Final Summer Thoughts

Posted August 13, 2020 by Amie Grosshans

I finished all my work for Collections Management last week.  I can’t believe the summer semester is over already.  It went by so fast.  I loved this class and would recommend it to all SLIS students, especially those who like hands on activities.  It was a great introduction to book repair and definitely made me curious to learn more.  It will be very nice to have a few weeks off, but I’m looking forward to my classes in the fall.  Since SLIS announced that all of its classes for the fall would be online,  all the in-person classes that I normally would not have been able to take were suddenly available to me.  I had to rethink my classes a bit, and I ended up signing up for a new class, LIS 532R, Reader’s Advisory.  I wanted to take this class as soon as I saw it in the course descriptions, but I wasn’t able to because it was at the Mount Holyoke campus.  But now I get to take it, and I am excited.  

I had a brief introduction to reader’s advisory in LIS 407, Info Sources and Services, but I really wanted to learn more about it.  Helping people find the perfect book sounds like a lot of fun and something that will be incredibly useful when I’m working in a library.  It’s a lot more than asking “what books do you like?”  It involves asking a lot of questions to narrow down what the patron is looking for, and I’m looking forward to learning more about that process.  Also, I’ve seen a draft of the syllabus, and each week is spent on one genre, including romance, historical fiction, and thrillers.  I think this class will get me out of my reading comfort zone.  I tend to read a lot of mysteries, but not many horror or science fiction books.  I’ll probably come out of the class with a whole lot of new books to read, and what could be better than that?