RA Tip: Unconventional RA Techniques

It's been a while since I posted, I know but I've got a good one for you ... :-)

Ever had a non-reader ask for help finding something to read? The standard readers' advisory query "Tell me about a book you read and enjoyed" may not garner the response you are trying to elicit. In such cases, you might consider asking "What's your favorite TV show?"

If you haven't heard about this readers' advisory technique, a recently posted article on Public Libraries Online is a great introduction to the concept! Check out: 

 

Books are the New TV: Unconventional Readers' Advisory Techniques

And don't forget to click on the links included at the end! Great online sources to which you can subscribe as a means of keeping up.

Blogging 101: Learning How to Post

A number of staff contribute to the SCCCLD Book Challenge. Others may have considered joining in on the fun but are reluctant because they've never posted to a blog before or have never written an annotation or review as a blog post.  

Laura Pirondi (SP-Reference and book challenge blogmaster) and Lucy Lockley (the RAT Queen) will be hosting two (2) RA training demonstrations on learning how to post to the blog. Staff are invited to the session of their choice - the demonstration will be the same each time so there is no need to register for both sessions. 

Blogging 101: Learning How to Post

• A Readers' Advisory Training session on how to use the 'SCCCLD Book Challenge' blog to produce exciting, informative, and entertaining posts about titles you have read, listened to, or viewed. Come and learn how to post to our staff blog and help the district win the Missouri Book Challenge competition in 2015!!

• Wednesday, Oct 29, 2014 from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM in Room 112 at GA
• -- There will be few mobile devices (laptops & tablets) available for this session or attendees may bring their own device, if they wish to follow along during the demonstration.

• Thursday, Oct. 30, 2014 from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM in Room 221 (Technology Training Room) at SP

These training sessions are listed in e-vents as 'Staff Only' programs and are OPEN for registration to all SCCCLD staff. Please speak with your manager if you need to arrange time to attend one of the training demonstrations.

Hope to see you there! If you are reading something scary for Halloween, you should be able to blog about it before the Trick or Treaters come knocking at your door!  :-)

RA Branch Visit

Monday, Sept 8th, I spent all day at our Kisker Road Branch having been invited by Diana T, the branch Manager, to attend the monthly staff meetings at 8:00 AM and 4:00 PM. In advance of my visit, Diana had encouraged her staff to sign up for individual 30-minute NoveList training sessions to be held throughout the day.

For the staff meeting, I had 15 minutes to talk about readers' advisory, what it is, how staff can work together to assist customers, and suggest ways to prepare in advance for future RA inquiries. The NoveList training sessions were great fun! The  Kisker staff challenged me with their queries on how to use the database and I came away learning as much as they did from those 30-minute sessions.

I would love to do similar readers' advisory training at all the branches in the district and plan to spend a day at other locations in the coming months. If you wish to arrange for an RA branch visit, have your branch Manager contact me at General Administration.

Audio Readers' Advisory Workshop

LISTENING ADVISORY! WHAT'S THAT AND ARE YOUR EARS BURNING?

A Readers' Advisory Training workshop with special guest presenter Kelly Fann

Listening to a book is a different kind of experience 

from reading a book and advising customers in 

finding that next good audiobook requires different 

techniques. The St. Charles City-County Library 

District Reader's Advisory Training program is hosting 

an audio readers' advisory workshop for all library staff. 

The workshop will be presented by special guest speaker Kelly Fann from Tanganoxie Public Library, Kansas. Kelly will give advising tips and tricks, discuss appeal factors and trends, provide external resources, and review marketing and packaging techniques. Hot titles, mid-list titles, and key narrators will also be explored.

Presenter: Kelly Fann is the Director of the Tonganoxie Public Library in Tonganoxie, Kansas. She is a regular workshop presenter on readers' advisory practices, trends, and topics--her specialty being the horror genre and the incorporation of digital mediums for enhancing and invigorating library readers' advisory services. Kelly is also a reviewer for AudioFile magazine. Glued to the Internet, her iPhone, video games and audio books she is constantly seeking out new avenues and methods for finding the ultimate readers' services guides.

The Listening Advisory workshop will be held at the Spencer Road Branch in the Community Commons, Room 240. There will be two presentations of the workshop in order to try and accommodate as many attendees as possible. 

The dates and times to choose between are:

Tuesday afternoon, July 29 - from 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM 

- OR -

Wednesday morning, July 30 - from 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

LIBRARY / LOCATION :

St. Charles City-County Library District

Spencer Road Branch  - Community Commons, Room 240

427 Spencer Road

St. Peters, MO  63376

Click here for Directions to Spencer Road Branch

You can enter the Community Commons from the Boone Hills entrance on the North side of the library.

There will be handouts, light snacks, and possibly even some door prizes.  :-)

RA Training Session / Wednesday, March 5, 2014 / Six Degrees Technique

A number of great Six Degrees lists were presented and discussed during our meeting last week. Scroll down to find those lists already posted on the blog. 

More fun came at the end of the meeting with everyone participating in a 'Group Think' six degrees brainstorming session! Titles were thrown out, connections were made, and the result was a great on-the-spot Six Degrees list ... :-)

Impromptu ‘Group Think’ Six Degrees Exercise

1. How to be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman – a woman wakes up not trusting her husband.

2. Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson - the main character wakes up every day and 

doesn't remember anything then gradually begins to wonder if things are being hidden from her.

3. ‘50 First Dates’ feature film - due to a car accident, a young woman can’t remember anything from day to day. Her family tries to keep her from being traumatized (again) by pretending each day is the same until a young man becomes romantically interested.

4. The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings – a story of family trauma dealing with a wife and mother on life support after an accident and the husband’s discovery of her involvement in secret affair.

5. A Perfect Murder - feature film with Michael Douglas, Viggo Mortensen and Gwyneth Paltrow; a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, where the husband learns of his wife’s secret affair and hires someone to kill her.

6. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – when his wife disappears on their 5^th anniversary, the husband is assumed to have killed her especially when her friends tell the police she was afraid of him and had been keeping secrets.

Titles and connections courtesy of:

Lisa K (KR), Sheri K (DE), Sue D (MK), and Lucy L (the RAT Queen)

RA Tip: Six Degrees of Reading / Creating a List

Looking for ways to remember connections between titles so you can help customers with readers' advisory questions? How about creating your own Six Degrees list ...

Creating your very own Six Degrees of Reading list!

Start with a title you have read or know well and write a brief description; at least one sentence but no more than two. Include in the description an aspect of that title which appealed to you.

Although it can be, the connection does not have to be the genre, author, or main character. The aspect can be anything: a secondary character’s occupation, a location mentioned in the title, etc. Be creative! Go crazy and see where it can take your list! J

Connect that title to a second title using the same appeal aspect from the first. Then take an aspect from the second title, something different than the one you used for the first title and connect it to a third title.

Connect the third title to a fourth title using a different aspect for each title to connect to the following title. Continue on until you get to the sixth and final title, for an annotated list of six titles.

Then, and this is the hard part, figure out how the sixth title can link back to the first title on your list!  J

HINT: Choose the 1^st and 6^th titles FIRST and make sure they connect to each other! Some might call this cheating but I like to think of it as PLANNING AHEAD!  J

My Six Degrees of Reading List

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Free Bird (Song) / Lynyrd Skynyrd / Six Degrees of Music

While I was working on my own Six Degrees lists to bring to the next RA Training session, my husband asked me what I was doing. Once I explained the idea, he couldn't resist and came up with his own 'twist' to the Six Degrees technique ...  :-)

SIX DEGREES OF MUSIC

ELECTRIC GUITAR SOLOS

1.  Free Bird – Allen Collins and Ronnie van Zant (Lynyrd Skynyrd)

2.  Smoke on the Water – Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillian, Roger Glover, Jon Lord, and Ian Paice (Deep Purple)

3.  Do You Feel Like We Do – Peter Frampton

4.  Life’s Been Good – Joe Walsh

5.  Layla – Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon (Derek and the Dominos)

6.  Purple Haze – Jimi Hendrix (The Jimi Hendrix Experience)

Jimi Hendrix and Ronnie Van Zant both died before the age of 30. (Allen Collins was seriously injured in the plane crash which killed Van Zant.)

List courtesy of Richard L, husband of The RAT Queen

Born to Run / Christopher McDougall / Six Degrees of Mixed Media

Wondering how far you could take mixing books with films, I had lots of fun creating a Six Degrees list inspired by a RAT Nonfiction benchmark title from Round 4 ...  :-)

SIX DEGREES OF MIXED MEDIA

In Born to Run: a Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall investigates ultra-marathon athletes, the science of running, and the reclusive Tarahumara Indians, the fastest runners in the world.

The Tarahumara tribe live in the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico, which brought to mind Humphrey Bogart and the film Treasure of the Sierra Madre, from a book by B. Traven.

The Bogart film lead to ... The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and Almost Lost my Mind by Katherine Hepburn.

Hepburn’s book reminded me of ... ‘White Hunter, Black Heart’, a Clint Eastwood film based on Peter Viertel’s book, inspired by events which took place while director John Huston and others were on safari during the filming of ‘The African Queen.’

Thinking about trips to Africa lead to ... Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible about a harsh evangelical Baptist missionary, Nathan Price, who takes his wife and his four daughters on a mission to the Belgian Congo...

Missionaries brought to mind the movie ‘Chariots of Fire’ about Eric Liddell, Scottish missionary, and Harold Abrahams, Cambridge student, who compete in the 1924 Olympics as runners for Great Britain (based on William J. Weatherby’s book).

The film ‘Chariots of Fire’ is ultimately about the joy and science of running which leads back to McDougall’s Born to Run ...

List courtesy of The RAT Queen

A Moveable Feast / Ernest Hemingway / Six Degrees of Reading

SIX DEGREES OF MIXED MEDIA

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway – contains stories about his life as a young man in Paris in the 1920’s.

The movie, Midnight in Paris, is a fantasy about the main character’s dreams of living in Paris in the 1920’s. In this movie, the main character meets Scott Fitzgerald.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, a novel about the wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanon, in which there are several descriptions of lavish parties on Long Island.

Fictional characters, Gatsby and Buchanon, appear as neighbors to the main characters in Christopher Bohjalian’s The Double Bind which also takes place in Long Island.

A recipe for a drink named Long Island Tea is in the nonfiction book, See, Mix, Drink by Brian Murphy along with many other recipes for alcoholic beverages including those containing whiskey.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain is written from Ernest Hemingway’s first wife’s point of view and references Mr. Hemingway’s habit of consuming large amounts of whiskey. The book takes place during the 1920’s in Paris.

List courtesy of Sheri K (DE)

French Kiss (Movie) / Meg Ryan (Actress) / Six Degrees of Film

SIX DEGREES OF ROMANTIC COMEDIES

French Kiss - A woman flies to France to confront her straying fiance, but gets into trouble when the charming crook seated next to her uses her for smuggling a stolen necklace.

A Fish Called Wanda - In London, four very different people team up to commit armed robbery, hide their true identities and then try to double-cross each other for the loot.

True Lies - Harry Tasker is a secret agent for the United States Government. For years, he has kept his job from his wife and leads a double life, but is forced to reveal his identity when his wife is swept into the world of espionage.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith - A bored married couple is surprised to learn that they are both assassins hired by competing agencies to kill each other.

RED (Retired and Extremely Dangerous) - When his peaceful life and new budding romance is threatened by a high-tech assassin, former black-ops agent Frank Moses reassembles his old team in a last ditch effort to survive and uncover his assailants while pursuing the “woman of his dreams”.

Kate & Leopold -   A modern day scientist finds a rip in the fabric of time near the Brooklyn Bridge. Leopold --a man living in the 1870s-- follows the scientist back through the time gap to present day and meets the “woman of his dreams”.  Time proves to be an obstacle.  

*Which links back to French Kiss through common themes of mismatched couples brought together against all odds/fate and actress Meg Ryan.

List courtesy of Lisa K (KR) who put it together while assisting a customer at the desk.

Gallipoli (Movie) / Peter Weir (Director) / Six Degrees of Film

SIX DEGREES OF FILM

A discussion about Australian actors prior to coming to Hollywood began with  ...

1. Gallipoli (staring a very young Mel Gibson) - Two Australian mates face the brutal realities of war when they are sent to fight in the (tragically mismanaged) Gallipoli campaign in Turkey during World War I.

Leading to ...

2. Breaker Morant - Three Australian Lieutenants are court martialed for executing prisoners as a way of deflecting attention from war crimes committed by their superior officers.

Which lead to a film set in Australia ...

3. Picnic at Hanging Rock - On Valentine's Day 1900, in Victoria, Australia, three students and a teacher from Appleyard College disappear during a class visit to Hanging Rock.

A play on words (with hints back to injustice) lead to ...

4. Bad Day at Black Rock - Shortly after WWI, a one-handed stranger comes to a tiny town possessing a terrible past they want to keep secret, by violent means if necessary.

Leading to ...

5. The Fugitive (the motion picture starring Harrison Ford) - Dr. Richard Kimble, unjustly accused of murdering his wife, must find the real killer (a one-armed man) while being the target of a nationwide manhunt.

Which lead to ...

6. Witness - A young Amish boy is sole witness to a murder; policemen John Book (portrayed by Harrison Ford) goes into hiding in Amish Country to protect him until the trial.

Witness is directed by Peter Weir who also directed Gallipoli.

List courtesy of the RAT Queen with suggestions from her husband.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl / Jesse Andrews / Six Degrees of Reading

SIX DEGREES OF YA LITERATURE

1. Greg has clique-jumped his way through all of high school. His only consistent friend is Earl with whom he has nothing in common except a love of film. Greg’s mother insists that Greg befriend Rachel, a girl who is dying from leukemia. Greg’s uncomfortable new friendship with Rachel is awkward, touching, and hilarious in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews.

2. Eleanor, a poverty stricken outcast at a new school and Park, a teen trying to find himself in the daily monotony of life cross paths on the bus and find hope and healing through their relationship in Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell.

3. Four orphans are selected by a cruel nobleman to see who has the ability to impersonate a long-lost prince in The False Prince by Jennifer Nielsen.

4. Trash by Andy Mulligan follows Raphael, Gordo, and Rat as they sort through the mystery of an important find they discovered while digging through a trash dump in a third-world country.

5. Tyrell is living in a homeless shelter with his mother and brother trying desperately to stay out of the cycle of poverty and helplessness that sent his father to jail in Coe Booth’s Tyrell.

6. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Junior is too smart and too driven to stay in his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation but once he leaves to go to the “fancy” school in Reardon he feels like an outcast in both worlds. Junior’s humor and intelligence, however, inspires hope and relays his resiliency in finding himself outside his comfort zone.

List courtesy of Maggie M (SP)

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks / E. Lockhart / Six Degrees of Reading

SIX DEGREES OF YA LITERATURE

1. In The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart, Frankie secretly infiltrates her boyfriend’s all male secret society with hilarious and thought-provoking consequences. Frankie’s story gives a funny and interesting high school feminist perspective.

2. In Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers, Ismae escapes a brutal marriage to find herself in the safety of… Assassin nuns?

3. A plane crashes on a deserted island and the survivors are beauty pageant contestants struggling to survive in the elements in Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens.

4. In Cinder by Marissa Meyers, Part cyborg and societal outcast, Cinder, inexplicably becomes involved with the handsome Prince Kai. But will he accept her and all of her flaws?

5. Tally is about to turn sixteen and in this dystopian society that means she gets to be operated on to become the perfect physical specimen. Tally is so excited to become a “Pretty” until something happens to make her question the norm in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies.

6. Barbie is viewed as a model of female empowerment, a standard of unattainable beauty, just a toy for children and all kinds of things in between. The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie: A Doll’s History and Her Impact on Us by Tanya Lee Stone delves into the different societal perceptions of Barbie as well as the history of her and her creator, American business woman, Ruth Handler.

List courtesy of Maggie M (SP)

The Water Witch: A Novel / Juliet Dark / Six Degrees of Reading

The Water Witch by Juliet Dark
Callie McFay, a professor of gothic literature takes a job in a small town of New York state. She moves into a Victorian home that has been taken over by a demonic force.

   which leads to

The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker
  Nora Fischer a doctoral student takes a walk and ends up in a different world. She falls in love and is soon married to the man of her dreams. That is when things begin to go off-track. Nora escapes and finds herself being an apprentice to a magician named Aruendriel.

   which leads to

A Kiss of Shadows (Meredith Gentry) by Laurell K. Hamilton
   Meredith is the High Princess of Faerie. She is avoiding the job her aunt wants her to perform: to be a constant companion to the most beautiful immortal men of the the world.

   which leads to

The Alchemyst by Michael Scott
   Nicholas Flamel is the greatest alchemyst in the world and has eternal life in the bargain. He must keep The Book of Abraham, the Mage hidden and protected at all costs.

   which leads to

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
   Diana Bishop a scholar and descendant of witches discovers an alchemical manuscript.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
   A young woman finds a book in her father's library that leads to the discovery of an evil that has been hunted for centuries.
 

Snow in August / Pete Hamill / Six Degrees of Reading

The Snow in August by Pete Hamill
In 1947, a young boy befriends an immigrant Rabbi in New York City. They summon a golem to confront the violence in their lives.

    which leads to

The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley
  Set towards the end of World War II, Evelyn Roe finds a body buried in the clay of her yard. It begins to form itself into Evelyn's vision of Adam.

   which leads to

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
   It is 1946 and Laura McAllan is struggling to raise her family on a Mississippi Delta farm. Two men return from World War II to help with the farm and face what happened in combat and prejudice at home.

   which leads to

I'll Be Seeing You by Suzanne Hayes
   Two American women begin a correspondence during World War II, helping each other with the absence of the men in their lives. The letters help them deal with loss, prejudice and the joy of living again.

     which leads to

Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole
   In 1912 Elspeth Dunn a poet in Scotland receives a fan letter from David Graham from New York City. A romance develops and World War I intervenes. In 1940 Margaret, Elspeth's daughter discovers the trove of letters and their secrets.

     which leads to

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
   Set in 1899 New York a golem is left without a master and a jinni is released from his bottle. They become best friends and navigate the unfamiliar world of New York.

Readers' Advisory Training (RAT) Program

WELCOME TO ROUND 5 OF OUR READERS' ADVISORY TRAINING (RAT) PROGRAM

On Tuesday, August 27th and Wednesday, August 28th, we were fortunate to have Duncan Smith, co-founder of 
NoveList and a great proponent for readers' advisory, present a program for our staff. 

This was the kick off for Round 5 of the district's Readers' Advisory Training (RAT) Genre Study program. Duncan is an enthusiastic and inspiring speaker and both sessions of the program were very well attended. 

Check out under Resources for a list of references related to this GREAT program!

-- Throughout Round 5 of the Readers' Advisory Training (RAT) program we will be studying various fiction genres and nonfiction topics using a combined book discussion / book talks format. 

So you can see what genres will be covered and when, the full schedule for Round 5 is available as a shared  GoogleDoc and can be found online at: 
RA Training: Genre Study Book Discussion Program - Round 5 

• A print copy of the RA Training: Genre Study Book Discussion Program - Round 5 document will be sent out to each branch so it can be posted in the staff room for future reference.

-- To help you choose which genres you may want learn more about, try using the following document to which staff have access via NoveList Plus: The ARRT Popular Fiction Reading List 

• Although available to staff through the district's subscription to NoveList Plus, this document was compiled and published by the Adult Reading Round Table Steering Committee (ARRT) in Illinois. 

 

To access the document, look under the NoveList Resources heading on the right-hand side of the NoveList Plus homepage. Next, click on the Readers Advisory Toolbox link, then click on the Popular Fiction List link to reach the The ARRT Popular Fiction Reading List page which contains a link to download the document.