Listening to Advisors: A Conversation About Readers’ Advisory Services, Practice, and Practicing

Abstract

As RA service has moved from its second-wave renaissance during the late twentieth century/early twenty-first century (with a steady stream of reference tools, conference programming, and think pieces) into an often underpromoted but bedrock mainstay of the public library, what do advisors continue to discuss among themselves and see as areas of need? If you could gather a handful of advisors together, over a cup of coffee one rainy morning before book group began, what would they talk about? What would they ask each other? What do they know to be foundational about the service? As important, what might they suggest we all re-think? This column invites you to eavesdrop on such a conversation. It was conducted over email between six advisors: two at the start of their careers, two helping to define the field, and two who have lead the way for librarians, for a combined eight decades. These advisors share research, hard-won and lived-in lessons, showcase the luminous nature of RA work as well as its difficulties, propose a change for RA education, and, of course, each suggests a book to read.

Reading time: exploring the temporal experiences of reading

“…Accounts of everyday practices related to reading that get at what people read and when, how they find and keep track of reading materials and how they manage their reading preferences allow us to also see the discontinuities in linear timelines. These timelines correspond to how reading choices are often imagined in LIS-that is going from a need or desire for a particular book, for a particular kind of reading experience [3], to a site where such needs and desires can be matched with reading materials to the actual reading event (which is treated as a discrete series of actions itself), to reflection or feedback on whether the reader is satisfied, and then repeat the process at some other distinct point in future time (Wyatt, 2019). Some of the most consistent findings in reading research with teens and young adults (age categories that are themselves typically characterized as temporal transitions in biological time) are defined by time.…”