Today I attended the monthly Reader's Advisory meeting for the library. Each month, they choose a genre and everyone has to read a book in that genre. One librarian presents materials about how to serve the readers of this particular genre and what the librarian should know about the features of the genre, and then everyone gets to talk about their books (which is awesome and makes me feel like I'm an English major again.)
This meeting started with a presentation by P, one of the head tech guys. He had recently reconfigured the library's "Author Alert" system so that most of it is online. Until now, librarians have called people on the author alert list, manually placed holds, and generally had to spend a lot of time. The hope is this new system will be less expensive and more efficient. Patrons can create their own Author Alert list and specify what kinds of materials they want (Large Print, Audiobook, etc.) and then the system searches for new titles every day and sends either an email or a text message to the patron whenever new materials are available from his or her favorite author. It doesn't seem like a perfect system, but it's certainly a step up from they way they have been doing it, with paper Author Alert forms and lots of man-hours. Check it out here (because you might never find it browsing the website - it's a little buried right now): http://www.monroe.lib.in.us/fiction/author_alert.html.
From there we moved into the discussion of the Horror genre by our resident Horror expert, E. (She also brought Halloween cupcakes, which endeared her to me greatly.) E had a powerpoint and detailed handouts for everyone, with sample authors, notable feature and appeal factors for each subgenre of horror. She told us about everything from haunted houses/ghosts, vampire and werewolf novels, psychological horror, and splatterpunk. (I'll probably be steering clear of splatterpunk.) The most important thing to remember when doing RA for Horror is the level of violence, gore, sex, and general terror in the book. It's also one of the harder things to judge unless you have experience with the novel, because NoveList isn't always very specific about what the novel contains. Some people like a little chill up their spine and some people like something that's a knock-down, drag-out gore fest, and you really don't want to give people from one category something meant for someone in the other. E did mention a few other resources that could be helpful for getting more specific content information about books, some websites and some books.
The best part was just sitting around as librarians and talking about the books we'd read - what we liked about them, what we didn't like, what kind of patron might like them. I love the way this library tries to stay fresh and explore new ways to better serve the patrons.
