• Jillian Yau, Lane Cove
• Therese Scott, Ashfield.
• Merilyn Hills, Hornsby.
• Ellen Forsyth, State Library.
• Martin Mantle, Armidale.
• Helen Foley, Strathfield.
• Sean Finlay, Randwick.
• Sarah Hajjar, Bankstown.
• Jenie Woodward, Mona Vale.
• Anne Duffield, City of Sydney.
• Karen Deegan, Fairfield.
• Karen Mitchell, Lane Cove.
• Pat Annetts, Newcastle.
• Tonia Bisho, Newcastle.
• Jacquiline Elstein, Mosman.
• Merilyn Porter, Mosman.
• Kasia Malicka, Burwood.
• Gaye Stinson, Burwood.
• Lim Goodarzi, Canada Bay.
• Jenny Nicholson, Kogarah.
• Kirsten Bell, Armidale.
• Margaret Gibson, Blue Mountains.
• Kathy Hane, Blue Mountains.
• Jenny Lyttle, Parramatta.
• Yan Zhang, Parramatta.
• Vassiliki Veros.
• Will Coombe, Lane Cove.
• Vincenza Cigolini, Hills.
• Anne Nenne, Lane Cove.
• Jenn Martin, Auburn.

Grant White, Campbelltown

(looking for guest bloggers 52 blog posts needed, plus posts for blogjune).

Please think of things you might be able to write about for the reading group for 2012. Just one paragraph about one of the monthly themes can be turned into a great blog post. Email writing to Ellen and she will make sure it appears on the blog (love2read2012.wordpress.com).

Monthly themes are available here: http://love2read2012.wordpress.com/monthly-themes/

This is a great collaborative project that is little work, that everyone can use - please link to the blog on your library website or library blog, and please feel free to reuse content (just remember to link back to the blog and include information about each month’s twitter reading discussion.)

New research and new challenges. Is it time for some RA training refresher, e.g. How to conduct and RA interview?? - Martin

Intersection between ebook use and readers advisory - how to assist customers with format choices. Increasingly need to be experts on the technology used to read - different formats and different interfaces. What happens when a customer comes into the library with ereader in hand and asks you how to find new books to read?

Page on wiki for discussion: http://readersadvisory.wikifoundry.com/page/eBooks+and+Readers%27+Advisory

Great links to professional articles on the wiki from Martin.

Encouraging customers that ereaders aren’t out of the ordinary. Helping to make customers comfortable with them. How can we assist customers with print disability? How can the Library Initiative that offers libraries Daisy Readers benefit from Readers Advisory? Home Library Services that push content as well as pull content. Would be a very effective delivery model if HLS customers wanted to use ereaders. Physical limits to HLS may be extended with a virtual service. Connection and human contact is important, too. Still need to have conversations with customers.

Do any libraries offer show and tell sessions for their customers so they can try different ereaders?

• Randwick runs Talking Tech sessions. Auburn Library has just started Overdrive and is running introductory sessions to help customers use the software.

• Readers Advisory Training to include e-readers and e-selection. Ref ex?

• A reasonable percentage of NSW libraries currently make e-books available via their library catalogue (20% of hands raised at meeting?).

• Don’t need the right tools to start engaging, can download and read ebooks on your computer to start with. State Library Readers Card gives you access to EBL. Find out which libraries have Overdrive and become a member. Work out the parameters for your own reading and get a degree of comfort. Our own technical struggles in the early days will make us more sympathetic when helping customers.

• Tweeting from Kindles/ipads? You can cut and paste text from book you are reading and share.

• Technical problems could possibly turn customers off the experience - staff need to help raise awareness that there are lots of options and sometimes you need to support clients and suggest alternate formats/access. Prices are continually dropping for ereaders - will become more and more ubiquitous.

Lending rights with digital content - the more we promote to customers and create demand, the safer our access to ebooks from libraries? People who borrow ebooks through public libraries have a higher purchase rate - Vassiliki mentioned article from Publishers Weekly (http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publishing-and-marketing/article/49316-survey-says-library-users-are-your-best-customers.html). Ownership of collections - subscribing and distributing content, rather than owning - huge shift for collections. Help customers become literate about where they can access free content - sometimes it depends on what kind of reading software you have (eg MegaReader). Pointing our readers towards content that we do not control.

All about being proactive and offering advice and helping.

Range of different readers - DRM for public library acess. Kindles are always developing. Need to do your research about what you want to access. Devices are very personal - how does it feel, how do you hold it, how does it function, what is the screen like, does it have a light so you can read in the dark, what is softer on the eyes and which batteries last longest? Completely depends on the individual reader and their needs.

• Fancy cables can be used to link devices to library furniture, so that they are available for customers to play with (ala Mac Store and Queensland Writers Centre)

• Talking Tech workshops for library customers can help them try a range of different devices (Randwick)

• Staff training for using equipment - small groups, let staff take equipment home (Auburn)

• Staff will become community recognised troubleshooters. If you show people how to do things themselves and explain it as you fix the problem, you will help people learn and feel confident.

• Ereaders and readers advisory will be a standing agenda discussion point so that we can keep conversation going on this topic. Please contribute to the discussion on the wiki and take photos of your own exploration with devices, also sample promotional material for talking tech and sight support would be useful.

• A Discover ereaders blog post for Love2Read2012 would make a good collaborative post. Anyone who is interested, please email Ellen Forsyth.

Blog posts are regularly coming from the RA Sterring Committee and guest bloggers. Twitter reading group on the last Tuesday of every month is going well.

Looks great - lost of NSW staff updating regularly. Jenn suggested that we approach active participants and ask them if we can use their content in Love2Read2012 blog posts.

Completed spreadsheets are due back now. Please email to Ellen Forsyth at State Library. Takes approx 4 hours of staff time to check. Send comments along with your email back, telling how you are using it and how it is helping to generate discussion. Leanne and Ellen would like to hear of the value of the exercise and what discussion it generated.

http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/services/public_libraries/library_mgt/stock_quality_health_check.html

Leanne and Ellen will be drawing a Big Picture from the results of individual spreadsheets and will be reporting broad stats, but will not be naming individual libraries. The SQHC is mostly a tool for generating local discussion about collections within your library organisation.

What do you do about areas where numbers are low? Are they low for a reason? That area has been highlighted by the evaluation, but what is the appropriate response? Look at your community and decide what will be useful - you don’t have to buy everything. Sometimes the best response is a proportional response.

Next year is Childrens’/Young Adult.

Plan to revisit Fiction 500 in 5 years time, replace some titles to refresh and then check again. Exploring on a 5 year cycle.

- Jenn and Ken

After presenting survey ides to group, it was decided that the best way to collect information on what individual libraries are doing for book groups on the Readers Advisory wiki - Jenn and Ken will create a list of libraries and have a page for each to contribute information about how they run their reading groups.

There will be a section where you can link to online resources relating to your book groups, or add attachments to the bottom of the wiki page.

Martin (Armidale) - Michael J Sandel Justice: A Journey in Moral reasoning. Digital booty for Christmas: the enhanced/annotated e-version of Kerouac’s On the Road.

Sean (Randwick) - Iraq War narratives - Martin’s enhanced ebook made Sean think of digital intertexts that could go with these narratives - journalists who were filming during incidents etc - could you link with youtube or watch youtube with book in hand. Video enhancement of narratives. Raises interesting issues about changing to materials advisory across formats - the internet interelates to everything that we read.

Helen (Strathfield) - Marieke Hardy’s You’ll be Sorry When I’m Dead - funny, charming and slightly irritating at times.

Sarah (Bankstown) - new Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves.

Jenie (Mona Vale) - Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending - elegant, interesting, engaging - themes of memory and time.

Anne (City of Sydney) - Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman - challenge to read Booker Prize shortlist.

Karen (Fairfield) - Honeymoon Dive, Simpson and Cook - true crime narrative.

Karen (Lane Cove) - Benjamin Gilmour - Paramedico - 80 countries by ambulance. Lives in Bondi but has worked in so many places - funny, but with serious moments. Spoke at Lane Cove recently and was a great public speaker.

Pat (New Castle) - Kate Grenville.

Tonia (Newcastle) - Michael Connelly - political intrigue and suspense.

Jacquiline (Mosman) - is reading for a Crime Book Club at Mosman Library.

Merilyn (Mosman) - Matilda is Missing - Caroline Overington’s third fiction book. Used to be a journalist. About a custody battle.

Kasia (Burwood) - Broken by ? Different take on a To Kill a Mockingbird type narrative. Through the eyes of a little girl who witnesses a crime. Different place. Similar themes to Harper Lee.

Gaye (Burwood) - Serendipity by Alexander McCall Smith. African society - customs and expectations. Detective Story on the top, Social study underneath.

Lim (Canada Bay) - Terry Pratchett - Guards! Guards! - graphic novel. A reading choice from Fantasy Reading Group. First Terry Pratchett.

Jenny (Kogarah) - A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness - witch who is denying her abilities and falls in love with a vampire. First in a series.

Kirsten (Armidale) - Hellraisers - the life and inebriated times of Richard Burton, Peter O‘Toole and Oliver reed - recollecting movies they have done - good for materials advisory when you speak to customers who borrow a lot of DVDs. Also reading Dogman - biography about Japan after WWII - couple who are attempting to save the Akita dog after it verged on extinction.

Margaret (Blue Mountains) - The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Wall - Japanese Artefact inspires a journey through 19th century European Banking and Art world.

Kathy (Blue Mountains) - Katrina Best - Canadian Novelist. Short Stories - all funny. Centenary Antarctica books - Scott’s last diary - available online. Blue Dressing Gown - poetry chapbook from Ross Dalton.

Jenn (Auburn) - Neal Stephenson and Jennifer Crusie.

Jenny (Parramatta) - Sophie Kinsella.

Yan (Parramatta) - This is Not the End of the Book - Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere. Looking at the role of the book in society, interesting read when thinking about new and different reading formats etc.

Vassiliki - John Larkin’s new book - The Shadow Girl - Also reading lots of apartment and design blogs on ‘flipboard’ on ipad.

Will (Lane Cove) - Villa et Belle - very sad book - couple who help people escape from the nazi invasion of France. Lots of sad moments and matter of factness in book. Cookbooks on ipad - Donna Hay magazine is free on ipad at the moment - multiformat - can browse magazine, or has slide screens for recipes with step by step instructions. At Swim Two Birds. (maybe try The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Carey?)

Vincenza (Hills) - Audiobooks - abridged version of Northanger Abbey. When my Husband does the Dishes - very funny collection of lists. MP3 - Sherlock Holmes - if he had lived and been a historical figure - set in France during WWI - might be a secret agent?

Anne (Lane Cove) - Historical Mystery - Master of Souls - Irish Nun - background is really interesting - legal detail. Mary Stewart - republished.

Therese (Ashfield) - Privileges - set in Manhattan. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel on ereader.

Merilyn (Hornsby) - Tea with Arwa by Arwa El Masri. Story about a young Palestinian Australian woman.

Lake of Dreams by Kim Edwards. Audiobooks while cleaning. Shelter Me - young widow - different take on death and grief.

Ellen - Ian Rankin - Impossible Dead - new characters. WoW character based novel - great landscape descriptions. Neal Stephenson - REAMDE.

-Therese Scott.

Ideas going up on Love2Read Website. Brand everything with the logo. Ideas on the wiki. Time to get a team together in your library. Voting for one story in libraries - great way to get people reading the shortlist. Banners will be available shortly - $200/300. Can use logo on own merchandise - like tshirts/bags etc. Redbubble will have twitter reading group tshirts available. Can get a better transparent logo from the organisers. Indigenous version of logo also available (is it an approved logo?)

Idea for promoting National Year of Reading - slip printers

-from Ellen

http://www.knockknock.biz/catalog/categories/pads/playtime-pads/lets-pretend-pad/

‘Let’s pretend’ pad - discussion starter - can be used as an idea sparker. ‘I read a book’ pad with discussion starters for reading and talking about reading with kids. Paper tweeting pad - great for crowd sourcing posts in a non digital way - also for encouraging people who don’t get twitter. ‘Guilty reading pleasure’ - asks comfort level etc. Anonymous review tool - pass out to customers and display their reviews in the library.

Next Meeting: Hawkesbury Library, February 7th.

Materials/Integrated Advisory to be included on Agenda for this meeting.