Week 13 Prompt Response

I find it is easy to feel personal bias, because I am, simply, a person, with, yes, a unique and important, but still, a narrow knowledge of mainly my own perspective.  Thus, I will freely admit I sometimes experience a sort of snobbery about some reading choices I see customers making.  And we’re all susceptible to this, I think, which is why we often choose to make important decisions in concert and include a variety of perspectives in the process, or we join ourselves to an institution that is larger than ourselves that has the resources to include a variety of perspectives.  That brings me to the American Library Association and our connection to the organization as librarians.  As individuals we are allowed to feel and explore our own biases, as librarians we are not.  

The ALA lists as part of their mission their motto, “The best reading, for the largest number, at the least cost” (ALA, About ALA, 2018).  Well, of course “the best” is sort of what this prompt is about but ideas of “the best” are so fluid and dependent on personal experience (see above) we should really try to talk about something quantifiable like audience size, or as the ALA’s motto puts it, the “largest number” (2018).  Brookover establishes that there is “an audience of dedicated, loyal, even ravenous readers … (a) proven fan base” that has led “traditional publishing houses to take notice” and to try “their own hands at New Adult” (2014).  If there is a significant audience that has caused publishers to sink capital into developing content for them I think libraries are duty-bound to provide access to that content along with all of the other information we collect.

Another consideration is that if we truly believe as librarians/readers’ advisors that “reading has intrinsic value” then we shouldn’t be worrying about the content or format but simply about the act of reading that supplying YA/NA/Graphic Novels to adults is supporting (Saricks, 2005).  We can get into debates about quality and “the best” but if we truly believe in access to information, ideas, stories, and texts as we say we do, then, as Pierce points out, we must work to “continu(ally) critical(ly) assess…” our actual service practice and not just opine with “statements promoting freedom of inquiry and access to information” (2006).

So, what can we do?  We can keep an open mind, read outside of our comfort zone, and, most of all, offer respect to fellow readers that don’t “expect us to be fans … (of) what they enjoy,” just to, “as fellow readers …, appreciate what they enjoy, whatever that is” (Saricks, 2009).

Works Cited:

American Library Association. (2018). About ALA. Retrieved April 05, 2018, from  http://www.ala.org/

American Library Association. (2018). Advocacy, Legislation, and Issues. Retrieved April 05, 2018, from http://www.ala.org/

Brookover, S. (2014). What’s New About New Adult? Horn Book Magazine, 90(1), 41-45.     Retrieved from Library Lit & Inf Full Text database.

Burek Pierce, J. (2006). The Borderland Age and Borderline Books: The Early Practice of Reader's Advisory for Youth. Young Adult Library Services, 5(1), 42-47.

Saricks, J. (2005). History and introduction. In Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Library. Chicago: ALA. Pp. 1-13.

Saricks, J. (2009). The Readers' Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction. Chicago, IL: American Library Association.