Article Note: On library promotion and buttons

Citation for the article:

Luedke, Jill E. and Sarah K. Laleman Ward. "It All Started With a Button. . ." Urban Library Journal 15.1 (2008): 67-77.

Read online. Journal is open access. Link to journal main page here.



I continue reading items on outreach for academic libraries. This short article has some good ideas for promoting library services. I particularly liked the idea of using small one-inch buttons as promotional tools. The size seems a bit more practical than the larger size ones we can make here. We do have a button maker, which was barely used until I arrived. It makes the two-inch or so larger ones, which are nice, but the size is a bit on the big size. I wonder if the smaller size, and the way that the authors integrate the buttons to instructional materials as well as outreach could be something that might work here. I am always looking for a new marketing and outreach idea. One challenge we would face would be the finding of materials. The authors work for an art library, so they can likely draw from a broad range of visual materials, something we are lacking here. But having said that, I think the button card idea is quite feasible for us. The article does provide some illustrations so readers can get an idea how the concept works.

The article also features a reminder for outreach librarians to reach out to campus organizations and orientation activities. This is something we do here where we set up a table for events like Patriot Preview Day. However, I don't think I am quite ready for the black "librarian" tee shirt idea they suggest. Here they usually prefer a more professional look (I would wear the tee; I just don't think the powers that be would go for it), but they did give me a couple of embroidered polo shirts for the library I can wear for events.

There are a couple other ideas I liked in the article as well such as the library "facebook" display. I can always use another display theme, and this could be something we could do at the beginning of a semester when new students are arriving.

Overall, a short article worth a look; it is a good example of a "how-to" article.

Article Note: On Promoting Leisure Reading in Libraries

Citation for the article:

Bosman, Renee, et. al. "Growing Adult Readers: Promoting Leisure Reading in Academic Libraries." Urban Library Journal 15.1 (2008): 46-58.

The journal is open access. Main page here.


I am not sure if it is because it is summer, or it is just the type of article that has caught my eye as of late, but here is another one on promoting reading in the academic library. We are talking here about reading for pleasure, which I personally believe we should be doing more in our academic libraries. This barely gets a nod from library administrators, many who think that if you just put a small shelf with some popular fiction, that such will be good enough. Sure, we need to offer the materials, but we also need to work on promoting them as well as promoting the importance of reading for leisure overall. The article I am featuring this week gives some specific ways to promote leisure reading in an academic library. It can provide a good starting point. I like how they consider it literacy outreach. I certainly intend to use that term as I work to expand our efforts here.

The authors, who are from Virginia Commonwealth University (link to their Center for Institutional Effectiveness. From there, you can get the plan as a PDF), refer to their campus's strategic plan which makes references to focusing on the student experience in terms of research, scholarship, and creative activity. Since I am a curious boy, I rushed to go over and look at our own strategic plan, only to find it does not say as much on the matter. I am going on a limb here, but the plan does leave a lot of things out. It is big on learning for the workplace and being global and blah blah blah, but I don't see a whole lot about focusing on the student experience. It is more about cranking them out so they can be ready for the workplace. The point for me, after I managed to put aside my disappointment, is that I may have my work cut out for me. Then again, the way I see, it may mean job security for me. Anyhow, I do think reading promotion is important given the many benefits students gain from it and skills that will serve them throughout their lives.

Some notes then:

• The kind of job I would like to have in an ideal world (or one of the jobs I would like to have): The VCU folks created an "Undergraduate Services Librarian" position, and in 2004 actually hired two people for the position to "design, promote, and assess library reference services that further undergraduate teaching and learning initiatives on the Monroe Park Campus" (47). That just rocks. Some of this is the kind of stuff that our Instruction Librarian and myself, as the Outreach Librarian, try to do in a scattershot approach. What we need is better coordination of the efforts, a very serious look at what we do now and what we could be doing, and then put it in a vision and goals so we can start implementing some things. I am thinking that now that our new reference librarian is here, we can probably put her to work. Plus, the library director recently requested that I rewrite and update our reference services standards. I am thinking the opportunity to put a few new things in is now.
  
• What do we do here now for literacy outreach (that is mentioned in the article)? We do have a small browsing collection. We call it the Bestsellers Collection, and it is basically a McNaughton plan for popular fiction (well, it is somewhat narrow in the concept of popular, but let us not digress) and some nonfiction. I usually do a blog post when we receive new books for that collection, providing a brief note on each title. Sample here. This is dependent on whether the Acquisitions people send me a list in a timely manner for me to do the post. Since we do not get much rotation of the collection, months going by without something new is common. I use the library blog to do some reading promotion. The sample post is one way. I often try to announce literary awards with inclusion of notes on titles we may have. The challenge for me is that often we do not have titles that win awards. And yes, I have pointed this out to the powers that be. A lot of this is simply a budget matter, but also a lot of it is this kind of attitude. Another thing we do is display cases for various observances and themes. This can get challenging too (again, the lack of books in certain areas), but I am learning to improvise where I can.
• Other things we do that are not mentioned in the article? How about here, here, and here? Yes, that is some of my handiwork, so to speak.
  
• "While there are numerous studies that examine the reading behaviors college students, literature concerning the promotion of recreational reading and examples of literacy outreach resources are scarce, particularly those that frame these services within the context of the campus library as the 'third place,' regarding both its physical and online space" (49). I like that idea of the third place in the context of promoting the library not only as the place where the computers are at but also as the place where you might find some books you actually want to read.
• I definitely liked the idea of their blog for books, Book reMarks. As described in the article, it seems a great tool to promote pleasure reading. According to the article, the blog was started "with the purpose of highlighting the VCU Libraries' collections and identifying leisure reading materials for our students and faculty" (51). A great idea. I don't think we need to have a separate blog just yet. I think we can use The Patriot Spot (our library blog) to do some of that work. I have been giving thought to diversifying the content on the blog, and this may be one way to do it, if I can find enough books to highlight. We need more than the usual academic fare we get in the new books section (when we get something in the new books). And yes, I have thought of spreading the work, so to speak, but getting staff collaboration has not been easy. As the article points out, "it can also be difficult to solicit enough reviews from busy library workers to ensure a steady stream of fresh content" (52). Again, new librarians (we have two) may mean I can try again to get a collaborator or two. We'll see, so stay tuned.
  
• An idea from the article I liked: "A recent edition of reviews commemorating Women's History Month written by members of Sigma Lambda Upsilon/Señoritas Latinas Unidas help meet the goal of using library outreach services as an innovative way to foster dialogue with patrons" (51-52). I think I can reach out to one or two of the campus groups here to do this kind of thing. I really like this idea, and it sounds like something to explore for fall.
  

Overall, this is a nice little article with some good ideas that can get a librarian in an academic library started. VCU is bigger than we are, but I can see that these ideas can work in a smaller university like ours.

Booknote: Reading Matters

A note from my GoodReads List:


Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals About Reading, Libraries, and Community by Catherine Sheldrick Ross

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is a very good overview of the research available in the area of reading for pleasure. The organization of the book is very good looking at history of reading and what we know from the research. This is followed by specific chapters focusing on what is known about children, about young adults, and about adults. In addition, the book contains small sections at the end of the chapters for what can libraries do to apply the lessons of the chapter. This is very useful and practical advice. Also, there are small segments, in gray boxes, that look at small case studies or other interesting details. A reader can easily read the whole book, or he can choose to browse the parts of interest. Some of the material I read here I had seen in other books about reading I have read. The strength of this book is not so much on novelty, though there are some new things, but on the excellent synthesis of various sources. The book is well written; it is engaging, and it makes some very good points about the need and desire of reading for pleasure. I think that librarians and educators alike should be reading it as well as anyone with an interest in reading.



Finally, as a small exercise for myself, this is a partial list of books mentioned in Reading Matters that I have read. By the way, the book provides a convenient title index in the back, which made it easy for me to go back and have a look. The list then:

• Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire. I don't quite recall when I read it, but it was a few years ago. It is not listed here in GR.
• Diana Herald, Genreflecting: A Guide to Reading Interests in Genre Fiction,. I read it in library school, and I still consult it on occasion. I keep my copy in my office. One of these days I have to list it here on GR.
• Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading. I read this one years ago, so it is not listed in GR. I have to reread it one of these days.
• Jim Burke, I Hear America Reading: Why We Read, What We Read,. This one is listed in my GR list.
• Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America. This book came out in 1985. I remember being very moved by it when I read it during my undergraduate days. Since it was so long ago, it is not listed in GR.
• Robert Burgin, Nonfiction Readers' Advisory. This one is I have listed on my GR list.
• Harold Rabinowitz, A Passion for Books. This one, a favorite of mine, is also listed in my GR list.
• Joyce G Saricks, The Readers' Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction. I read this in library school for my RA classes. Not listed in GR. I also read her Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Library for the same classes.
• Dilevko and Gottlieb, Reading and the Reference Librarian: The Importance to Library Service of Staff Reading Habits. This one is listed in my GR list. It makes an excellent point on the need for librarians and library staff to actually read (yes, believe it or not, a lot of my brethren do not read outside what little they may need professionally).
• Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran. I do not have this one listed in my GR page, but if I did, it would be on the "dropped" shelf. I simply could not get into this book, which I found pompous and pretentious at times. But hey, if it is your cup of tea, go for it. Remember the old adage: never apologize for your reading tastes. This book was simply not within my reading tastes.
• Sara Nelson, So Many Books, So Little Time. I have it listed on my GR. However, it was not a particularly good book in my estimation.
• Harold Bloom, The Western Canon. Read this in graduate school. Not listed in GR.
  

View all my reviews.

Could this be the mother of all reading lists?

Maybe, maybe not. This is a big reading list. Arukiyomi has compiled the list of 1001 Books to Read before you die in a somewhat convenient spreadsheet (you have to download, then unzip a file, then calculate). I took a look over the list, since I can't resist a book list, and I sure as heck can't resist seeing how I stack up. However, this is one of those lists full of highly literary books, the kind that I rarely read these days. There are reasons why I left the English doctoral program I was in to pursue library school; the freedom to read what I want when I want without some pretentious snob telling me how I should read a book is one of them. Don't get me wrong. I do like some aspects of literary analysis, but I also like reading the cool stuff, and this list is not it (in my humble opinion). So, how did I do?

• Out of 1001 books, I have read 85.
• I marked only 17 as "to be read." And those are ones where I like the authors, like Mario Vargas Llosa, or books I did intend to read anyways.
  
• A lot of the books I read on the list were books I read in graduate school or that I was forced to read in school. Yes, I use the word "forced." There are some items on that list that probably should not have been inflicted on a high schooler. As for the ones I read in graduate school, a good number of them actually bring back bad memories. When I think about it, it's a miracle I still like to read. But then again, graduate school did have some cool classes (like Dr. Papa's drama classes. Wherever you may be now Doc, thank you for igniting an interest in theater and the powerful messages it can convey. Oh, for the cool stuff too).
  
• And by the way, my selections from the list I did read are heavy on classic Spanish and Latin American because I went to high school in Puerto Rico. Had I gone to high school in the states, it would probably be more heavy on classic United States literature.

The likelihood that I will pick out books to read from this list in the coming year is next to none. The chances are slim and fat. There are authors on the list that I simply do not care for, like John Updike. Still, it is interesting for me to see a list like this and to see what I have read. The calculator on the spreadsheet says I would need to read 25 books per year to complete the 2008 edition of the list. If I focused on the list, that would be pretty easy since I can easily read about 100 books in a year. But I dislike the idea of giving up on my pleasure reading in order to follow the whims of some snobbish high brow list. If this was the Hugos list or something like that, I would be there.

And in case my three readers are curious, here are the titles I have read from the big list. I will note the ones I read in Spanish. Oh, and when I note "Spanish edition" as opposed to "Spanish," it means that author does not write originally in Spanish, but I read him or her in Spanish translation. This usually applies to people like Coehlo (Brazilian, writes in Portuguese) or Saramago (Portuguese):

• Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat (in Spanish).
  
• Paulo Coehlo, Veronika Decides to Die (in Spanish).
  
• Arturo Perez Reverte, The Dumas Club (in Spanish).
• Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried.
  
• Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia.
• Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry.
  
• Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate (in Spanish).
  
• Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions.
  
• Toni Morrison, Beloved.
  
• Isabel Allende, Of Love and Shadows (in Spanish).
  
• V.S. Naipaul, Enigma of Arrival.
  
• Alan Moore, Watchmen.
  
• Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (in Spanish).
  
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.
  
• William Gibson, Neuromancer.
  
• Marti Amis, Money: A Suicide Note.
  
• Isabel Allende, The House of Spirits (in Spanish).
• Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children.
  
• Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose.
  
• John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman.
  
• Mario Puzo, The Godfather.
  
• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (in Spanish).
  
• Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God.
  
• Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange.
  
• Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook.
  
• Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (in Spanish).
  
• Gabriel García Márquez, No One Writes the Colonel (in Spanish).
  
• Joseph Heller, Catch-22.
  
• T.H. White, The Once and Future King.
  
• Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners.
  
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.
  
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.
  
• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger should be grateful anyone wants to do a sequel of this piece of tripe. No wonder Salinger has been a recluse. What people see in this novel is beyond me).
  
• Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (in Spanish).
  
• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
  
• George Orwell, Animal Farm.
  
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (in Spanish edition).
• Graham Greene, Brighton Rock.
  
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
  
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit.
  
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
  
• Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon.
  
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
  
• E.M. Forster, A Passage to India.
  
• Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt.
• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
  
• Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.
  
• Juan Ramon Jimenez, Platero and I (in Spanish).
  
• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth.
  
• Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness.
  
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
  
• Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie.
  
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening.
  
• Bram Stoker, Dracula.
  
• H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau.
  
• H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
  
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
  
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
  
• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
• H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines.
  
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
  
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island.
  
• Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.
  
• José Hernandez, Martin Fierro.
  
• Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days.
  
• Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.
  
• Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth.
  
• Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
  
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
  
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.
  
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
  
• Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
  
• Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo.
  
• Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo (in Spanish).
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum.
  
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher.
  
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
  
• Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal.
  
• Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels.
  
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe.
  
• Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote (in Spanish, and baroque Spanish nonetheless, not some sissy abridgement. In high school. Just for this I should get a pass on a lot of the list).
• Anonymous, Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (in Spanish, back in high school).
  
• Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, Amadís de Gaula (in Spanish, and similar to Don Quixote too, and read it in high school).
  
• Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina (in Spanish, another high school selection).
  
• Anonymous, The Thousand and One Nights.

And for the curious, if they stuck this far, here is what I marked as "to be read." It mostly means to me stuff I would like to read, but I may or not read it.

• Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (yes, in Spanish).
• Paulo Coehlo, The Devil and Miss Prym (likely in Spanish ed. I happen to like Coehlo, so pretty much anything he writes is on my TBR list).
  
• Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (in Spanish).
  
• Tomas Eloy Martinez, Santa Evita (in Spanish. This author has been on my TBR for a while now).
  
• Jose Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (in Spanish ed. This is another author that has been on my TBR for a while).
• Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (been on the TBR for a while too. I am a bit reluctant since I am told he can be similar to Terry Pratchett, and I did not like the one Pratchett novel I read. But I did like the film, so maybe there is hope).
  
• Anais Nin, Delta of Venus.
  
• Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire.
  
• Mario Vargas Llosa, The Time of the Hero (in Spanish).
  
• Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz (in Spanish).
  
• Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land.
  
• Juan Carlos Onetti, The Shipyard (in Spanish).
  
• Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (I have seen the film, so curious about reading the book).
• Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye.
  
• Ian Fleming, Casino Royale.
  
• Isaac Asimov, Foundation.
  
• Isaac Asimov, I, Robot.

A hat tip to CW at Ruminations.

Article Note: a bibliography on Sufism

Citation for the article:

Francesconi, Danilo. "Sufism: A Guide to Essential Reference Resources." Reference Services Review 37.1 (2009): 112-124.

Read via Emerald.


It may be a librarian thing, but once in a while I like reading over bibliographies, especially ones on topics that can help me learn new things. I will admit that Sufism is not something I know a lot about, so I certainly wanted to read this article to get an idea of where to start if I wanted to learn more. The article did just that, and it also gave me some ideas in case I have to help out some patron who may starting to investigate the topic. The author provides a list of works meant for a general reader; he introduces "essential works about this broad subject, its fundamental doctrinal concepts, its basic ritual practices, its ethics, and the history of the main Sufi masters and their groups" (112). He also mentions that this guide can be useful for small public libraries to develop some collections on Sufism (113). I will argue that this guide can be also useful for small academic libraries as well. It certainly would be a guide I would use to develop our holdings related to Sufism.

Francesconi provides a brief historical timeline and briefly discusses some of the challenges in doing research in this area. A big challenge is that a lot of the resources may be scattered, and this is where the librarian comes in to help the researcher. There is a good listing of electronic and print sources from basic reference sources (like encyclopedias) to good books and databases. The article is not meant to be exhaustive, but it will give you a good start.