Last week, the Ontario Library Association hosted a teleconference with staff from the Vancouver Public Library and they were offering insight into the services they offer and how those services might also be popular at your library.Check our Vancouver's What Do I Read Next website.
VPL's director, Sandra Singh, has provided a clear vision to staff to enhance the library's core brand of books and focus more on the reading rather than the objects. Staff seem excited about this strategic direction and they are working hard to develop a community of readers.
The staff offer personalized reading lists which can be requested via email and encourage readers to actually approach library staff to get reading suggestions. The vision is to firmly establish library workers as readers and the source of appropriate and exciting reading suggestions. They have experimented with twitter and facebook, so they are exploiting new technologies to better support an old idea.
The other unique offering is to focus on the actual fiction reading development of newcomers. Reading is one of the critical ways that newcomers learn about the society in which they live and they should not be ignored because their reading skills are different. They also suggest that libraries should provide better readers' advisory in other languages which can be quite a tall order.
Vancouver Public Library is embracing readers' advisory and quickly becoming a leader in Canada. Consider following their efforts and checking in regularly to see what they are offering!
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