Collection Developments @ Sno-Isle

from today’s Shelf Awareness:

Library News: Early Word Gives ‘Em What They Need

Congratulations to Nora Rawlinson, former editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly, former editor of Library Journal, former librarian extraordinaire and a great onetime boss and dear friend, who has founded EarlyWord.com with another ex-PW person, Fred Ciporen. (More about him in another issue!)

Rawlinson said that Early Word aims to be to libraries what a great sales rep is to bookstores: offering insight on forthcoming titles that appeal to their customers and tips on titles that are suddenly taking off.

The centerpiece of Early Word is Rawlinson’s blog, “Give ‘Em What They Want,” where she writes every day in conversational and informative style about books libraries might otherwise miss or underbuy. “In libraries, there is so much else going on besides new books,” Rawlinson said. “Librarians don’t the time to look around and seeing what’s taking off. I’m trying to give them quick and easy access to what’s getting attention and rising in demand.”

For the blog, Rawlinson said she watches movement on Amazon as well as checks librarians’ catalogues and see what ordering patterns are. She also tracks reserve-to-copy ratios–in the case of Scott McClellan’s What Happened the ratios showed extraordinary interest, rising to 10 to 1 and 20 to 1, in some places, she said. Librarians also tend to read more pre-publication reviews than consumer reviews and can miss trends in that area, which Rawlinson addresses in the blog and with links to consumer review media.

Besides commentary, Early Word features a variety of resources for librarians, including links to national and specialty bestseller lists and to publishers’ e-catalogues. The site also offers information about book-related movies and TV and about one book/one community picks, a directory of publishers’ library marketing staff and their special services for libraries. (”The librarians’ sections on many publisher sites are hard to find,” Rawlinson said.)

The next main project for Early Word is to create a group of readers advisory and collection development librarians who will be paired with various imprints. “The imprint would pitch to the librarian, who would then write about their picks and takes on the books on Early Word,” Rawlinson said, explaining that “publishers don’t have reps who call on libraries because even though they are 10% of sales, there are too many of them.”

Rawlinson started posting in November, “just to get in rhythm and figure out what I wanted Early Word to be.” By the ALA midwinter meeting in January, she talked with groups of librarians to get more information about what they wanted from such a site. By the PLA meeting in March, Early Word had a soft launch. For the moment, the focus is on adult titles but eventually the site will grow to include children’s and YA books as well.

The arrival of Early Word is fortuitous: the importance of libraries continues to expand in the Internet Age, Rawlinson said. Library websites have long posted their holdings and allowed readers to reserve books. But now they offer downloadable audio and e-books, send out e-mail newsletters and are putting up staff recommendations. “These changes are bringing in a new group of users who don’t have time to go to the library,” she said. “Some of them come into the library once, to get a library card, and then do everything with the library online.”–John Mutter

Congratulations! You found the Collection Development blog. We hope you’ll come back regularly and look around since we post new entries frequently. Ah, but I hear you say, “I’m too busy to remember to go take a look at the blog, and besides if there isn’t anything new there since the last time, won’t I be wasting time when I should be working.”
Patience, grasshopper, there’s a cool way that you can be notified whenever new material is added to the blog, and other websites you visit as well. It’s called an RSS feed, and Bill Barnes of the library comic strip Unshelved has a great little post explaining what they are and how to set one up. Be sure to watch the little youtube video Bill recommends, its great. Setting up an RSS feed is super easy and only takes a few minutes.

Meredith Farkas (Information Wants To Be Free) has an article in Library Journal 12/15/07 summarizing her findings of which librarians are blogging and why. Some of the things I found interesting.

Who blogs.

• Academic librarians are more likely to blog than public or special librarians.
• More men than women blog.
• The number of librarians who are blogging continues to grow.

Most bloggers contribute to more than one blog.
“A collaborative blog can be an excellent option for those who don’t want the sole responsibility for a blog but want to share their ideas. Some 24% of respondents contribute to a collaborative blog they consider professional in nature, and 12% contribute to a collaborative personal blog.”

A collaborative blog like ours.

Why they blog.

“Respondents were asked to list their top three reasons for blogging. The majority (69%) identified sharing ideas with others. Other popular reasons include building community (38%), contributing to the profession (23.2%), and reaching out to patrons (23%).”

Meredith also notes that many librarians blog as a form of writing practice and as a way to keep abreast of developments in librarianship. A related article on Libraries and Blogging appeared in the 11/15/07 LJ.

You can read Meredith’s full findings here.

In order to make this into what I hope will be a useful resource for us, I’ve added some links and RSS feeds. There are now RSS feeds for the Collection Development feature in Library Journal, as well as the Books section of the New York Times.

Collection Development also has a Delicious feed on the blog as well. I’m hoping that all of us will add content to delicious as a way to share articles and websites amongst ourselves. See me for logon information. If you have a delicious feed of your own, please add Colldevsnoisle to your network. Don’t know what Delicious is, watch this video here.

In the Links and Tools section you’ll find links to particularly useful resources. I’ve added links to the New York Times Bestseller Lists, and also to a site called Metacritic which pulls together reviews from respected critics and major publications. Metacritic gather reviews books, film, DVD, games, and music. The reviews are weighted depending on the authority of the source and then the combined scores of all the reviews are averaged to determine an overall score. So for example if you look up a film like “The Usual Suspects” a review by Roger Ebert will have more importance than a review from Jim’s Movie Blog–and no, I don’t have a movie blog. The combined scores in Metacritic are nice but what’s really useful is that for many of the sources the full text of the review is just a click away.

find reviews for a book and more on summize.

in thinking about an internal blog, here’s a useful list from ‘The “M” Word,’ Blogging for a Purpose?

I’ve got the Hank Williams Monday Night Football theme in my mind for some reason….perhaps because after today’s Collection Development Summit I’ve lost my mind.

I see the positives of blogging as

• Permanent and chronological
• Easy to use and monitor by RSS
• Improvement over public folders

Perhaps its time we talk about this again.

Getting all ready for Digipalooza this morning. I leave Seattle tonight late and arrive in Cleveland early Friday morning.

Post script to this post.  This conference spent a good deal of time listening to speakers, I easily could have blogged this conference to better share some of the information I learned–if I had a laptop with me.