Ebook only books, which are increasingly popular (especially in the romance genre) see little to no reviews in professional publications unless they have a big name author, and then still it's usually only RT Reviews (formally Romantic Times) or other genre heavy publications. How does this affect collection development?
It definitely makes it harder for ebook only books to make the cut for collection development. I think that is just the way things currently are since librarians can't be expected to read every book ever written in order to have an informed decision about including a title for collection development. A lot of these books will unfortunately never even be heard of due to the lack of professional reviews since that is the main place librarians make their collection development decisions from.
I have posted two more documents in the week five files. One is two reviews of an ebook only romantic suspense novel, one from a blog and one from amazon. Look over the reviews - do you feel they are both reliable? How likely would you be to buy this book for your library?
I think there are several other factors that would weigh in on whether I would buy this book for my library. These reviews are helpful due to the fact that, as someone who is not likely to read them myself, they give some insight and understanding of the content. However, the informality and the grammatical errors do affect my response to them and, if these were the reviews available, would make me hesitate in buying them for my library. The other factor I would consider are the statistics for circulation for other ebooks similar to this title already in our collection. If there is already a strong interest in similar books, the positive reviews that are there might tip the scale in favor of purchasing them for the library. If ebook romance is not of much interest to the patrons, I think this would be a pass from me personally.
The other document contains some reviews of Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt, an incredibly popular memoir. These reviews are all from professional publications, feel free to find more on your own I just nabbed a few from the Book Review Digest database for you. How do these reviews make you feel about the possibility of adding Angela's Ashes to your collection?
After reading these two sets of reviews, I am acutely aware of my own bias in favor of the professional reviews. As someone not in charge of collection development, I can only imagine how much stronger that reaction is for someone who reads professional reviews all the time. I have no doubt that I would add Angela's Ashes to my collection based off these reviews, but that also makes me wonder what my reaction would be if there were professional reviews done for the romance ebook. I think due to the content, it makes comparing these books a little awkward, but perhaps a better thought experiment might be if the opposite were true: if Angela's Ashes had no professional review.....
Do you think it's fair that one type of book is reviewed to death and other types of books get little to no coverage? How does this affect a library's collection? And how do you feel about review sources that won't print negative content? Do you think that's appropriate? If you buy for your library, how often do you use reviews to make your decisions? If not, how do you feel about reviews for personal reading, and what are some of your favorite review sources?
I don't think it is fair, but I also think it is the current nature of the beast. There are so many people writing books and so many being published that, as librarians, we have to rely on reviews in order to learn about as many books as possible in the shortest amount of time. To combat that, I think it is up to the librarian to diversify where they get reviews and to try and occasionally dive deep into genre specific resources and use more unconventional methods.
As far as negative reviews go, I think there is something to be said about getting a more honest opinion of a book. I don't think it is necessary to go off the deep end and have these scathing reviews (as humorous as they may be!) because ultimately there really is no point in writing a review if all you have to say is negative things. Having a critique or criticism layered into the review, however, is incredibly useful and, in my opinion, gives a more accurate picture of the book. As someone not yet working in the library field, I tend to use GoodReads for my source of personal reviews. I take many of them with a grain of salt, but I have also found that there are many who put real time and effort into their reviews. If I understand the format correctly, GoodReads also sorts the comments by those voted to be the most helpful or agreed with. I tend to look at several of the 5-star reviews and 1 or 2 star reviews to try and get the entire spectrum of what makes people like or dislike a book before reading it. I also like to go back and look through more reviews AFTER reading a book too, to see where my own perceptions line up.
Hi Zach, I'm in your camp with the negative reviews, why bother if the entire review is negative? I also take user reviews with a grain of salt; every book will get a negative review from a reader at some point. I have found that after you've worked with a community of readers for a while, you get an idea about what works for your library and what doesn't.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point. I guess I always assumed that there would always be a diverse set of readers, especially if there's a large population the library is serving. How big is your library that you work for? I guess the better question would be, what's the population size that your library serves?
DeleteI think you are right on with librarians having to take some initiative and dive into lesser known resources to look for books; especially for genres that they are personally not interested in. I like Laura's observation that after awhile, you do learn your demographic and their reading habits! I think that helps collection development as well. What I really appreciate with my library, we belong to Evergreen, Overdrive, and Hoopla. With those three avenues, is we do get a patron with an obscure interest, if we don't have it, we can definitely find the book at another larger library! Also, something that does not get mentioned much, is talking to patrons! Personally, I am not terribly interested in the far out science fiction. We have a couple of patrons who LOVE them. They would be ideal to talk to about how we could weed or expand our collection for others to enjoy. In the next couple of years, it will become my responsibility to order books. This class is great with helping me to see past the Library Journal which seems to be my director's do to source for ordering titles!
ReplyDeleteI am sure those far out sci-fi fans would LOVE to be a resource for the library too, especially if they are into it as much as it sounds! That's a really good idea!
DeleteHi Zach,
ReplyDeleteI agree that ideally a librarian would consult lesser known review sources to get information about more obscure titles or formats. If the library had a staff member whose role was devoted solely to collection development, this would probably work fine. Thinking of my own library, though, where collection development is super decentralized, it's just not realistic. Because collection development duties are spread among probably 20 (or more?) people throughout the system, ordering is just one of our many duties. I order music for my branch, but I have a lot of other responsibilities that take priority over researching lesser known titles, so I just cannot justify spending time on such a task. I hope my library adopts a more centralized model for collection development because I think the whole process would be much more thorough as a result.
I can attest to what Shannon and Laura said about how much it helps to get to know the readership at your library. I work in Circulation, so I am able to get a pretty good sense of what our patrons enjoy reading. I think this is what subconsciously influenced my own response to this prompt. I said I would consider ordering the ebook-only romance. The Amazon and blog reviews were definitely not convincing (the writing style was very informal and they did not point out specific appeal factors), but I knew that this book was something my patrons would like because they tend to check out a lot of books in this genre. This is something I know because my job involves working on the frontline with patrons literally all day everyday. If I was more of a behind-the-scenes librarian, I might not know what the readers enjoyed, beyond what the circ statistics tell me, and this might influence my decision to order the book.
Excellent prompt response! I'm like you in that I tend to gravitate towards Goodreads to look at multiple reviews, I also love seeing how my feelings of the book lined up with other readers. Full points!
ReplyDelete