Bass, H. (2014). Teens and
personalized reading lists: A perfect match*. Young Adult Library Services, (Spring),
21-23.
Summary
In this article, Hayden Bass
details how the teen services librarians at Seattle Public Library piloted an
online readers’ advisory program that was popular among teens. For this
program, librarians provided personalized reading lists to teens who
emailed them information on the types of books they liked to read. The teen
librarians called this program, “Your Next Five Books” (YN5) because they would
recommend five titles based on the teens' likes, complete with links to the
catalog and short abstracts of each title. The article outlines how this
service was an immediate success, mainly because the teens liked the
personalized service and human interaction with an adult who is truly listening
and paying attention to their interests and needs.
Evaluation
This article showed me the
important role that readers’ advisory should play in collection development.
Since the nature of readers’ advisory is grounded in human interaction, librarians
should use this interaction with patrons as an opportunity to gauge which types
of books to add to the collection. Also, it is important to note that teens are
an underserved population because many are afraid to “bother” the librarians at
the desk face-to-face. Perhaps we could serve more teens if we can provide them
with readers’ advisory web forms since teens like the convenience and confidentiality
afforded by web forms; all the while still providing personalized service to teens. In
addition, this article underlined the importance of getting patron input in
regards to understanding their reading interests.
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