At
the Information School, with its emphasis on technology, research,
and "content management," it's hard for some of us to keep
in mind why we joined the program in the first place: our love of
books and working with the public. Is there still a place for us in
the librarian profession? I took this question to David Wright, a
reader's advisory librarian in the Fiction Department at Seattle
Public Library and an occasional iSchool guest lecturer in Nancy
Pearl's reader's advisory class. The result was the candid, informative,
and very encouraging interview that follows:
You
graduated from here in December, 1999. Tell me about your decision
to go back to school and get your MLIS.
Like many librarians,
I came to this profession the long way 'round. I used to be in theater-got
an MFA at UW-was always chasing after the next job and working day jobs
to pay the rent...Well, one of my day jobs was as a library technician
at the law library at Preston Gates & Ellis...and that evolved into
a similar support position with the U.S. Courts Library, where I got
my first taste of reference work. And I thought, hey, this is kind of
fun, and fairly meaningful, and at least benign if not positively beneficial-let
me look into this...I started taking night classes at what was then
the Library School in Suzallo, and within a few months I started working
as a student librarian for the Capitol Hill Branch of Seattle Public
Library. That was it-I fell in love with this work. On my first day
solo, I had people humming Mozart tunes for me to identify and a woman
asking for a picture of what I later learned was called "canine
coital lock" for a tattoo, and every other thing from every direction.
I worked as a student librarian for two years while I continued as a
library technician during the days, and took classes on nights and weekends-it
was a very busy time, and yet...I always felt energized arriving at
the public library for my shift, and I took that as a good sign.
Was there any
coursework that particularly helped in your present job?
I took some classes
from practitioners, some very good, some not so. I'll just wade into
the controversy here-I was very critical about many of the changes that
took place when we became the iSchool. I admire Mike Eisenberg and just
about everything he's done for the school, but as a public librarian
I remain unimpressed by the iSchool's commitment to the work and future
of public libraries, as reflected in things like core courses and professorships-the
service professions remain a poor relation in the department's budgetary
priorities. Not that I want to pick a fight. It can be great having
classes taught by practitioners in the field, and my favorite classes
at UW were all taught by people I now work with at SPL...The student
librarian experience was hands-down the best part of my schooling-I
was very sad to learn that we've had to curtail that at SPL, and I hope
we bring it back when our budget will support it..
So, what's a
typical day on the job for a reader's advisory librarian?
On any given day
I might be weeding the collection, assisting readers who come in searching
for a particular book, or just looking for something they're going to
like...assembling a customized book list for a patron or a more general
book list for us to publish, setting up or stocking a book display,
participating in a discussion group, assisting a member of a book group,
lots and lots of other things. I get to participate in a poetry group
we have that meets every Tuesday at noon, and that is a great time...The
most important thing I do is simply giving good public service...Of
course it's important to know how to find stuff, but all of that doesn't
mean a thing if you don't enjoy talking to people and sharing their
enthusiasms...
A while back
you told me that people in your department were reading and discussing
books from genres outside their usual interests. Has this been useful?
Genre study is
one way of helping staff become more proficient at talking about books...For
example, in the Fiction Department we did a study of the Romance genre,
and everyone who participated in that read various kinds of romance:
contemporary, historical, regency, paranormal, ethnic, young adult,
and romantic suspense. That was invaluable to me, as I don't normally
read romances. A suspense study that I've lead with PSRAR (The Puget
Sound Reader's Advisory Roundtable) and will be doing at SPL includes
softer suspense like Mary Higgins Clark, hard-edged suspense and noir,
legal and medical thrillers, and different kinds of political and espionage
novels. Doing a genre study won't make you an expert in any genre, but
if you do it enough, you get toeholds all over the fictional map.
Aside from participating
in an organized genre study, readers' advisors need to read all kinds
of fiction. Reader's advisory is not about what you-the librarian-likes,
but about what your patrons like. If you have lots of Horror fans that
use your library, then you'll need to be dipping into the ghosts and
gore, whether you like it or not. But it isn't a chore. One of the best
parts of this job is the obligation to read and enjoy a wide range of
popular fiction. "Gee-I'd really like to read this bone-dry article
on retrieval systems, but I ought to get a few submarine thrillers under
my belt first."
What are reader's
advisory librarians around the country doing? Is there an active network?
Public libraries
all around the country have been getting wise to the importance of reader's
advisory, but the capitol of the RA world is still the Midwest in general,
and Illinois in particular. Most of the big names in RA are there, and
they have been doing great networking throughout that region for decades,
with groups like the Adult Reader's Roundtable. Here in the Northwest
we've been working to get a similar group going for a number of years
(the above-mentioned PSRAR). Four times a year, reader's advisory librarians
from around the region get together to do training and exchange ideas.
Recently I was invited to be an inaugural member of PLA's Reader's Advisory
Committee. We met for the first time at ALA midwinter this year, and
it is hoped that we'll be doing some programming at PLA in 2006.
I am an active
member of Fiction_L, the Reader's Advisory listserv, which is a great
resource for people doing this work. I also belong to SF-Lit, Dorothy_L
(a mystery listserv), Romance Reader's Anonymous, and other listservs.
Hundreds of librarians around the country help each other out via these
networks, suggesting readalikes or identifying hard-to-find titles that
patrons have been seeking for years and years...Reader's advisory really
thrives on this kind of sharing both within and between institutions-the
collective mind is a valuable approach for questions that don't resolve
into a single factual answer, but rather a range of choices.
What's the career
outlook for RA librarians?
The whole reader's
advisory renaissance came about in part because of a growing awareness
that much of the reference work that librarians have done in the past
is being steadily chipped away by the Internet. Not to overstate the
case-there are still plenty of things that a good librarian can do for
even the savviest online searcher...But more and more people don't need
to ask us what the height of Mt. Kilimanjaro is anymore, or get us to
reserve books for them, and that used to be a big part of our business.
So librarians have been casting about for things that help justify our
continued existence-and there it is, staring them in the face. The vast
majority of people who walk through the library doors, or dial in to
the catalog, are coming to us for a good story...Think about it-if our
libraries just provided reference, with no kids' books or fiction-how
many branch libraries do you think the public would support?...On the
other hand, we could probably eliminate the reference desk altogether,
and still have people flocking to their neighborhood library.
I don't mean to
knock reference work-I love reference work-I totally understand and
share that badger instinct, and it is a hugely important and useful
service. But for way too long librarians and library schools seeking
some kind of scientific legitimacy have ignored the human side of our
profession. Now that tide is turning. More research is being done on
how we read, what we read, why we read. Story is fundamental to our
lives-to how we think about our existence, how we construct meaning,
how we get through the day...
Reader's advisory
is definitely a growth field right now-it is in vogue-witness the boom
in reader's advisory publications...And reader's advisory is showing
up in job descriptions and mission statements all over the place. But
even if and when the current fashionableness of RA fades, the actual
ability to do basic reader's advisory-to reach out and take an interest
in people's reading lives and make your library a part of the greater
community of readers-that will remain a vital skill for librarians to
create living, breathing libraries-libraries that will survive regardless
of what technology does.
What is the
role of developing technology in reader's advisory? If people can search
databases like Novelist, will they still need librarians?
No, technology
will not replace reader's advisory librarians. Not that there aren't
lots of interesting and useful online and print tools coming out that
really help with this work. The Novelist database has been adding features
and refinements over the years, and has become quite handy for tracking
down hard-to-find titles, the kind of literary detective work we do
a lot of, as well as identifying similar books...I'm a big proponent
of using all the tools you can get your hands on...But in truth the
kinds of things that a reader's advisor is looking for are more complex
than what goes on in a reference interview. Reference is all about subject-we
look for things "about" things, and there is a long tradition
of indexing, classification, and cataloging that assists in that. Reader's
advisory isn't about subject-or rarely is. It is about character depth,
pace, tone, setting, outlook, language, and lots of other things...There
have been attempts to automate that process, resulting in some interesting
and entertaining websites and databases, but there is no reader's advisory
machine. There is not a scanner that you can feed a book into and get
a printout that says, "Hmmm, menacing and creepy in a nonviolent,
psychological way, sort of like Ruth Rendell, but funnier, edgier, and
with some profanity-starts slow, but picks up nicely, etc." Ultimately
it is that human contribution that tools like Novelist rely upon....
Plus a lot of reader's advisory is about human interaction-having conversations
about books-sharing that pleasure (and pain) person to person. That
won't go away-people need that, and that is what will keep people coming
to libraries even when that distant day comes when everyone truly does
have online access.
Can people really
learn how to do reader's advisory, or is it a God-given talent?
It's a God-given
talent. (Just kidding.) There are some extraordinary reader's advisors
out there-Nancy Pearl is a great example. She has done a lot for this
profession...But it is easy for the rest of us mortals to get a bit
intimidated by such stellar performers... Reader's advisory is something
that everyone can do, and can learn to do much better. I'm not saying
it is easy-in my view it is more challenging than reference. But you
can definitely learn how to do it.
Does adult reader's
advisory have a place outside of the Fiction Department of libraries?
While most public
librarians can use reader's advisory, I'm not as sure about subject
specialists in academic and special libraries. Mary Whisner at the UW
Law Library did a neat article on reader's advisory in law libraries
("Good Reads in the Law Library?" Law Library Journal. Summer
2001, 517-523). I certainly think anyone dealing...with nonfiction subjects
in a public library benefits from knowing some things about reader's
advisory. Sometimes you'll be doing a reference interview, and you'll
find you're having a tough time-that the question, the subject that
you're looking for, just won't jell properly. At those times it is useful
to remember that the patron might not be looking for a subject at all,
but just for a good book. "Can you recommend a good history book?
I'm interested in WWII, but I'm more interested in something exciting,
something that doesn't bog down in details, etc." The subject of
nonfiction reader's advisory is starting to get written about-there
was a nice article in a recent collection called The Readers' Advisor's
Companion (Shearer, Kenneth D., and Robert Burgin. Libraries Unlimited,
2001).
I can't let
you get away without asking the fun stuff. What are you reading? What
were your favorite reads of the past year? In general, what are your
reading interests?
I've always been
fickle in my reading tastes-and working with fiction readers is a way
of turning that into a virtue...My all-time favorite books tend to be
big old things by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. James Agee's Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men has a special place in my heart. I loved Middlemarch-the
sparkling intelligence of Eliot's narration. The best book I read last
year was Nabokov's Lolita-just brilliant! I want to read more
of him, including his translation of Eugene Onegin. Other stuff
I've enjoyed recently was the latest of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch
mysteries-I read much of that excellent series this year-and az novel
by Richard Flanagan, Gould's Book of Fish, which is just about
indescribable, but hard to forget. Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist
was hard not to like, although a bit impersonal for my taste. There
was a really good Jazz novel that came out this year called Shackling
Water.
I tend to like
books that combine elements of genre fiction with some of the style
or characterization of literary fiction-a good example of that this
year was a book called Violence, Nudity, Adult Content. I also
really enjoy more spare stuff, like hardboiled and noir writing by folks
like Jim Thompson, Kenneth Fearing, Frederic Brown, Charles Willeford,
Raymond Chandler, James Sallis, Chester Himes, etc. Ken Bruen is a good
current writer in this area, and John Ridley. I read this just NASTY
book by Gary Phillips called The Perpetrators that was a true
guilty pleasure, as is Iceberg Slim. I like lost treasures. I've
recently been reading a guy named Jim Tully who wrote back in the 30's-a
tough guy writer who eschewed crime stories for books about circus life,
carnies, etc. John Franklin Bardin, Boris Vian. Writers who like to
shock. It is fun working with readers who have adventuresome tastes
and look for cutting-edge books-a lot of Capitol Hill patrons are like
that. I like spy novels-one of my favorite spy thrillers of all time
is a 1939 Geoffrey Household thriller called Rogue Male. Terrific
action. Delighted to see the early Eric Ambler titles come back into
print as well, riding on the coattails of historical espionage writers
like Alan Furst.
I also enjoy poetry,
from haiku to rap to epic, and have been reading a fair amount of Greek
history and philosophy lately. I read Hamsun's Hunger this year,
a book I'm sure I'll return to...I just loved a recent little book called
The Emperor's Babe-a bittersweet love story between a teenage
Nubian housewife and a Libyan Roman Emperor in Londinium, written in
verse.
Wow, I was going
to ask you what I should read next. I like history, unrequited love,
fires and circuses, and books set in Africa...But I'm afraid your answer
will exceed my word limit! So, I'll seek your advice later. Besides,
I need to go find a copy of The Perpetrators...
Thanks, David.
(By the way, David would like to continue this dialogue with any iSchool
students who have further questions about the profession-or maybe just
some good book suggestions. His email is dwright@spl.org.)
