Week 9: Summary & Wrap Up

Assignment #1:

I watched the Packing for Mars: Space Hygiene book trailer and read the Super Sad Book Trailers article in the Chicago Tribune and the Author Takes a Turn article in the New York Times.

Assignment #2:

I do not find book trailers to be useful or effective in marketing books.  Whenever I hear the words 'book trailer,' I think of those awful commercials James Patterson puts out.  I agree with the Chicago Tribune article, that most are poorly done with little to no budget.  Peoples' imaginations are personal and one of the main things they enjoy about reading is that they can interpret a book however they want.  I think this is why we often hear people say "the book was so much better than the movie" or "I cannot see so and so playing this character in the movie" whenever a famous novel is adapted into a movie.

I can honestly say that I would not think to use books trailers as a readers' services tool.  I think many people who love to read enjoy using their imagination and getting lost in a story.  An effective book trailer would most likely have to use some details from the story, which would take away from the world building in a book. 


Assignment #3:

I found the Be More Bookish  training to be helpful and engaging.  I believe there is a lot of useful information in this training, the hard part is keeping on top of all of these resources and knowing when to use each.  I hope that I continue to remember to use Goodreads and some of the other resources covered in this training and do not forget about them or let them fall by the wayside when I get busy.  The training did a great job of covering a variety of readers' services tools, while incorporating them into hands on assignments.  I did not have any experience creating and maintaining a blog, minus grad school which was only seen by classmates, so I really enjoyed this aspect of the training.

I think Be More Bookish would be extremely helpful to new librarians and should be included as part of the Librarian's Training Checklist.  It might be hard to incorporate because you need multiple participants to make it effective, but if there was a way to offer it once a year or so, new librarians could participate in it together and gain valuable knowledge. 

I would recommend decreasing the workload a bit, or increasing the amount of time given for each assignment to make it less daunting.  Because April through June is such a busy time of the year (SRC, school visits, Schedule 3W, VoIP, etc...) I would also recommend offering it at a different time of the year.  

All in all, I thought it was a great training and involved a lot of hard work from the Readers' Services Committee!  I hope that BCPL can find a way to incorporate the Be More Bookish moving forward and take advantage to all of the hard work it took to create such a useful readers' services training.