Essay Summary

To begin the summary, I want to cheat a little and include the introductory paragraph. I tried to make it explain everything my paper attempted to do….

It is the right time for readers’ advisory services (RA) to grow into whole-library advisory services. Joyce Saricks has spearheaded the work of RA becoming the base text in the majority of graduate level RA classes, including our own. Her firm foundation has established a concrete way to step around talking about genre and finding out why readers like books. This essay argues for an expansion for her theories along with a critique of some of the factors Saricks’s overlooks about library patrons. Whole-library advisory becomes a welcome addition to Saricks’s method both enriching RA and expanding advising theory across library platforms allowing patrons easier access to all formats. After a discussion on theory and method this paper will dive into a discussion of how whole-library advisory meets a need of access for patrons.

For a critique of Saricks, I used the work of Karen Dali along with an explanatory example of whole-library advisory with video game research. Dali’s work claims that Saricks misses that mark of ‘why’ a reader picks up a book by focusing on appeals. Dali believes social and personal reasons need to be taken into consideration to have a great RA conversation. Her method has merit, but needs work on establishing the ‘how’. My thought was to argue that combining the appeal-based conversation with the ‘why’ factors would be easiest with incorporating all formats a patron consumes, this why there is always something to point to as an example.  A paper I found on video games provided the basis and research for my theory to be shown as workable as in that format, just like in books, there are both appeal-type factors and personal/social factors (mood, fellowship, challenge) that need to be applied to grasp the real reason a person enjoys the media.

The last main idea of the paper was that whole-library advising is a need that has not been filled in the digital age. Companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple are trying to figure out how to offer their users a movie based on what book we bought in their digital store, and the companies that do this best are enjoying great success. I state that libraries can become a leader in this to stay relevant, as we offer this service in a very personal way.