Week 9: Book Trailers and Training Wrap Up

Assignment 1: I read the articles on book trailers.

Assignment 2:
Looks like book trailers have a long way to go for their popularity to be widespread. Today, most are not worth the effort, acording to the articles and the few I watched. The two book trailers that I felt were successful were Wonder by R.J. Palaccio and Room by Emma Donoghue. This may be because the inner voice of the protagonist is very well developed in both trailers and the mood of the books was captured. Not all trailers capture a reader enough to make them want to read the book. Most readers like author interviews and traditional book reviews for their next book suggestion.

I would not use book trailers as a readers' advisory tool because most readers' advisory encounters last far less than it would take to look for a book trailer. Book trailers are so few and far apart that by the time one researches it, the customer would have left the library. Book trailers really need to be revolutionized before they would become a useful readers' advisory tool, unless a customer is not a reader but a listener. They could listen to the book trailer instead of reading the reveiw, but the reviews are so much better and capture the essence of a book.

Assignment 3:
This assignment was tedious and hard to find time to complete. Staff at my branch were allotted 2 hours per week. Some assignments could be completed within the 2 hour time, but many others could not. With less staff and more desk time, training like this needs to have time designated on the schedules, and even with scheduling, it was more time consuming than it was marketed.

It was very difficult trying to toggle back and forth between the blog and the instructions to each assignment. Also, the blog is not easy nor intuitive to move around while working on it, like other blogs I have used. Some of the assignments were worthwhile and others weren't. It did force me to spend more time with sites I knew about, but had not pursued enough.

Overall, I am glad I completed it and hope some of the things I did learn will be useful in the future. Some of the things I learned were: how many tools there are out there available to librarians and customers for their readers' advisory, how inter-related many of the genres can be both in fiction and nonfiction, how a few articles on adults reading teen books can help a branch change how they help customers with readers' advisory and merchandising, etc. Our branch had been doing monthly readers' advisory exercises, and these branch exercises were helpful in detailing appeal characteristics at a more thorough level.

The best source out of all of the ones we used is definitely Novelist Plus for Readers' Advisory and just plain old reading a lot in many different genres and age levels will increase readers' advisory skills, too.