Thursday, April 5, 2018
Week 13 Prompt
How can we as librarians, work to ensure that we are able to serve adults who enjoy YA literature or graphic novels? Or should we?
The biggest thing we can do is make sure they’re available and easily accessible. My local library has a teen area that’s open only during certain times of the day (usually after school), effectively making a portion of the collection inaccessible part of the day. To alleviate this, the library has a separate section of YA books near the main fiction collection. This means the library has to buy duplicate copies of a number of books.
Conversely, their graphic novel/manga collection is only separated into an adult section and a children’s section, making it easier to maneuver. Long story short, the library goes to great efforts to both give teens their own space, while also allowing adults access to YA books. With this library, it works; they have a large enough budget to acquire the extra books. I’m just not sure it’s a model that would work everywhere.
Going all the way back to the beginning of the semester, we read about the current definition of RA, and the history of RA. Saricks notes that we shouldn’t be trying to ‘elevate the masses’ but instead we should be helping them connect with books that they enjoy reading (Saricks, 2005). To me, this includes YA books and graphic novels - and even middle grade novels, if it’s appropriate - because if it’s something the reader is going to enjoy, then they should be able to access it and read it without judgement from librarians. Just because it has images (graphic novels) or has a main character who is between the ages of 14 and 18 (YA) doesn’t mean an adult can’t read and enjoy them.
Previous to this class, the majority of my RA interactions were with teens or kids looking for books. I know that when I make the shift to recommending more books for adults that I’ll be mixing in YA and graphic novels to people who will enjoy them, simply because I’m familiar with them. A big step towards ensuring that we can serve adults who enjoy YA and graphic novels is simply being somewhat familiar with the materials, just like we’re doing this semester.
Saricks, J. (2005). History and introduction. In Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Library. Chicago: ALA. Pp. 1-13.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'm glad you noted Saricks's comment about "elevating the masses." If we push the wrong book on the wrong reader, it can set them against a genre, or worse, reading, for who knows how long after that. We're there to help find the reader's next great read based on their interests-- not ours. It'll be rare to find someone with our exact tastes, and we can't assume ours is the best. To every reader his or her book. To every book its reader.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing how your library handles it! It's always interesting to see how libraries differ. That model wouldn't work at my system because of our budget, but I can see it's merits! Full points!
ReplyDelete