Never apologize for your reading taste. – Dr. Betty Rosenberg’s First Law of Reading Recently a patron who was requesting a celebrity memoir apologized to me for asking for this “trashy” book. I assured him that we at the library don’t judge what our patrons want to read, that we want him to read whatever *he* wants to read. I made fun of the librarian stereotype, pulling my glasses down my nose, glaring over them, and waving my finger in a shushing manner, and said, “Yeah, we don’t do that anymore.” He laughed, and I hope he went away understanding that the old prescriptive model of libraries as purveyors of Official Real Literature has morphed into the new model of libraries as suppliers of Real Literature + Pop Stuff Your Friends Are Talking About, and that’s ok. It’s hard to understand what our patrons really want if we are busy judging them in our heads instead of listening. Let us make Dr. Rosenberg’s famous law our basis for recommending.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 21:02:37 +0000
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