Readers' Advisory Fundamentals: Books and Beyond

• Are you involved in planning, providing and promoting advisory services to your community's adult readers, listeners, and viewers at a time when public health concerns have altered your library's service plan?
• Would you like to increase your comfort with responding to community member interests in locating materials that will satisfy their searches for books, audiobooks, films, and music?
• Are you ready to learn how to apply best practices in contemporary advisory, working with your library's collections and your community's assets and challenges?

In this six-week online course, which satisfies all of the Library Support Staff Certification (LSSC) competency areas for adult advisory work, you will have the opportunity to learn and practice the interviewing, evaluation, and communication skills needed to provide your local community with access to satisfying leisure reading, listening, and viewing, and become acquainted with a variety of resources to help you build your advisory skills.

Note: This six-week course covers content previously offered through two separate four-week Infopeople online courses.

Course Description: Through a variety of readings and other resources, assignments and optional activities, online discussion forums, and guided field practice, this six-week online course provides: best practices, tips and techniques, and the opportunity to put them into immediate action meeting your community's interests in reading and media discovery. In addition to becoming familiar with a variety of published tools that support excellent advisory work, you will develop your own customized aids and become ready to collaborate with other agencies in your community, and beyond.

Course Outline: When you log in to the Infopeople online learning site, you will see weekly modules with these topics:

• Week 1: Readers' Advisory Basics
  • What is advisory work
  • Genres
  • Appeal factor theory
  • Advisory interviewing
• Week 2: Library Advisory Work in 2023
  • Delivery methods
  • Best practices in 2023
  • Interviewing techniques
  • What library-based advisory work isn't
• Week 3: Library Advisory Venues
  • The library catalog
  • Technology and marketing
  • Active advisory
  • Passive advising
  • Advising remote library users
  • Social media use and the advisor
• Week 4: Growing Your Community Beyond Traditional Methods
  • Your community is unique
  • Community experts as advisors
  • Using published lists
  • Promoting commercial online advisory tools
  • Curating free advisory sites
  • Creating community through advisory planning
• Week 5: Community Priorities Meet the Library's Budget
  • Collaboration enhances value of library services
  • Diverse staff roles in advisory service delivery
  • Addressing specialized preferences and needs
  • Local experts beyond library staff
  • Prioritizing: every budget is a response
  • Developing a formal advisory service plan
• Week 6: The Future Relies on Your Flexibility
  • Locating reviews of new materials
  • Prizes, long lists and short lists
  • Your advisory log, blogs and buzz
  • Assessing future advisory developments

Time Required: To complete this course, you can expect to spend 2 ½ hours per week, for a total of fifteen (15) course hours. Each week's module contains readings and other resources, an assignment, and various options for activities, discussions, or online meetings. You can choose the options most relevant to your work and interests. Although you can work on each module at your own pace, at any hour of the day or night, it is recommended that you complete each week's work in consecutive order as the material builds on previous weeks' content and learning.

Who Should Take This Course: Staff in any type of library who work with adults in providing, planning or promoting advisory services. Please note that use of Pinterest (or a social media platform such as Instagram) is a requisite for course participation.

Library Support Staff Certification (LSSC): This course is approved as covering the Adult Readers' Advisory competencies for the LSSC program.

Do you work in a rural or tribal library? If so, you may be eligible for a course fee waiver. This Infopeople course has up to five no-cost seats allocated for rural or tribal libraries. Fill out a fee waiver request(link is external), and if a no-cost seat is available you will be notified via email.

Keywords: RA, advisory, recommendation, lssc