So let's delve into this further with Lambda Literary. I love their mission statement because it is simple, to the point, and can work for many reading experiences:

Click here to see the full page

This is also the point where I remind all of you that LGBTQ [or African American, or Asian America, or whatever] is NOT a genre. That is one of biggest pet peeves with helping library workers improve. I have been preaching this since 2004 when I started teaching the RA course. I made my students read from an under represented group and called it "Special Reading Interests." You would never say all white people books are one genre OR all female authors are the same genre. Of course not. So don't do this. It's just dumb.

LGBTQ framed titles encompass every genre and that is the first point I want to make about using the Lambda Literary homepage as the best resource for information about literature with a LGBTQ frame. Just a quick click on the Reviews tab reveals that they have information about every type of book you can think of. But their resources go beyond giving you reviews of books worth your time.

Lambda Literary has their history [which is a great history of LGBTQ since the late 80s in and of itself], interviews, features [including news and opinion pieces], a curated list of literary links separated into categories, and much more. The point is everything you need to know about the world of LGBTQ literature is here or there is a link that will take you where you need to go.

One of my most important training tips is that you should make an effort to stay in genre shape all year long. Yes, I know I said LGBTQ is not a genre, but this genre training program works for special reading interest area too; in fact, I included special reading interests as one of my categories in my personal genre a day plan, and where I worked LGBTQ was one of my most popular special reading interest areas.

Just spending an hour or two, 2-3 times a year looking at  resources, lists, news, trends, and award winners for any genre or reading interests area, like LGBTQ, keeps you in fighting shape. If you cannot help a reader off the top of your head, your work will at least have prepared you on where to go to find the best book. For LGBTQ I always begin lambdaliterary.org.

Which leads us to Collection Development. One of the best ways to keep up with a reading area where you are less familiar is to look at what the people who are most involved with that topic think is the best. This is how you can identify the bare minimum you should have in your collections. But don’t just consider adding or suggesting the winners only. Every book that makes the long list, from this year and past years, if something you can suggest with confidence. Head on over to Goodreads to learn more from people who gave it 5 stars or 1 stars- then you can see the things people love about the book and hate all in one place.

In our example we have the Lammys, which were given out last night. Here are all of the winners, including one of my favorite reads of last year, Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn- which by the way is a great choice for any book club made up of any people who have ever been on a vacation at any resort, ever- whether they are specifically looking for a Lesbian read or not.

But here is the list of every book on the long list for this year- in over 20 categories! And here is the very easy to use index of every list of winners and finalists for the 28 previous years of this award.

These lists are a great place to start as you assess your LGBTQ holdings. But even if you do not do any collection development with your job, they are also an excellent place to go to for suggestions if you have a patron who enjoys “Gay Mysteries” and you are not sure where to even begin [hint, begin here.]

You can do this for any award, but the point is, you need to use the experts to keep you informed AND to feed you the best suggestions. If you know where the experts live, you can find your readers the perfect book with only a few clicks.

Congrats to all the 2017 Lammy winners and nominees. And if you haven’t read any of the books on this list, give one a try. There is literally a book for every reader on the Lammy lists- from literature to nonfiction, to poetry, to mysteries, romance and SF/F/Horror.

Now get out there and find some awards lists to use as a RA tool.

Great Idea for Homebound Service Book Discovery Problems

Yesterday I spent a wonderful day with the library workers who provide RA Service to adults from throughout the Spartanburg County [SC] Public Library system. You can click here for the details.

As I mentioned in that post, we had carved out time for the group to bring up specific challenges they are having in their system. From that conversation, I got the fodder for at least 3 upcoming blog posts, starting with today.

One of the women at the training [we will call her E for the purposes of this post] worked with the homebound program, something I have also done in my career. I have much to say about the joys of serving the homebound, but E brought up one of the biggest frustrations too:

Too often, the elderly homebound do not have a book discovery tool beyond us, the library workers who serve them.

Even in this day and age, many of them do not have reliable internet access, and, even when they do, they are not very good on using their time online to search for books they might enjoy. Many elderly homebound patrons, E's included, can barely use the Internet [if they even have it] to send emails.

E does the standard and obvious things to help her homebound patrons identify books, including:

• Conducting the RA Conversation with the patron every time she visits to gather what was liked and disliked about the titles she delivered, which informs future choices.
• Bringing lists of upcoming titles so the patrons can check off ones they want.
• Providing other lists created by the library.
• Using what she knows about the patrons to find new reads for them.

But what E is missing from her RA interactions is a way for her to allow her homebound to "browse" a larger collection. Yes she is having great success providing them with titles, but it is all based on what she chooses for them in the first place. She knows there are many more books out there that each of her patrons would enjoy if only they had a way to know what was available on a larger scale.

We talked about getting lists and help from all of the branches and even creating a way for more library workers throughout the system to suggest titles, but I had an idea I think would work very well for anyone serving any homebound patron, anywhere.

Bring old issues of Booklist along with the books each time.

Why Booklist, well a few reasons [besides the fact that I write for them]:

1.  The reviews are all positive. Booklist's mission is to only include books that should be considered for your collection. This is key to why it would work as a book discovery tool for your homebound patrons. You won't waste their time with "bad" choices. All reviews are written to the book's best reader. Homebound patrons can decide if they want to read a specific title or not, but taken as a whole, the reviews are all good, solid choices.
2. Each issue is a Spotlight issue, meaning it focuses on a genre or topic [or 2]. This means you can start by giving your homebound patron the issue about their favorite genre.
3. You have the backlist paper copies of the magazine hanging around your library already. No one is reading them. Grab some issues from 1-2 years ago and give them to the patron. Tell him or her they can mark the ones he or she is most interested in. Who care if they mark up the magazine? What are we saving them for? This is a solid reason to use them.

Our patrons who are able enough to visit us can browse the entire collection, talk to multiple staff members. and see our varied displays to enhance their own book discovery. And those who have internet or visit us to get help navigating the Internet can be opened up to a wide range of more resources to find good reads.

The serendipity of finding the perfect title by accident, through random browsing brings feelings of such great joy. It also introduces readers up to books they might never have found any other way. Our homebound patrons are missing that piece of the service puzzle.

Bringing them old copies of Booklist, can recreate that feeling and bring some of the joy from the in-person visit back to the library experience for homebound patrons AND help library workers serve these patrons even better. 

There are plenty of great reads out there, waiting to be discovered. Get to it.