Today, I did my first booktalk. The assistant manager for my branch asked me to talk about Fantasy and Science Fiction books in our staff meeting about this years Summer Reading Club. Thus, I was performing for a friendly audience. Nevertheless I feel I can honestly say that its an experience I wouldn’t mind repeating in the least.
For those of you who are completly confused, Booktalking is when you stand infront of a group of people and talk about books (there’s a head scratcher for ya)! You quickly have to sum up why a book is great and who should read it. For today’s, I was to just talk about books in these areas (I threw in History Nonfiction as a bonus) so staff would know what was out there when they inevitably got questions about what good books are out there. Since we’re aways so swamped during Summer Reading Club, its important that everyone be able to fill this role.
For the one today, I picked books I like and feel others will like. Some will tell you that you don’t have to have read the books, but I feel that its much easier to talk about books you have read and liked or at least have an appriciation for its virtues. Booktalking books unfamiliar to you involves enough additional preparation to sound knowledgeable that you might as well read the book as far as I’m concerned. You can also speak with more passion about books you genuinely like.
For example, at the meeting today our teen librarian talked about teen books. All were books she liked and weren’t necessarily on any best seller lists. You could tell by the way she talked exactly why this woman is a teen librarian, for her passion and enthusiasm for these books and teens and general was plain for all to see. Her personalized approach made her comments seem genuine and meaningful. All of us have spoken to people who’ve just read the dust jacket on something and then try to act like they read it. I comes off as really phony and does nothing to inspire.
For my own part, I have gotten some good reviews on my efforts. I had a couple coworkers tell me they liked what I had to say and wanted to know more about some of the books I discussed. I’m not a great public speaker, but I have to tell you, I found this to be rewarding experience and highly reccomend it.
Fantastic Fiction – http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/ – 3 Stars
Many who know me have heard me extoll the virutes of this site. It allows a person armed with an author or title to find other books by the same author. The site is great for determining the next book in a series and its faster than using a database like Novelist (if you don’t know about Novelist, ask a librarian its great!).
This site is easy enough to browse and search within its focus. Most books are linked to amazon so yoy can get a hold of a copy. The site has cover images, and often has them for multiple editions, so if you can only remember the cover of a book you read in the past the site can be really helpful. The site is not the most attractive out there but it is very functional. Some author pages have listings of books recomended by the author. This is really cool as it often exposes one to new and more obscure authors.
Sky and Telescope Magazine – http://skytonight.com/ – 2.5 Stars
Sky and Telescope‘s site offers a lot of neat stuff for telescope and astronomy enthusiasts, including cool columns, stargazing tools, blogs, feeds, and more. One can learn how to start with this hobby and ways to get involved with the stargazing community.
The site looses ground with me as far as the layout is concerned, as its really busy. It also includes ads which always irritate. If the ads weren’t thematically related to the site I would have taken off another half star on my rating.
Give the site a look, and be patient.
I’ve decided to abandon the name “CoolQueries” for this blog. As neat and potentially marketable as that name was, I felt I wanted to go beyond talking about interesting reference questions (turns out there weren’t enough truly interesting questions to write about).
“The Life of a Sentient Search Engine” speaks to my passion for reference service while being more open to other “librarian stuff”.
PDF Online – https://www.pdfonline.com/convert_pdf.asp – 4 Stars
I just discovered this at work today! This free service allows one to convert numerous popular document and image formats to PDF. Now I know this is nothing new, but its special to me because its all online! Where I work, I cannot install the software or drivers necessary to use most of the PDF coversion solutions and therefore could only make PDFs by printing the document, and scanning it to PDF on our RICOH copier. This naturally degraded quality significantly and was, needless to say a hassle. This free online site does the conversion with no messy real world interaction, creating crisp PDFs that look like the original document.
The site is easy to use and feature rich. All the most popular Microsoft document formats and most image formats are included! The site does load slow so be patient! Also be patient when uploading, as, quite naturally, some files take a while to upload. It only takes a short while after that for the file to show up in your mailbox. Highly recommended, especially used in conjunction with a mail service like Gmail or Yahoo mail for PDF creation on the go!
