New tech tools and library innovations take patrons well beyond the bestsellers Andrew Smith, Readers Services librarian at Williamsburg Regional Library, VA, has a lament, and it's not a new one: 'We have to weed many good books that haven't circulated in years - despite our best efforts.' Librarians have long grappled with how to draw patrons to the mid- and backlist books relegated to the deeper reaches of their collections, but innovations in technology and fresh marketing insights point to new approaches to making the entire collection move.

E-readers' advisory

It's no secret that readers' advisory is a great way to steer patrons to books they might have overlooked, and increasingly more libraries are starting to provide RA online. For the last two years, Williamsburg has been running the Looking for a Good Book program, in which patrons complete a form that, as Smith puts it, 'teases out information about their likes and dislikes in reading - characters, settings, genres, writing styles.' And that's teasing with a fine-toothed comb: patrons have the option to express such preferences as the main character's age and personality, the number of plot lines, and the degree to which the ending is resolved. The form asks for five books the reader did not like. 'Then one of the members of our RA team responds with a personal list of authors and titles they might enjoy,' says Smith. 'We've done about 250 forms so far - most completed via the website - and have gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback.' Making the plunge to web-based RA can mean less work, faster distribution, saved paper costs - not to mention that the audience, and potential new users, would be receptive. A 2005 OCLC survey on Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources showed that 42% of respondents considered their online library as an information source, while 55% would opt for the brick and mortar. And that gap is closing. More patrons are interacting with their libraries online - 23.8% more in 2004. Library web sites boast an alluring array of RA features these days: staff-written reviews, annotated lists, readalikes, discussion forums. The Ossining Public Library, NY, hosts the Ossining Review of Books (ORB), a literary magazine/online public forum run by marquee editor Bob Minzesheimer, VP of the library's Board of Trustees who leads book coverage for USA Today. On ORB, which went live in January and is updated monthly, librarians and local authors like novelist Benjamin Cheever recommend and review books. Readers can jump in with opinions of their own, answering questions of the month like 'What's your favorite book about Westchester?' Word of mouth of this kind has the potential to wipe the dust off many a library treasure. Imagine what an article like the one in the newsletter's latest issue,'Five of My Favorite Books of Feminist Speculative Fiction,' could do for the Elisabeth Vonarburgs or even the Charlotte Perkins Gillmans in your stacks. Clever lists can become the go-to source for hungry readers, and online they can feed folks beyond the library's base. The Mid-Continent Public Library, in Kansas City, MO, offers a 'Based on the Book' section on its site that compiles more than 1150 books, novels, short stories, and plays adapted into motion pictures since 1980. This, too, is an excellent resource, considering that the release of a movie based on a book is one of the biggest catalysts for patrons to look beyond the bestseller list in the first place. And the Gardiner Public Library, ME, famously maintains an archived online list of 'Who Reads What' dating back to 1988 that highlights celebrity book selections. Here patrons can discover the favorite reads of everyone from Kofi Annan (All the Pretty Horses) to Lucille Ball (Anatomy of an Illness) and, provided they don't already rub elbows with the famous, they'll be picking up books they might otherwise never have happened upon.

The blog's the thing

Blogs, through free platform-offering services such as WordPress, Yahoo!'s Moveable Type, or Google's Blogger, offer good forums for alerting patrons to new materials, posting lists of upcoming titles, and calling attention to undiscovered classics. Though some, like Denver's Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library, maintain a staff blog and are in the 'thinking about it' process of starting a public one, a good number have already gone for it. According to librarian and tech geek Meredith Farkas's 2005 demographic survey of the biblioblogosphere, 18.3% of respondents had an official library blog for patrons. Miriam Bobkoff, a reference librarian at Santa Fe Public, uses her library's blog - called Icarus because, she says, Santa Fe is a 'technological low-flyer' - to draw attention to wallflower titles by pulling cover images from the catalog or posting short bibliographic essays under such headings as 'More Non-Fiction Pleasures,' 'Terrific Titles,' and 'Ripping Good Stories.' The blog has spurred interest in titles she recommends or discusses: patrons stopsby her desk to talk about books they've read at her suggestion. Icarus gets approximately 500 hits a month and is, says Bobkoff, Santa Fe PL's fourth most frequently accessed library web page. Network coordinator Diedre Conkling of Lincoln County Library District, OR, which arguably flies at a higher altitude technologically, admits that what she likes most about her library's blog is the RSS feed. 'I think that it's because of that that there were over 20,000 hits on our blog last month,' she says. How much work does it take to maintain a blog? The one at Marin County Free Library, San Rafael, CA, relies on five staff members to contribute content, one person for every week day. E-services librarian Sarah Houghton says the blog 'has helped us communicate to our patrons, in yet another medium, about what's new at the library.' She estimates that each post requires 5-15 minutes, 'depending on the length, hyperlinks, or images involved.' Then there's the potential of providing this type of service in real time, e-reference style. Libraries like Cleveland Public have integrated RA into the mix by offering ReadThisNow, a statewide live chat on which telecommuting librarians are available 24/7 to answer requests for suggested readings. As with the reference service, at the conclusion of the chat a transcript is emailed to the patron with links to the resources discussed. As of December 2005, ReadThisNow had 4,889 users.

Matchmaker

The evolution of the MatchBook program at the Morton Grove Public Library, IL, is a great model of the adaptability of online RA. Developed by Morton Grove nearly a decade ago, MatchBook allowed patrons to keep up to date on new additions to the library's collection that match their personal preferences. In 2001, the complimentary lists went from being picked up at the library or snail-mailed to patrons to email delivery. In mid-2005, Morton Grove signed on with BookLetters, an RA service introduced several years ago by BookSite and BookPage that offers enhanced web services and provides self-generated and custom lists, to create MatchBook Select. It now includes an emailed monthly list of new books that meet patrons' interests; e-newsletters focusing on a variety of titles; a cumulative, searchable database; and, because the newsletters link back to the library's OPAC, automatic reserve. According to reference/electronic resources librarian Colleen Ringel, the Select system currently has 450 subscribers. At Hennepin County Public Library, MN, staff reviews are written and RA selections made centrally, a system that might change soon. Sharon Hilts-McGlinn, adult services librarian of the eLibrary, feels it is burdensome. 'We have looked at some of the new services, like BookLetters, to take on some of that work,' she says, 'because we'd like to be able to do better annotations. That's one of our aims: we'd like to produce more content on a less labor-intensive level. And we'd like to have staff who are genre specialists refreshing the pages.' Other examples of RA subscription-based services are the decade-old Fiction_L, Thomson Gale's What Do I Read Next? (WDIRN), Bowker's new Fiction Connection (free for Books In Print subscribers), and EBSCO's NoveList, which was improved last year with enhanced series searching, popularity sorting, and phonetic search help.

Pushing new reads

In March EBSCO will launch NextReads, which disseminates reading lists on 20 different genres and topics and gives librarians the ability to create their own lists and then push them on email to patrons who have subscribed on the library's web site. Other than taking the burden off library staff, the advantage of turning to outside resources is compelling. Much of the content has already been created - available templates can be easily customized with individual branding and lists adapted for local needs - and expert staff is already in place and on hand to field questions or problems. The newsletters are made available to the library several months before the send date to vet titles against the OPAC and then several weeks before the send date so librarians can preview and modify each list (or not) before they are automatically sent to subscribers. 'Maybe some people who never make it past the best-seller shelf will actually use something that has a 1999 imprint on it because they get it on their newsletter list,' says Dodie Ownes, a Colorado-based independent information services contractor who offered a peek at the service at ALA's Midwinter meeting in San Antonio. 'And because the newsletters themselves are dynamic and linked to the catalog, you get people into the library's resources more.' E-newsletter providers like Constant Contact and IntelliContact also present a good case for putting newsletter mailings into someone else's hands: libraries receive reports on reader feedback, bounce-backs are handled, and survey tools track and analyze mailing and response information. They make juggling several newsletters a cinch. Using Microsoft's List Builder, the Denver Public Library sends a weekly e-newsletter that lets customers know when an order has been placed that might appeal to them (Book Ahead), a monthly e-newsletter that lists upcoming books (BookBound), and separate newsletters for teens and children with suggested reads (BookBuzz). Web information services and resource sharing manager Michelle Jeske estimates the library sends more than 10,000 newsletters a month. 'We see holds go up on almost all books mentioned in the emails about books,' she says. 'If we discuss a web page on our site, we see views of those pages rise, too.'

Meeting all needs

As book groups have been migrating online in email and blog form, libraries' options are keeping pace. The Kent District Library, MI, and Skokie Public Library, IL, use an e-service book club called DearReader to email readers a five-minute sample from a book daily, generate newsletters, and start online forums and clubs. DearReader, which claims 760 library system subscribers (or 3000 individual libraries) and 300,000 library users, specifically avoids bestsellers, and its staff checks upward of 100 catalogs to make sure that libraries already own the books they recommend. Programming isn't immune to the benefits of the Internet, either. Many libraries offer workshops, classes, seminars, and author events that can spark interest in topics previously unfamiliar, intimidating, or inaccessible to patrons. Anita Barney, director of the Brookfield Library, CT, recently started using her monthly general newsletter 'to remind people about concerts or special programs.' Each underappreciated book that comes out of the stacks is an advertisement for further exploration. Librarians who aren't seriously considering the difference an e-service could make are selling themselves and their collections short, and those that rethink old habits are often onto something. But enhancements should be made on every front. Williamsburg's Smith has noticed that 'one of the gaps in staff awareness that turned up [in a recent meeting] was that many of us are readers but don't read outside our comfort zones.' By initiating two staff book groups to discuss various genres and readers' needs in those genres, he hopes to 'increase the number of staff members who can talk with a modicum of knowledge about a wide variety of genres, help patrons, or direct them to a more knowledgeable person.' Smith highlights another integral strategy: continual staff development on the RA front.

---

Link List
Blogger www.blogger.com	BookLetters (BookSite/BookPage) www.bookletters.com	Constant Contact www.constantcontact.com
DearReader www.dearreader.com	Fiction Connection www.fictionconnection.com	Fiction-L www.webrary.org/rs/FLbklistmenu.html
IntelliContact www.intellicontact.com/index.php	List Builder www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/online/email-marketing/list-builder/detail.mspx	MatchBook Select www.webrary.org/RS/matchbookselect.html
MOTOR www.motor-online.com	Movable Type www.sixapart.com/movabletype	NextReads www.nextreads.com
NoveList www.arls.org/ebsco_novelist.htm	ReadThisNow www.readthisnow.org	What Do I Read Next? www.gale.com/servlet/ItemDetailServlet?region=9&imprint=000&titleCode=GAL10&type=4&id=111002
Whichbook www.whichbook.net	WordPress wordpress.org

---

Raya Kuzyk is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in BlackBook, Publishers Weekly, and LJ