Practice Makes Perfect: Reminder to Check Out #AskALibrarian

Hey it's Thursday and I want to remind you that every Thursday over on Twitter you can practice your RA skills with #AskALibrarian. Remember, my 10th Rule of Basic RA Service is PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE! And this is one of the best ways you can practice. It is free, accessible to all, and fun.

Below, I have re-posted from the blog back in December of 2015 when #AskALibrarian first began.

While participating in the live, weekly event is great, the easiest way to practice at any time is to lurk on the hashtag. And you do NOT need a Twitter account to lurk. Just click here and you can see every and any question and the answers.

Yes, you cannot reply without a login, but much of the learning happens by simply seeing real readers ask questions so you can (1) know what people are interested in reading about in real time, (2) see what other library professionals are suggesting for those questions, (3) practice looking for different answers yourself, and (4) learn about titles you may not have hear about before. 

That's a lot of practice. And you can do it live every Thursday from 12-1 eastern or anytime here. 

You have no excuse not to practice. Oh, and don't think you are too good to not need practice. I may not get to the live event often [Thursdays are bad for me in general], but I check the hashtag at least once a week, and I am the one training all of you. If it is good enough for me, it is good enough for you.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2015

#AskaLibrarian: New Interactive RA Tool for Staff and Patrons

There are a lot of Twitter chats that are relevant to library workers who help leisure readers, but there is a fairly new one that I think stands out as one of the best already. #AskaLibrarian.


Details:

Librarians are always interested in sharing book recommendations, and now they have a new tool. Each Thursday from noon to 1 p.m. EST, they can turn to #AskaLibrarian, a twitter initiative launched by Penguin Random House and Read It Forward, a reader community program sponsored by Crown Publishing Group’s Community Development department.

Below is the full text of the article describing what this Twitter chat is trying to do. [Here is the link to the original.] 

Please try to participate either with questions or answers.  Thursdays are often a meeting day for me, so I can’t be a part of it every week, but I have already participated once and loved the experience.  This past Thursday, I was booked all day, but still went back to use the hashtag, many hours later, to see what I missed.

When I did participate I loved two things about the chat:

1. The content itself was very useful. People were asking questions and throwing out titles like crazy.  And because of the format and range of people following, the results were amazingly varied and usable right away.  I loved the mix of old and new titles. Often there is a lot of useless information to filter out in any of these social media chats, but not so much here.
2. This chat is moderated very well. The moderators are clearly stepping in and keeping control. From making sure people don’t just reply to the “asker,” to resending requests that may have been lost in the shuffle, to keeping the conversation focused on its main mission, the moderators are working hard to make sure the chat itself is as positive and fruitful an experience as possible.

It has mostly been library and publishing people so far. The next push is to get patrons and consumers involved.  I will be interested to see how that goes, but I for one am happy with #AskaLibrarian already. It is worth your time to at least take a look.

 ______________________________________________

#AskaLibrarian Gives Librarians and Readers a New Tool

Librarians are always interested in sharing book recommendations, and now they have a new tool. Each Thursday from noon to 1 p.m. EST, they can turn to #AskaLibrarian, a twitter initiative launched by Penguin Random House and Read It Forward, a reader community program sponsored by Crown Publishing Group’s Community Development department.

The initiative brings together librarians, library patrons, other consumers, library marketing representatives, and publishers in a huge tweet swap on good books and readalikes. The hashtag facilitates searches by anyone who can’t jump in at the appointed hour.

Launched on November 11, #AskaLibrarian attracted over 200 contributors and over 600 tweets on its maiden voyage, reaching 1.1 million people on Twitter. The following week’s chat had similar numbers, and a retweet by @twitterbooks (which has over four million followers) promises to bring in more consumers—especially important with the holidays coming, when #AskaLibrarian’s promoters hope to make a big push. It adds up to a lot of book talk for readers everywhere, but librarians definitely run this show.

Why #AskaLibrarian?

Tasked with developing reader relations, folks at Crown’s newly established Community Development department turned to Read It Forward, which has been around since 2008. “We surveyed our audience to see how they get book recommendations, and 25 percent cited libraries,” says senior manager Alana Buckbee. “So we saw this as an avenue to explore.”

Buckbee already knew that librarians frequently tweeted about Crown titles—“I’m on twitter all day long,” she observes—and also knew that there was no truly active book chat on Twitter. Putting it all together, she came up with the idea of a twitter chat orchestrated by librarians, “not just your local library, but something scaled up, instantaneous, and online,” she says.

With librarians swooping online to offer personalized book recommendations (and asking for recommendations, too), Buckbee sees the chat as mutually beneficial for librarians and readers—and great for publishers, too. “Librarians have deep backlist knowledge,” she explains, “and our backlist is filled with gems that our readers have yet to discover.” Certainly, #AskaLibrarian promises to put bring many backlist titles to the fore.

While #AskaLibrarian is an initiative of PRH (of which Crown is a division), other publishers are welcome to join the conversation—and already have. Many librarians are on board, as are the LJ book review editors, who are helping to spearhead the conversation.

Next up: bringing in more consumers, and not just for holiday list making. Buckbee encourages librarians to spread the word, letting their patrons know about the initiative “in any ways they already communicate with readers.” After all, what’s the best way to learn about a great new book? Ask a librarian.

Follow PLA 2020 and RA for All Schedule

PLA begins today in Nashville and starting tomorrow I will be there too.

But even if you are #PLALeftBehind, many attendees, myself included, will be Tweeting about the conference using #PLA2020.

Click this link at anytime, whether you have a Twitter account or not, in order to see what is going on. I was not there last time in 2018 [due to a family trip that overlapped, not the snow] and I spent a lot of time using that conference's hashtag to stay in the loop. I took quite a bit away from that conference and managed to communicate with a few new people I didn't know, all from Twitter. Do not under estimate how much you can learn from afar.

Also, those of you who are there in Nashville, you cannot be everywhere. Even attendees can learn from the sessions and meetings they are NOT at by checking in with #PLA2020 periodically.

Now as I said, I will be there Thursday- Saturday myself, so let me give you a sense of what to expect here on the blog during that time.

Thursday, I have a post all set to run about Unboxing videos.

Friday, a Women in Horror Month interview I did with the venerable horror magazine, Cemetery Dance, will run on their site and on both blogs.

Monday, sign-up for HWA's Librarians' Day will go live at 9am central and I will have a post about it. [Click here for the EventBrite link to preview the event.]

That means that my PLA recap posts will not start being posted until Tuesday [at the earliest].

However, while I am at PLA, I will be tweeting regularly and using #PLA2020. When I am in a session, I tweet the entire session as one thread so that it is easier for me to pull up the notes for each session at once.  So, if you want a sneak peek as to the recap I will be posting later next week, use the hashtag over the next few days. But when I post the summaries on the blog, I will have direct links to each thread of my notes and some commentary on overall thoughts.

And with that, this post goes back to its beginning, so I think it is. time for me to go. See some of you in Nashville, in person, soon.

#AskaLibrarian: New Interactive RA Tool for Staff and Patrons

There are a lot of Twitter chats that are relevant to library workers who help leisure readers, but there is a fairly new one that I think stands out as one of the best already. #AskaLibrarian.


Details:

Librarians are always interested in sharing book recommendations, and now they have a new tool. Each Thursday from noon to 1 p.m. EST, they can turn to #AskaLibrarian, a twitter initiative launched by Penguin Random House and Read It Forward, a reader community program sponsored by Crown Publishing Group’s Community Development department.

Below is the full text of the article describing what this Twitter chat is trying to do. [Here is the link to the original.]

Please try to participate either with questions or answers.  Thursdays are often a meeting day for me, so I can’t be a part of it every week, but I have already participated once and loved the experience.  This past Thursday, I was booked all day, but still went back to use the hashtag, many hours later, to see what I missed.

When I did participate I loved two things about the chat:

1. The content itself was very useful. People were asking questions and throwing out titles like crazy.  And because of the format and range of people following, the results were amazingly varied and usable right away.  I loved the mix of old and new titles. Often there is a lot of useless information to filter out in any of these social media chats, but not so much here.
2. This chat is moderated very well. The moderators are clearly stepping in and keeping control. From making sure people don’t just reply to the “asker,” to resending requests that may have been lost in the shuffle, to keeping the conversation focused on its main mission, the moderators are working hard to make sure the chat itself is as positive and fruitful an experience as possible.

It has mostly been library and publishing people so far. The next push is to get patrons and consumers involved.  I will be interested to see how that goes, but I for one am happy with #AskaLibrarian already. It is worth your time to at least take a look.

 ______________________________________________

#AskaLibrarian Gives Librarians and Readers a New Tool

Librarians are always interested in sharing book recommendations, and now they have a new tool. Each Thursday from noon to 1 p.m. EST, they can turn to #AskaLibrarian, a twitter initiative launched by Penguin Random House and Read It Forward, a reader community program sponsored by Crown Publishing Group’s Community Development department.

The initiative brings together librarians, library patrons, other consumers, library marketing representatives, and publishers in a huge tweet swap on good books and readalikes. The hashtag facilitates searches by anyone who can’t jump in at the appointed hour.

Launched on November 11, #AskaLibrarian attracted over 200 contributors and over 600 tweets on its maiden voyage, reaching 1.1 million people on Twitter. The following week’s chat had similar numbers, and a retweet by @twitterbooks (which has over four million followers) promises to bring in more consumers—especially important with the holidays coming, when #AskaLibrarian’s promoters hope to make a big push. It adds up to a lot of book talk for readers everywhere, but librarians definitely run this show.

Why #AskaLibrarian?

Tasked with developing reader relations, folks at Crown’s newly established Community Development department turned to Read It Forward, which has been around since 2008. “We surveyed our audience to see how they get book recommendations, and 25 percent cited libraries,” says senior manager Alana Buckbee. “So we saw this as an avenue to explore.”

Buckbee already knew that librarians frequently tweeted about Crown titles—“I’m on twitter all day long,” she observes—and also knew that there was no truly active book chat on Twitter. Putting it all together, she came up with the idea of a twitter chat orchestrated by librarians, “not just your local library, but something scaled up, instantaneous, and online,” she says.

With librarians swooping online to offer personalized book recommendations (and asking for recommendations, too), Buckbee sees the chat as mutually beneficial for librarians and readers—and great for publishers, too. “Librarians have deep backlist knowledge,” she explains, “and our backlist is filled with gems that our readers have yet to discover.” Certainly, #AskaLibrarian promises to put bring many backlist titles to the fore.

While #AskaLibrarian is an initiative of PRH (of which Crown is a division), other publishers are welcome to join the conversation—and already have. Many librarians are on board, as are the LJ book review editors, who are helping to spearhead the conversation.

Next up: bringing in more consumers, and not just for holiday list making. Buckbee encourages librarians to spread the word, letting their patrons know about the initiative “in any ways they already communicate with readers.” After all, what’s the best way to learn about a great new book? Ask a librarian.

Summary of CODES Conversation: Tweeting, Tumbling, & Pinning: Using Social Media for RA

Back in April I announced that the newest RUSA CODES Conversation would be happening May 12-13.

These are free conversations open to anyone, member or not, who is interested in participating in an email conversation about "the rapidly changing landscape of collection development, readers' advisory, and publishing." I will be frank, this two day blitz produces a lot of email in your inbox. But if you use a filter to send them all to one folder and catch up and/or participate when you have time, it is totally worth it to sign up.  You can put yourself on the list to always be included whenever a new conversation begins by clicking here.

This time, the discussion centered around using social media for RA. It was very informative and people shared quite a bit.  Thankfully for all of you out there, since I was signed up, I received the excellent 33 page summary from my friend, CODES conversation organizer, and just overall librarian extraordinaire, Neal Wyatt.

I have uploaded it to a shared document that you can access here.

What this document does is gather the many threads and simultaneous conversations that were going on and puts them into one, organized document broken down by category with all of the links and resources that were mentioned grouped into a cohesive order.

It's awesome.

In my opinion, this was one of the most useful conversations we have had, and this summary will help a lot of people [myself included]. Please take some time to look it over and consider signing up for future conversations.  It's free.

Have a great holiday weekend.  RA for All is back on Tuesday.

Five Other Librarian Bloggers to Follow

One of the best things about our profession is that it truly is International.  Helping patrons is helping people. People are people regardless of which country they reside in.

11 months ago, I had the chance to address a group of Australian Librarians who were interested in working with horror leisure readers. One of the wonderful outcomes of that presentation is the host of Australian librarians I got to “meet.”

Thanks to technology, and despite a crazy time difference that makes catching up with them difficult, I am still able to follow them regularly through Twitter.  In particular I enjoy following @MyleeJoseph and @EllenForsyth.

All of this intro is leading up to how I found this interesting article on Five Librarian Bloggers To Follow from Information Today in a Tweet from @MyleeJoseph. Ironically, I found a link to this article from an Australian librarian to a New Jersey based publication...and I’m the native Jersey girl.  [I love irony.]

Back to the article. If you are reading this post, you enjoy following the blog of a librarian, one who has a very specific niche albeit, but still, you are reading one.  So, I figured there was a chance you would want to see five other examples that represent a much broader view of librarianship too.

Check them out. Some you may have already known about, but I would venture not all were familiar.

And while you are out exploring other options, also consider following librarians from other countries too.  There is too much we share not to make some effort connecting with each other.

See you back here tomorrow with some reviews.

Follow the ILA Conference in the Twitter Widget

As I have mentioned numerous times, I am in Springfield at the Illinois Library Association Conference all week.  The blogs are both soldiering on due to the benefits of being able to write ahead and schedule things, but I did want to check in to remind people that I am not blogging about specific programs.

Instead, I am tweeting everything.  But I wanted to stress that you do not need to be on Twitter to access my comments and reports from #ilakick.  Readers of the blog can simply scroll down, and look in the right gutter under my book cover to see my Twitter feed.  It has its own scroll bar and the links are clickable.  You can also click on the hashtags to pull up more information without logging onto Twitter.

I’m trying not to duplicate information while still respecting my loyal blog readers.  I hope this is working for people.  If it is not, please contact me and let me know.

Tweet Your Favorite Books of the Year

In my on going effort to sort out the most useful best lists, I would be remiss to not ask you to create your own best list using #libfaves13.

Click here to see what your colleagues are deeming “best."

After a busy few days for me both work wise and personally, I am hoping to spend a good deal of time getting multiple short reviews out for a bunch of books tomorrow [and all throughout the weekend].

And then Monday, we will begin the best list parade here on RA for All.  Week one is the best book you read this year that was published in 2013.  Week two is about the backlist-- favorite book you read in 2013 that came out before 2013.

Finally, a big thank you to Annabelle from Skokie Public Library for leading the ARRT 1 year genre study on graphic novels.  We finished up with a meeting on manga this afternoon. It was a useful, informative, and fun.  You really can’t ask for more.

Libraries and Librarians Worth Following on Twitter

Although I am not on Twitter myself [the reasons why would take an entire post], I am all about passing on as much information as possible here on RA for All.

There have been a series of posts by Matt Anderson, editor of the online newspaper Library Science Daily, about the best tweeters in the library world.

Here is his list of the 100 libraries to follow on Twitter.

And here he compiled the 125 Librarians to follow.

These are all libraries and librarians, so the focus is not only RA specific.

However, the library marketing team at Harper was inspired by Anderson and compiled their own list of the most active librarians they follow on Twitter.  This list is the better one if you are looking for the best Librarian Tweeters from the RA perspective.

My pick, Kaite Stover, but you have to register to follow her.