21 October 2025 Workday at the library Book Club items for the remainder of 2025 and on to 2026

 

The day started learning all about the upcoming book club selection. Went into RSA workflow and ordered several large print and a total of 14 copies of the Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters. This is a common practice in RSA to support the book clubs. It is cost effective to share books.

In the workflow system you can see the books that were in transit to the different libraries in the area. Looking at the volume of books in the Inter Library Loan program was eye opening. It was great to see this service used. As it does save money for the libraries to borrow from other institutions.

Director Duttlinger has been tracking the book club choices of the small and rural libraries in Central Illinois in blogger for the past 15 years. Other libraries post their upcoming selections to assist with selections to guarantee available copies of books.

After finishing the ordering. Worked on the Book Club November 24th selection promotion sheet. It includes a picture of the cover of the book. The Biographical data of the author. Then select several read a likes by posting images of those books on the sheet.  

The interesting task was finding 8 discussion questions for the club to discuss the book. This was a very interesting part of the exercise. Pulled 14 questions from various online sources like good reads. Several public library websites. Since the author is of Canadian Tribal ancestry it was fun to see how different locales posed differing types of questions.

This was a new item that I had never participated in. It was a very interesting assignment.

The next project was looking for books for the 2026 round of the Book Clubs. The Director has been keeping a file of potential books. She gave me the file to review and to find the availability of the books in the RSA consortia.

Went into the union catalog of all the RSA libraries to search for resources. We are looking to see if there were large print books, eBooks, and the quantity of books available in the RSA system. The Library book clubs all require large print books. The demographic of the book clubs is mostly baby boomers and older.

There were roughly 50 plus books in the file. Went through each of these in the RSA file and input the information in an excel spreadsheet for the director.

Interesting to see how the records in the system worked and how each library might have a different location of type for the same book. It also showed the status of the book; It was interesting to see the holds and numbers of the ones checked out.

PLA Forces: Force 4 Asset driven impact. Book Clubs are all about improving quality of life. It improves the quality of life of the individuals involved. Reading new genre is expanding the outlook of the patrons. Talking with others, networking, and finding new friends and acquaintances is a plus for the patrons.

Force 2 the evolving role of the public library. The use of the software that RSA uses makes book club selection easier and the ability to move specific books into the library for patron use. In this case for the book clubs and for future selections. This interlibrary loan service is essential to maximize the efficiencies of the library.

Work total 6 hours                  Semester total 72

Comments

  1. GabrielOctober 23, 2025 at 9:25 AM

    Book clubs are great efforts, and interlibrary loans are cost-effective ways to maximize collection access and use. Sounds like you really explored these two areas and in the process also found out more about how records serve the library.

    ReplyDelete

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