8A: Reflection on Class 10-25-16

Our warm-up for class was very interesting and fun. It concerned reader’s advisory. The patron wanted a book like “Fifty Shades of Grey”, so immediately the first thought that comes to mind is that the patron wants to read more erotica books. We first suggested she read the sequels. The patron then said that she liked that the book became a movie. So my group started looking up erotica books that were turned into movies (we came up with Eyes Wide Shut and Brokeback Mountain). But after asking more questions, we realized that the patron did not necessarily want erotica because she said she liked how they were in love. The next question we asked was if she wanted steamy or sweet. The answer was that her friend liked steamy but her husband preferred sweet. At this point, I was like “uhhhhhhh”. A whole bunch of questions flew through my mind: is she reading books based on what others are telling her? Are her friend and husband going to read it after her? Did they all like the movie and book so she wants to get each of them a book as a gift? Or is it that it is something else, which I am not writing down? My group member said we should play it safe and go with sweet since it is better to anger the friend than the husband. My other group member came up with “The Princess Bride” to which the patron said she loves that movie and did not know it was a book. Unfortunately, the book was checked out, so we suggested “Outlander” instead.

It shows that before you perform reader’s advisory, one needs to conduct the reference interview properly. You cannot immediately make an assumption about what a patron would like. It went from “Fifty Shades of Grey” to “The Princess Bride”. That is a big jump considering the latter is comedic. If we had not kept asking questions, I do not think we would have ever come up with what we did. Disclaimer: The patron was not a “real” person; it was just a hypothetical question for an exercise.

Later in class, we had our resource guide presentations. The first one was really good and looked like an actual library guide. It made me think that ours was bad and that we did it wrong. But a lot of the groups had completely different styles and some looked like a website like ours was, so I felt better afterwards. A lot of the look of the design was due to who the audience was, but also the groups used different websites to create it: a Google site, Wiks, Weebly, Word Press, etc.