I’ve been collecting readings and citations for my #WhatWeRead project for the last few weeks and organizing them in Zotero. But I’ve remained uncertain about where exactly to start at, other than just picking up the thing closest to me at the moment. Until I realized exactly what the closest thing to me was: my own work.
Several years ago, while I was still working on my Master of Library and Information Studies degree at the University of British Columbia, I wrote a paper called “Book Appeal, Literacy, and the Reader: Readers’ advisory in practice and theory” for my Public Libraries course (full text link is in the middle of the page - I had trouble finding it). The paper was mostly an opportunity for me to spend some time delving into the research behind readers’ advisory (RA) services in public libraries. It appeared to me that RA was a library service where best practices came largely from “what-do-you-do?” hearsay (into which I include many of the articles on RA in professional publications), trail-and-error, a few well regarded and well published practitioners, and enthusiasm. I wanted to find what solid research there was to back up RA practice (which I guess is essentially what I am doing right now, too).
Later I submitted the paper to our program’s inaugural edition of See Also, which a number of my friends were spearheading as “a student-run, open access journal devoted to showcasing high quality original research and scholarship created by students at UBC’s iSchool/School of Library, Archival and Information Studies.” It was submitted mostly because my friends were organizing the journal and mentioned that they had very low submissions for their inaugural edition . . . not because I thought my scholarship was in need of sharing with the wider world. To be honest, it’s mostly a very short literature review with an argument that I really hadn’t enough depth of experience with the research to fully back up. (It’s also very apparent at the end of the article that I was about to exceed the assignment page limit if I didn’t wrap this thing up quick).
The first thing I learned from reading my own work (other than that this is a deeply nerve wracking thing to do right before I publicly re-post my own student work for the world to see), is that I have apparently misnamed the #WhatWeRead project: “In order to better understand the book selection process, the focus on what we read could be exchanged for a richer exploration of why we read” (3).
Well sorry, past self. We’re stuck with #WhatWeRead. We’ll just have to live with that.
Second, I was reminded of exactly what gave me the interest in books selection as a literacy skill. In a short section of researcher Catherine Sheldrick Ross’s paper “Making choices: What readers say about choosing books to read for pleasure” (2000), she suggests (to quote pg 8 of my own paper - I haven’t reread her article yet) “that successful choices are ‘a part of a self-reinforcing system that sustains the pleasure of reading itself, while disappointing choices kill the desire to read’ (Ross, 2000, p. 12).”
In other words, if you have developed the skills needed to select books most likely to interest and appeal to you and to meet your own current reading needs (mood, energy, time, etc.), then you are more likely to enjoy the reading experience, building trust in your own selection process (as well as furthering your skills in that arena) and thus making you more likely to keep reading. And vice versa. If you haven’t develop the ability to judge how trustworthy a recommendation is, how your own mood an life events will impact a reading experience, how to judge a book by it’s cover and determine, before investing in a longer reading experience, whether or not the writing is appealing and approachable for you, then you are less likely to have an enjoyable reading experience, less likely to trust yourself and other sources of information you used to select that material, and less likely to read.
Now as I suggest in my paper, I’m not entirely certain from reading Ross’s work that she had the depth of data necessary to back up this idea (nor from my memory of this article, do I think she claimed she did). But I am fascinated. This in particular is something I would like to find more research on. It seems closely related to the information literacy skill of being able to select the material most useful for your information need, but this is not an arena of research I have delved deeply into outside of my coursework.
Can you help me out? Anyone know of anything out there about book/reading selection as a literacy skill?
Ferri, A. (2015). “Book Appeal, Literacy, and the Reader: Readers’ advisory in practice and theory. See Also, 1.
Ross, C. (2000). Making choices: What readers say about choosing books to read for pleasure. The Acquisitions Librarian, 13(25), 5. doi:10.1300/J101v13n25_02
