Services Design
Readers' Advisory
Even the best reference librarians cannot be everywhere for everyone. It is for this reason that libguides provide such a crucial augmentation to the librarian's arsenal in meeting the information needs of his or her users. I explored precisely this in my quest to create two libguides for varying purposes. The first was a readers' advisory, the second a pathfinder devoted to a topic of my own choosing.
The readers' advisory was a distributed effort between a team of individuals including myself, each of us picking a particular topic or genre and exploring it within the confines of modern juvenile fiction. The topic I chose for myself was horror, having long been intrigued by the aesthetic of the unknown and unknowable and the sense of atmospheric mystery and tension which pervades good horror. It is not hard to rattle off a list of adult horror novels, but when it comes to works aimed at a younger audience I was unsure what there would be for me to discover.
I went through a number of lists of horror novels, making particular use of GoodReads and their litany of user-generated lists and reviews. I looked over what felt like countless lists on or related to the topic of horror, picking out books which appeared most often and going over the reviews, good and bad, to try to see if the work truly fit with what I wanted to accomplish. By the end I had selected ten different novels, each with their own varying appeal and style.
Our teamwork proved quite crucial in this project as in the middle of it one of the worst ice storms to strike the Triad area occurred, leaving us scattered and unable to meet properly. In what limited capacity we did have we continued to collaborate, using Google Docs to add in our own findings so that, when we were finally able to, they could be added into the libguide. Despite the added challenge, we managed to pull together and create a good libguide.
While horror might be a particularly narrow topic, what this taught me is the importance of considering what a library’s patrons wish to read and how I can then attempt to meet those needs through research and the design of a service that will lead them to new and interesting options, be it in something such as horror, the Napoleonic Wars, or any number of other topics.
Related: Readers' Advisory
Pathfinders and the Proto-Indo-European World
The readers’ advisory served as an introduction to the libguide format, helping me to grow comfortable with it and understand its potential value. This was quite fitting as my final challenge for my reference class was to create a true pathfinder, a libguide uniting a diverse wealth of resources on a particular topic. At first I thought I would choose to create a guide on the Proto-Indo-European language as linguistics has always been a field of particular interest to me, especially when it intersects with anthropology such as in ethnolinguistics. Since I already knew a fair bit about the language side of things, I decided to instead branch out into something new, something which appealed to that cultural side of the equation: Proto-Indo-European religion.
While we can readily accept that the various branches of the Indo-European language family must have some common root, we tend to see the manifestations of culture within the Indo-European group as being islands unbound to one another. Be it the Norse, the Romans, the Greeks, the Iranians, the Afghans, or the Slavs, each are treated as their own utterly distinct entity. When one looks closer though, there begin to be hints of commonality, similar threads that go beyond mere cultural borrowings.
As an example of this, we can easily hand-wave the similarities between the Roman Diēspiter (Jupiter) and the Greek Zeus (Zeu Pater) as being so similar due to cultural borrowings—indeed, many mistakenly go so far as to say that the Romans outright stole the Greek gods and just renamed them, when in reality the Roman gods existed long before the Greek and Roman cultures began to mix. Even so, surely it is just a curious coincidence that these two figures are both sky-fathers and chiefs of their pantheons, right? Well, there is also the Vedic Indian sky father Dyauṣ Pitrā from half a world away. Unless we are about to say the Indians also stole their pantheon from the Greeks—or the Greeks from the Indians—it begins to seem like a lot more than mere coincidence. Rather, these commonalities begin to hint that, just as the Indo-European languages draw from a common root, so too might the Indo-European pantheons draw from a common mythology. Indeed, the linguistics hint at this, with a common root being found in Proto-Indo-European: Dyēus ph2ter, meaning sky or heaven (Dyēus, from whence we get Deus) and father (ph2ter).
Between the research itself and the use of the libguide, I was able to learn just how valuable it is to design the sort of resources people can utilize to further their own interest and education. Whether it is something as simple as a readers' advisory to something as narrow and focused as a pathfinder on Proto-Indo-European religion, the libguide provides an adept resource for reaching the public and enhancing the services of the library.
Related: Pathfinder on Proto-Indo-European Religion