Who reviews?

The web has made opinion--on anything you're looking for an opinion on--more plentiful.   That should make our job of book selection (in which we depend on other's opinion's because we can't read every book ourself) easier, right?

 

Collection development criteria are different from library to library, but I'll hazard that there's a core set of "values" for selection of children's mateirals in public libraries (literary quality, accuracy, popularity, curricular and local value, timeliness, etc.), values shared on the whole by our cohorts in the professional reviewing media.  Thank goodness they all seem to be making the transition to at least the 2.0 world: School Library Journal, The Horn Book, Booklist ...and rising from the brink: Kirkus. Don't forget to subscribe to them though! Most of them still hide their true riches behind the pay window, and for good reason.  The reason they're reliable is that their expert staff's paychecks are reliable (we hope).

 

But we now have a wealth of free online opinions to peruse, and I often wonder: how are we evaluating the media that we use to evaluate media? 

Amazon seems to have been one of the first places where anyone could post a review. How useful for us? It's theoretically possible to identify reviewer whose taste you trust regarding children's books (for me it would take having read at least three reviews for three very different books which I also read myself) and "follow" that reviewer.  That's a lot of work for a set of unedited reviews that provide no context of criteria.  I sometimes find Amazon reviews useful when attempting to gauge a popular response to a title...when that criteria is the one still in question for my purchasing decision.  Even so, one has to proceed with extreme care: like Yelp or TripAdvisor, you have to start with the assumption that at least a fair percent of these reviews are planted; and then try to read between the lines to figure out what criteria the posters are using to evaluate the thing at hand.

Blogger reviews are a little easier to make determinations about: you can usually figure out who a blogger actually is, as well as their angle.  Many blogger reviewers are now being very upfront with who they are (doesn't have to be who they really are, as long as you get an idea of how they're approaching the literature), why they're doing this, and any criteria they have for reviewing.  I found a nice example on the blogroll at Oops!: Wrong Cookie ...  The YA YA YAs.  Right across the top are links for "About" (in which easy of three reviewers introduce some of their favorite books, giving me an idea of their personal tastes) and "Review Policy and Contact Info" ...as well as for a sampling of bibliographies of favorites.  Even the description of the blog  is informative:  "Three Young Adult Librarians blather about YA literature, YA librarianship, and maybe even the Yeah Yeah Yeahs."   A few things I can tell after my 5 minute perusal of this blog (I promise you I'd never looked at them before!):

1. Posts have been updated recently, and are frequent...but only by one of the three bloggers: Trisha, which means she's the only one I really need to pay attention to at this point. 
2. The blog title and description give me a hint about the age/angle of the bloggers, or at least the age/angle they'd like to be associated with. (The name of the blog is a pun on a band name (see Yeah Yeah Yeahs)). "Blather" is an informative word choice.  i.e., unedited.  Or: "this is unofficial, so let us play around a little bit." Fair enough.
3. The Review Policy indicates that this is not a "reviews for sale" blog, and the blog posts themselves use the current convention of listing the book source at the bottom of the review. So, this is a blogger who stays up to date on blogger review etiquette/ethics.
4. In peeking at the lists of "Our Favorite YA Books" I find that Trisha bucks the tendency of most enthusiastic "younger" YA lit critics (at this point I'm just going to plow on with my assumption about Trisha's age bracket):  she's actually got 20th century titles on her top 10 list! More than one!  This tells me that she's widely read.

All this making The YA YA YAs a blog I will probably take another look at. Which thereby illustrates another value of blog reviewers: the blogroll.  Find one you trust to lead the way to others. Blogger reviews, being unedited, take a little longer to get the meat out of. But: being unedited and longer, they can offer meat you can't get elsewhere.

Common Sense Media is an interesting example of an even more developed reviewing site that is radically different than the professional media we usually rely on...yet is clearly professional.  Relying on media and child development expertise,  they review books, movies, websites and other media that is being sold to kids, and provide ratings on "The Good Stuff: Educational Value, Messages, Role Models," and "What to Watch Out For: Violence, Sex, Language, Consumerism, Drinking/Drugs & Smoking".  Short summaries then go into a little more depth on "What Parents Need to Know" and what "Families Can Talk About."

Pat Scales's article in Booklist last fall provided an important perspective on Common Sense Media and its potential use as a tool by censors.  The organization seems to be responsive to being open about their process and not being co-opted.  The "Ten Common Sense Beliefs" on their About page are illuminating, as are their FAQs.   But as a public librarian whose first concern has to be the needs and desires of the community my library serves, I have to be more than a little concerned about the judgments made in the macro-level ratings of "On" "Iffy" and "Off" for age appropriatness, as well as the headings "The Good Stuff" vs "What to Watch Out  For."  Is there a universal "common sense" among our public about what's good and bad for kids?  I do find transparent information when I dig all the way down into the statments on how each rating was given, but note that this requires clicking for more information.  A couple of examples on how this bears out.

The Newbery Honor Heart of a Samurai received 5 stars for "Role Models."  Whose role models and why? I ask, and find out that:   

"Manjiro embodies both traditional Japanese values (such as a group work ethic and respect for authority) and touted American ones (ambition, self-reliance, individualism). He’s a wide-eyed traveler, eager to soak up all he can. Captain Whitfield is an idealized authority figure, fair and noble."  Ok, I appreciate that at least the values are actually couched within the cultures they come from. The book, however, also receives 3 "bombs" for violence and 2 "#!"s for Language... which turn out to be for violence and bad language on the part of the "bad guys" in the story, violence and language that are necessary in driving forward this story-based-on-fact, and necessary in developing the 5-stared "Message" and "Role Models".  Isn't this being alarmist?  Or is the point that kids at certain ages can either handle or not handle violence or language of a certain sort...a point that anyone who works with a diverse population knows to be dangerously reductionist?

 

Compare its ratings to the ones for Dork Diaries, which gets only 1 "#!" for Language:  "Suck," "butt," "puke," "crud," plus slang stuff like "glamtastic," "I was like, OMG!," "CCP" for "Cute, Cool and Popular," and "G-G-G-ing" for "giggling, gossiping, and glossing."  ...as well as only one figure for Role Models:

"Brandon, a side character, is the best role model in the story because he is true to himself, doesn't follow the crowd, and is kind, helpful, and thoughtful. Chloe and Zoe are good friends to Nikki, working hard to make Nikki feel good and to help her win the art contest. Nikki does ultimately earn attention for being her dorky self -- but readers may be too turned off by her product name-dropping and popularity obsession to really care."    Are parents supposed to be watching out for "OMG!"?   And "readers may be too turned off by her product name-dropping" smacks of wishful thinking on parents' parts.

 

What the ratings for both of these titles fail to take into consideration is WHY a child would read Dork Diaries versus Heart of a Samuari.  The benefits they get from each are completely different, so why should a single template of appropriatness of "good stuff" vs "stuff to watch out for" apply?  

 

And isn't the "why do they want to read it?" question one of the most important things we consider when selecting books for our library collections?  In this discussion here I'm not as concerned with Common Sense Media as a tool for parents. I do think it's a powerful tool, though I feel it's somewhat deceptive on the face. I'm more concerned with its use in collection development for libraries, because I'm sure it's being used.   As a gauge for particular values that particular parents may/may not respond to, it has use.  Beyond that, I don't believe it does.

Goodreads

I started a Goodreads account first to simply keep track of what I'd read. It comes in handy if you're one of the many librarians who suffers "brain freeze" in reader's advisory situations...or in that embarrasing situation where someone meets you at a party, finds out you're a children's librarian, and says "Oh! Perhaps you can help me! My nephew is turning 12 next week..." 

I quickly found out how fun it was to connect with a handful of friends and colleagues and to see what they were reading...and what they'd thought of books I'd read.   This is social-networking stripped down to its most basic for bibliophiles and offers a variety of ways to participate.  You can use "shelves" as labels to group your titles in various ways.  You can review books (and "follow" each others reviews) and recommend books to friends...join groups that work as online bookclubs, or create or vote on lists. 

Collection Development at OPL

At Oakland Public Library (OPL) in California, we have what we call "coordinated" collection development.  There is a juvenile collection development coordinator who prepares lists with input from all 19 selectors, but all selectors ultimately contribute titles to each list and place their own orders.   The benefit to this is that the librarian on-site has a direct connection to her collection, and that our collections are tuned to the needs of each community, while at the same time drawing on a larger pool of expertise.  The downside is that it does take time to manage 19 selectors in a collaborative process, and we're somewhat at the mercy of the technical/software capabilities of our vendors.  We make all of our selectors through Titletales (BWI, Book Wholesalers Inc.) which we find the most flexible.