Outstanding Books and Public Libraries
The List as Merchandising Tool
Mary Arnold
The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.
—Jacques Ellul
While the Outstanding Books for the College Bound and Lifelong Learners list has been a valuable addition to the librarians’ toolbox for more than half a century, tools must be used to be effective. Rapid developments in technology offer many new merchandising and marketing variations on the tried and true avenues of booktalking, displays, programs, and readers’ advisory. Let’s look at ways in which we can capitalize on traditional and innovative library reading connections for college-bound students (and everyone interested in learning and examining new thoughts and ideas) using recent Outstanding Books for the College Bound lists to meet “needs” and create “wants.” These outstanding books can help us create an atmosphere that encourages building a community of committed readers eager to share reading responses to new ideas.
YALSA selection lists have long been a staple tool for library collection development, and the annotated OBCB list, updated every five years, is especially useful in highlighting recent titles that selectors may have missed. School librarians mention that the rigorous committee selection process plays a big part in teachers’ willingness to adopt subject-related books from the OBCB lists. OBCB plays a unique role in that its usefulness extends to many potential audiences—students, parents, educators, and anyone interested in continued learning and intellectual growth. Readers employ book lists to help them focus interest and choose from the plethora of titles in print, and compilers of book lists hope to influence readers to read specific books. Think of the appeal of Web 2.0 reading websites like Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing, or the reader-created Listmania book lists on Amazon. Many librarians become reading partners and use these networks as a virtual readers’ advisory perch, creating sites like the NEO-RLS Teen Learning Group on Goodreads, where teen librarians from library systems in northeast Ohio share reading suggestions with the world—a great forum to acquaint avid readers with the OBCB tool. Librarians can set up a Goodreads account and form a group with a title that becomes a hub for others to join, then recommend and discuss titles from OBCB lists.
Readers’ Advisory
Librarians have shared the list with schools that have used it as the basis for summer reading suggestions. Barbara Ruszkowski, librarian at Padua Academy in Delaware, created a summer reading assignment using the 2009 list, which provides a wide variety of reading choices. And as teen librarians well know, that element of choice is all important. Student readers shared reviews of their chosen books that included discussion of readability and interest levels, ease of use, logic of organization, and special features—not unlike the committee considerations for nonfiction titles! Students were also asked to evaluate how reading the book might influence their lives—certainly a prime objective of OBCB committee members as well. Padua teachers particularly recommended titles aimed at adult readers in science, math, and technology, and because the list provides annotations, teachers, students, and parents are easily able to determine the appeal of a book.
There is a growing community of homeschooled students at the high school level, and a variety of online schools, whose families utilize public library resources. Introduce the OBCB lists to parent-educators and administrators for homeschooling associations and virtual academies. Many of these organizations ask to use library meeting space to conduct mandated standardized testing, providing a built-in audience for a quick set of OBCB booktalks to welcome them to the library.
Public librarians are often the first port of call in the college search. While information about college majors, facilities, scholarship opportunities, and the like are crucial, preparing students for the level of reading comprehension that college-level study requires is something we are uniquely prepared to do. Both the 2004 and 2009 lists create reading categories based on college departments of study, so students can get a taste of reading in their chosen area of study and gain a critical understanding of differing viewpoints on issues and ideas. Share the recent OBCB lists with community partners like the Cleveland Scholarship Center (www.cspohio.org), which partners with local county public libraries for events like FAFSA Super Sunday in February. Get lists (and YALSA website links) into the hands of high school guidance counselors and literature and language arts departments. Include a link to the YALSA selection list page from the section of your library’s website on the college search process, and highlight one of the annotated titles (don’t forget a graphic of the book cover!). Make note of the fact that the books on these lists will also improve vocabulary, which helps those taking the SAT and ACT tests, as well as those writing well-crafted college application essays. Reading a variety of books in various subject areas also introduces students to terms that apply to a particular field of study.
John Briggs, a member of the College Board SAT Reading Development Committee, believes “students need to discover that there are books that our culture has kept as a legacy and these should not be forgotten.”1 The 2004 OBCB committee press release recognized such legacy books by explaining why classics like To Kill a Mockingbird were not included on this list. It then pointed to other reading tools of great value in finding those classic titles, particularly fiction, that appear on so many lists of great books and recommended reading, from the National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes to the Modern Library Association’s 100 Best Novels list.
Many public libraries offer the NoveList Plus database as a readers’ advisory tool for customers, and guess what’s available through NoveList—the most recent OBCB lists! Show readers how to customize their own college-bound reading by creating folders for annotated titles and how to use the various NoveList custom features to locate additional high-quality reading.
Take books from the list to local schools’ college information events to decorate your table or booth, with a copy of the entire list as a bookmark. As you share the many library resources available to aid in the college-application process, throw in a few short book blurbs for the titles you’ve brought along. Create a scrolling PowerPoint display on a laptop that includes information on the rich resources on the OBCB list, and look for a way to let interested students and parents check out a title right then and there.
Many librarians host book groups in the library or at other community locations, including schools, recreation centers, senior centers, and others. Annotated OBCB lists are a wonderful resource to help book groups to choose titles that may have flown under their radar and can be a new way to host a “Great Books” book group. For many of the OBCB titles, there are ready-made book discussion suggestions on publisher websites, ReadingGroupGuides.com, Litlovers.com, Bookspot.com, and others. The marvel of Skype makes a virtual author visit a possible OBCB-related program that would enhance a book group experience, allowing readers to interact with an author, express their own responses to the book, and ask questions. Or partner with a school librarian for a series of enrichment programs and activities around titles on the OBCB lists that could include Skype interactive author visits.
At Cuyahoga County Public Library (www.cuyahogalibrary.org), a committee of library staff from every age-specific service area highlights under-the-radar titles on the library catalog page. A feature like this on your library’s website could easily encompass OBCB categories like social sciences, science and technology, or history and cultures, particularly timed to the college application cycle. Readers could mouse over the book cover for title and author and OBCB list year, click to open the catalog record with full annotation, reserve the book, and check out the cloud tag “OBCB” for additional titles in the library catalog. For some books, readers could choose to listen to a podcast booktalk that gives library staff the chance to “build a buzz” for great college-bound reading. Podcasts can be created and linked to any catalog record, so every OBCB book can get its own commercial! You could even create a hot link from the catalog record and from any auxiliary library teen or college/career web pages to the online list at the YALSA website.
In addition to staff recommendations for OBCB titles, let readers get into the act. “Patron buzz” makes the library interactive and participatory. Web 2.0 applications allow library staff and readers to create categories for readers’ advisory by “tagging” OBCB titles by specific category of interest (drama/poetry/biography/history and cultures) or in general (“Great reads if you’re college bound” or “Never stop learning and growing”).
Booktalks
Booktalking has a proven track record as an effective way to highlight good reading and connect readers with books they may otherwise miss. While school classrooms are a no-brainer for finding a ready student audience, we know there are other audiences to be mined. And you don’t necessarily have to start from scratch. That’s the great benefit of professional online networks, websites, and a variety of publications that provide the basis of an effective, exciting booktalk for many of the titles on the recent OBCB lists. One such title with a novel multimedia approach that appeals to today’s young readers is Booktalking Bonanza: Ten Ready-to-Use Multimedia Sessions for the Busy Librarian by Betsy Diamant-Cohen and Selma K. Levi. The techniques for sharing the excitement of a book can be readily adapted to OBCB titles like M. T. Anderson’s Feed, Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, or Ishmael Beah’s Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Offer regular booktalk programs at a local senior center, or booktalk a selected OBCB title when you represent the library at your community Chamber of Commerce, school board, or city council meeting.
Online book trailers have become the librarian’s best trick for using social media to promote great reading. Libraries have built teen programs around creating these two-minute book commercials and uploading them to YouTube and other media websites. YALSA’s Teens and Technology Interest Group program “Lights! Cameras! Booktrailers!” presentation at ALA Annual Conference 2010 showcased a panel of authors and librarians who have successfully used book trailer contests to meld teen interests in reading and technology.2 Software like Photo Story or Movie Maker allows you to create, add images (from sources like creativecommons.org, Wikimedia.org, or loc.gov, the Library of Congress website), edit, and add special effects. Using flip cameras is fun and easy, as demonstrated on this site, which also includes lots of suggestions for storyboarding techniques and sites for free downloads: http://sites.google.com/site/flipworkshop/home/video-book-trailers/creating-a-book-trailer.
In “Digital Booktalk: Digital Media for Reluctant Readers,” Gunter and Kenny emphasize the importance of making meaningful reading connections with our younger digital-native customers. They believe that while story remains the core of both traditional print and digital media, technology is changing and broadening the definition of literacy and how students acquire reading and writing skills. They encourage educators to explore mediated instructional strategies using technologies like the Digital Booktalk web portal to motivate and match readers, especially reluctant or struggling readers, with books.3
Ever see digital photo frames used at strategic locations in the library, like at the circ desk, fiction area, teen area, or shelving range for college-related materials? Using Microsoft Publisher or PowerPoint, you can create postcard OBCB book ads as JPEGs and present a slideshow of good reading to catch customers’ attention. “Always be selling” doesn’t apply only to retail! “Read Me” shelf talkers (use colorful paper and the marvelous annotations created by OBCB members) call attention in the stacks to titles from the list and are a quick and easy merchandising tool.
Social Networking
Do you blog at your library website? Be sure to blog OBCB titles! Feature a selection of books from the humanities, social sciences, and history and cultures, and be sure instructors at your local high schools, junior colleges, and universities are aware of the uniquely useful arrangement of categories for the 2004 and 2009 lists based on academic disciplines. An added bonus is that these titles are, for the most part, recently published, include a great deal of nonfiction, and tend not to duplicate “classic” reading widely promoted in other recommended reading lists.
If your library has an institutional presence on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, use them to promote OBCB. Your Facebook wall is a great bulletin board for recommending good reading. If you tweet about library programs and activities, promote a different area of OBCB reading each month.
Displays
OBCB lists lend themselves wonderfully to thematic displays. It’s recommended that you re-create the bookstore style of reading abundance with multiple copies of titles and eye-catching realia and props (fall back-to-school displays using OBCB titles might include swaths of colorful artificial leaves, a variety of baskets, perhaps a colorful fall-themed cloth, and, of course, your harvest of good reading).
Library displays traditionally build around special days or times of year—be sure to include OBCB titles in every display you create. Chase’s Calendar of Events offers ideas for celebrating enrichment reading every month:
January—Book Blitz
February—Library Lover’s Month
March—International Ideas Month
April—National Poetry Month and National Library Month
May—Creative Beginnings Month
June—Bathroom Reading Month
July—Social Wellness Month
August—American Adventures Month
September—Banned Books Week and Library Card Sign-Up Month
October—Right-Brainer’s Rule Month and Go on a Field Trip Month
November—Inspirational Role Models Month
December—Spiritual Literacy Month
Programming
When librarians plan programs and activities of interest to their local communities, we always include displays about and information on library resources related to the program topic. Try some of the following ideas in your community.
In conjunction with local college information nights, the library could host a “campus life” panel of college freshmen sharing their real-life experience in a college classroom and dorm, discussing the kinds of supplemental reading that actually appear on a college syllabus, and talking about how reading titles from recommended lists like OBCB can be a practical way to prepare for the rigors of college-level reading. Teen librarians can then offer traditional booktalks, podcasts, and links to online book trailers for titles from the most recent OBCB lists.
What about hosting a program highlighting titles from a particular academic discipline? Invite a professor from a local college to speak on his or her field—an art professor could talk about college art courses while the librarian booktalks Carmen Bernier-Grand’s Frida: Viva la Vida! Long Live Life! (Marshall Cavendish, 2007). In twenty-six original free-verse poems, the author depicts the thoughts, feelings, and life events of Mexican self-portraitist Frida Kahlo. The poems are accompanied by twenty-four full-color reproductions of Kahlo’s paintings.
A sociology professor’s discussion could be supplemented by Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. What do the lack of Icelandic fisherman, the 2008 Chinese Olympics, and Easter Island tree cutters all have in common? Much more than you might think. Collapse explores the political, technological, and ecological decisions that merge in order to sustain or destroy societies.
Promote environmental science with Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring. Three buddies on spring break climb into a California redwood and discover a new ecosystem atop the trees. Join this group of young scientists in the canopy as they learn safe climbing techniques for the oldest and tallest trees of North America and encounter new species of plants, animals, and love.
The Outstanding Books for the College Bound and Lifelong Learner lists represent one of the most versatile and useful tools public librarians can wield. Make it work for you and the readers you serve.
Notes
1. Great Schools. “Get Ready for College Reading,” www.greatschools.org/students/academic-skills/ready-for-college-reading.gs?content=291&page=all.
2. YALSA Teens and Technology Interest Group. “ALA10: Lights! Camera! Booktrailers!” July 1, 2010, http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/2010/07/01/ala10-lights-camera-booktrailers/.
3. Glenda Gunter and Robert Kenny, “Digital Booktalk: Digital Media for Reluctant Readers,” Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education 8 (2008) 84–99, www.citejournal.org/vol8/iss1/currentpractice/article1.cfm.