Thursday, September 6, 2012

Memorable Reference Interview

A lot of firsts happened for me yesterday. I was helping a particular patron who shared her story with me about being a teacher in an underfunded school where her classroom was out of a tiny art room closet. I felt definite sympathy for her having friends in similar situations.

Her question was whether or not our 1Book 1Community selection for this year, When the Emperor was divine was appropriate for her middle school students. She informed me of a similar situation where a book was recommended to her classroom, but because of a few choice words (foul language) there was discontent among the community/parents. I walked over to the Information and asked Jason and Chuck if they knew of any websites that critiqued books by content. They said they didn't know of any. A quick google search lead me to a website called "The Literate Mother" which not only included evaluation for content but a rating system as well. I got some flack from my co-worker for using this questionable site as a source of information for this patron, as if she were a college student and I gave her a Wikipedia article as a primary source. My compromise was to give her the review as a guideline and a copy of the book for her to judge for herself, along with the knowledge that not only were several local middle school teachers picking copies of this book to use in their classes, but also that this book was being included in other middle school curriculums in other states.

The result was that she not only took several copies of the book to give to her superiors to read but she also took my bookmarks I had designed to promote the libraries Facebook page to give to her students as a way to track their reading logs. She even asked for my business card, which has never happened to me before. It's only been a year but all in all this way a fairly memorable event in my career. Start small! Dream big! That's my motto.