165. Secrets of the Library: An Interview with Librarian Alene Moroni

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 165 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is Alene Moroni, who is a librarian at the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts.  Alene and her partner in library crimes – well, not really crimes so much as awesomeness – Brenna Shanks, presented a workshop about libraries, and I heard from some of the people who were there that it was a terrific workshop, so I asked Alene if she’d be willing to talk about it on the podcast.  We talk about library market share, some of the misconceptions about libraries, library protection of user privacy, and how readers and authors can help their local library be the very best it can be.  Special thanks to Mel Jolly for connecting me with Alene for this episode.

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Hot Holiday Nights by New York Times bestselling author Jaci Burton, on sale wherever you find your fine, fine eBooks.

We talk a lot about a slideshow, and if you would like to look at the slides while listening to the podcast, you want to follow along at home, you can go to bit.ly/radlibrary, all one word, so bit.ly/radlibrary.

And housekeeping!  If you would like to sponsor the podcast or the podcast transcript, you should email me!  Sarah@smartbitchestrashybooks.com.  I would love to hear from you.

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater.  I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is and where you can find it for your very own.

But now, without any delay, on with the podcast!

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Alene Moroni:  I’m Alene Moroni.  I have been a librarian for 20 years or so, and most recently I led the department at the King County Library System in Washington that bought all of the books and other materials for the library system.

Sarah:  Nice!  That’s like –

Alene:  It was pretty exciting!

Sarah:  That’s like shopping with one of the world’s most powerful book budgets.

Alene:  It, that is exactly what it was, with a team of the most brilliant people and all of the fun stuff involved in that, yep.

Sarah:  And I think a lot of people are now realizing that their libraries not only have books and DVDs, but there’re also manga, comic books, video games, some libraries lend seeds, some lend, you know, equipment.  Like, there’s a lot that you can borrow.

Alene:  There really is, yeah.

Sarah:  So when you were leading the team of buying all the awesome stuff –

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – you learned a lot about the, the market share, basically, of libraries, and you did this really cool presentation, and I know it’s cool ‘cause I got a copy of your slides –

Alene:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – which reminds me, can I add your slide, a link to your slides to the podcast entry when this goes live?

Alene:  Yes.  If you use the slide share link that you have –

Sarah:  Yes.

Alene:  – you will see the gorgeous slides that were put together by Brenna Shanks for our presentation.  She is my colleague in all things presentation-oriented.

Sarah:  It is a very nice presentation.  Excellently done, too.  Very good looking.

Alene:  Thanks!

Sarah:  So you guys gave a presentation on how libraries buy, lend, and promote books.

Alene:  We did.

Sarah:  Was it well received?

Alene:  It was!  It was really interesting.  I have been in the business a while, and when you do something for a long time, you don’t always realize how much of what you do is actually mysterious to the rest of the world, and even in the world that you think you’re living in, like the book world, I think that the book people know about the libraries and what the libraries do, and that’s not exactly the case.

Sarah:  No, it really isn’t.  You guys are very mysterious.

Alene:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  All libraries, once you go past the desk into, like, your secret librarian headquarters, that’s like Hogwarts.  We have no idea what goes on back there.

Alene:  Well, I would like to tell you.

Sarah:  We presume it’s magic; maybe there’re cloaks, floating candles.

Alene:  There, there are floating candles, yeah.  You got that right.

Sarah:  Cool.  [Laughs] That would be, actually be really kind of cool.  Dangerous, with all the paper goods, but kind of cool.

Alene:  Well, you know, it’s a cold blue flame.

Sarah:  That’s true!  You’re, you’re okay then.

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Are you still at King County?

Alene:  I am not.  This summer I left my position, and I’m now working in a small library in western Massachusetts, the Forbes Library in Northampton.

Sarah:  That’s a bit different from King County.

Alene:  It really is, but it makes me really comfortable sharing all the secrets I learned in my previous life.

Sarah:  [Laughs] So, when you moved from one position to the other, did you notice that how you buy and lend and create a collection, does it change depending on the library?

Alene:  It really does.  It’s very different from the standpoint of the size of the library and the budget of the library and the number of locations the library encompasses.  It, it’s really different all over the country, and all over the world, really, so we tried to cover a lot of that in our presentation to make sure that we talked a little bit about what your library in your small town that may not be connected to a large library system is going to be doing some things differently than if you live in a city where there are thirty libraries all as part of the same organization.

Sarah:  Where I live, I live in northern Jersey right now, and I have a digital consortium that I’m part of, and a slightly smaller consortium for interlibrary lending that’s all – like, I can interlibrary loan from anywhere, but there’s a network of libraries that are, like, super best friends?  [Laughs] Like, I imagine them all wearing T-, T-shirts, and being, like, library best friends and everything –

Alene:  Yes.

Sarah:  – but they have, like, a very intimate loan program, and so I sort of thought, oh, well, I have access to all these libraries, that’s how it is for other people, but it’s really not.  Some people really only have access to a very limited number of branches, or even just one.

Alene:  Yes, that’s true.  And some, I’m in western Massachusetts, which is part of the central and western Massachusetts regional system that has, just like you said, best friends with a whole lot of libraries in most of the state, but there is lending with libraries all across the country that broadens the scope, and even your tiny library in your small town that doesn’t have a bunch of best-friend libraries can still do interlibrary loan.  It’s just an expensive process.

Sarah:  So with your presentation, what was your goal when you were giving this presentation?  ‘Cause I had two different people email me about this and say, this was awesome!  Which is, like, I was bummed that I wasn’t at NINC.  Do you usually go to NINC?

Alene:  I’ve never been before.  I was really excited to be invited.

Sarah:  Oh, cool!  So what was, what was your goal with this presentation?

Alene:  Well, we really wanted to just talk to authors who we may not have run into at the American Library Association conference or Book Expo, which are conferences that we do regularly attend, and let them know how we do what we do and what we can do for authors of all levels and how we want to be in good relations with authors, to have your books in our libraries for our patrons and your readers to get your, their hands on.

Sarah:  It has seemed to me at some times – and I’m putting this very broadly and mildly with a, a little bit of sarcasm – that the relationship between libraries and publishers is at times a little strained.  Or frustrated.  Or marked with frustration.

Alene:  Yeah, you know, it can be.  It, it, just like with everything in life, it depends on how you choose to perceive the situation.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  That was so diplomatic!  Well played!

Alene:  Because –

Sarah:  Someone is a librarian, and it’s not me.  [Laughs]

Alene:  Because, well, you know, publishers – we’re, we’re book people, and I will use that phrase over and over – we’re, booksellers and librarians and authors and publishers and everyone in between are all part of a book ecosystem that we are all really invested in seeing succeed, and there are situations that can be challenging for different parts of that ecosystem to coexist.  You may recall three years ago – was it three or four years ago? – when library eBook lending became a real big conversation between publishing and libraries, and –

Sarah:  Oh, yeah.

Alene:  – and there was, there was all kinds of distress about publishers imposing limits on eBook lending, or however you want to characterize that, and one of the, one of the most difficult things about that was that we all want, wanted people to keep reading, and some of us had ways that we could make it sustainable and others felt that this was making it not sustainable.  If a publisher was placing a limit on the number of circulations that an electronic book could have before being repurchased, it was going to be a problem.  And there was all kinds of discussion on Twitter and the internet and all kinds of angst about oh!  We’re going to boycott this or that or the other thing, and one of the things that I felt really strongly about was that we needed to find a way to make it work.  Publishers needed to come up with something that they found sustainable, and libraries needed to figure out a way to continue to provide these materials to their patrons without losing them completely.

Sarah:  Right.  It seemed to me from my third-person perspective that there is, at times, some misunderstanding of what libraries do on the part of many different book people.  Like you said –

Alene:  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Sarah:  – like you said, well, not everyone understands what we do, so, hence your presentation.

Alene:  Yeah, yeah.  So we wanted to talk about how libraries fit into the whole thing, and we wanted to talk about how libraries build readers.  Libraries build readers from pre-literacy on up through, hopefully, a late happy and healthy death.  We try to, we get ‘em young –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Alene:  – we have story times.  We bring ‘em in, we try to get their parents when they’re at story times, get them to take books.  We, we have a very, very different spot in that ecosystem than a bookseller.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Alene:  We buy books, and we keep them.  We don’t return things that we don’t sell.  We hang onto them for a long time.  If you are a writer with a really deep backlist, you’re likely to be held more comprehensively in libraries than you are in bookstores.

Sarah:  Definitely true.

Alene:  If you find that you are in a community that has no bookstore, you’re still going to be present in a library.  There are more libraries than McDonalds in the country.  There –

Sarah:  Really!

Alene:  That was a statistic that we quoted in our presentation, yes.

Sarah:  I had no idea!  That’s totally cool!

Alene:  There are, you’ve heard about, there are 16,000 library buildings in the United States –

Sarah:  Wow!

Alene:  – and you’ve heard about, you know, the small booksellers going out of business over the last several years, and –

Sarah:  And the big ones, too.

Alene:  And big ones too, and things really being hard for bricks-and-mortar bookstores –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Alene:  – and that’s actually increasing business in libraries, and so if you have lost a bookstore in your community, it’s entirely possible that your library is just bulging with people.

Sarah:  Well, that makes sense, because people are going to still find a way to get books.  I mean, I know where I live I’m, I’m gifted with a very, very comprehensive and well-developed library system.  I walk into the manga section of, of my library, and my eyes are like, wow, this is amazing!  We have our own separate, like, middle and teen YA section that’s separate from the children’s section, there’re couches in there, it’s really a great library, and I know that within five or six miles we have at least five ghost Borders, as I call them.  You know, giant, empty spaces that were Borders that were never purchased by another company.

Alene:  Yep, yeah.

Sarah:  And I live in Jersey; we know from big box stores.

Alene:  Yep.

Sarah:  But we have too many ghost Borders, yet we’re lucky to have a healthy library.

Alene:  Yep.

Sarah:  So with your presentation, what were some of the things that you talked about?

Alene:  Well –

Sarah:  Feel free to take us through it.  I won’t, I won’t make people watch the slides, and I won’t print out the slideshow, because printing out the PowerPoint is a bad idea.  [Laughs]

Alene:  Yeah, please don’t do that.  Please just sort of click through and, and click through to some of the links that are, that are available there.  I think we linked some of them directly from the slides.  We talked about the, there was an article in September in Publishers Weekly called “The Case for Libraries” that talked about some myths about libraries and some, some truths about libraries, and one of the things that I like the best is that librarians are experts in books, and people trust their librarians for book suggestions, so if you’re going, if you’re a local author and you connect with your librarian in your community, you’re going to be connecting with the readers that she talks to, because she talks about the books that are on her mind, and people do come into libraries and say, you know, I’m looking for something good to read.  Or they come in and they say, oh, my God, I went to see The Martian, and I have to read it, and they say, well, sorry, there’s a waiting list on The Martian, but have we got a deal for you!  We’ve got shelves of awesome science fiction based on Mars, based in space, with all kinds of adventure that you can get your hands on now.

Sarah:  Nice!

Alene:  Yeah, it’s pretty awesome!

Sarah:  So with your, with your presentation, you, what you wanted to do was explain to authors, we do a lot to help you, here’s how you can sort of get involved.

Alene:  Mm-hmm.  Yeah.

Sarah:  One of the slides I really liked was the myths about libraries.

Alene:  [Laughs] That was one of my favorites, too.

Sarah:  Good thing that you led off with it.  So what was your, what were some of your myths and things that you had to argue against?  ‘Cause I have definitely heard all of these statements about libraries.

Alene:  Well, I’ll run through them really quickly.  The first one was libraries cannibalize book sales –

Sarah:  I’ve definitely heard that.

Alene:  – and the second was library borrowers don’t buy books, libraries don’t develop authors, libraries are unfriendly to commerce, and libraries aren’t widely used, and none of those are accurate.  Libraries actually participate in book sales because we buy the books that we circulate – that’s the, the easiest way to, like, get to that bottom line – but also, like I just said, occasionally you’re going to come into the library and you’re going to want something that is not immediately available, and there are a whole lot of really avid library users who are going to be like, great!  I’m going to run out to the shop and grab that one, and I’ll read these in the meantime, and I’m feeling like I need some instant gratification, but hey, this other stuff is cool too, because we’re promoting these things on an ongoing basis.  We have conversations about books all the time.  That leads right into the second one of library borrowers not buying books.  They really do.  They, I can’t tell you how many people come in and say, oh, I bought this book and I want to find more like it, or I want to know more about it, or hey, my bookshop doesn’t have all of the other things by this author that I just bought and discovered; can you help me out?

Sarah:  Plus, you have the, the, like you said earlier, one author’s deep backlist is more likely to be at a library than at a bookstore with very limited shelf space, and as, as, I think it was, I think it was Courtney Milan who said on Twitter a while ago that as a reader, especially as a romance reader, our appetites always outstrip our budgets.

Alene:  Oh, absolutely.  That’s one of the – we, we often quote Courtney when we talk about this.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  A lot of people quote Courtney.  She –

Alene:  She’s a very smart woman.

Sarah:  She’s going to have her own line of accessories.  They’ll be, like, Milaninies?

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Just things that she said with really cool pictures.

Alene:  That’d be good.  We should just have that as a, a Google default search.

Sarah:  Totally!  Anyway – [laughs]

Alene:  And so, like, but libraries also, we develop authors.  We’re very friendly to commerce.  If you go into your library and you butter up to your librarian and you say, you know, I want to read my new book that’s coming out, we’re going to say, great!  Bring your buddy from the bookshop across the road and sell a stack of them, because we can’t actually do that in the library, and you can come in, and you can put a flyer up, and you can read your book, and you can sell a stack of your books at your reading, and you’re good to go.  We are a really good place for you to find readers; we’re chalk full of them.  It’s kind of a thing we do.

Sarah:  [Laughs] They’re everywhere!

Alene:  And we have lots of them.

Sarah:  Even when we want to close the doors, they’re still here!  [Laughs]

Alene:  Yes!  They’re always here, and they’re, they’re reading.  They are, they are surrounded by books sometimes.  They’re just sitting on the internet checking their email, but I see them walk by the bookshelves and pick up books too.

Sarah:  Oh, totally.  One of the things that I, I always find fascinating is how much librarians talk to one another, and yet how, how often people don’t know anything about what you do in terms of how you buy and what you buy.

Alene:  It really is interesting, isn’t it?

Sarah:  It, it’s fascinating.  Like, I remember hearing so much discussion of, you know, what books was Costco buying or not buying, and how did they change their book section, and is it all now just – I mean, my Costco is nothing but religious, nonfiction, calendars, cookbooks, and, you know, the top five authors that you’ve already heard of.

Alene:  Pretty much, yes.  That’s what Costco’s doing.

Sarah:  Because it’s, well, it’s, as, unfortunately, my local Barnes and Noble has, has revealed, it’s much more profitable per square foot to sell something else other than books.  Like, my, my Barnes and Noble is a huge Barnes and Noble and over the past eight years has become a toy store.

Alene:  It really has!  I was so surprised to go into the Barnes and Noble here and be like, oh, look!  They have more Lego than Target!

Sarah:  Yes!  I don’t take my kids – I’ve said this before on the podcast – I don’t take my kids to Barnes and Noble because I have to go in the store, past the toys, past the electronics, past, past the Lego, to the escalator to go to the second level to find books, which is why came in, in the first place.

Alene:  Yep.

Sarah:  Whereas if I take my kid to the library and I hand them their library card and I tell them that their checkout limit is fifty books, they’re like, wow!  Oh, my God!  Mom, hold me back, I’m going in.

Alene:  Yeah!

Sarah:  So one of the, one of your slides talks about the Book Expo America data from 2015 –

Alene:  Yeah!

Sarah:  – and this blew my mind, that libraries could be as much as 5% of the trade publishing market.

Alene:  And I, you know, and I think it’s bigger in some cases.  I think that, that we’re bigger in terms of midlist sales because –

Sarah:  Definitely, definitely.

Alene:  – we are not, we’re going to buy something based on what we believe our readers to want.  We’re going to buy things that our readers have actually told us they want, and we’re going to buy things based on past history of what a certain sort of debut performs as and so on, and, like I said before, we’re never going to send it back.  There’s no remaindering in libraries.  We are – and I, I think that we are underestimated in terms of genre sales, because many libraries don’t actually buy a lot of mass market paperbacks and, or catalog them or get them out there.  Many libraries have mass market paperback sections that are supplied primarily by donations, and, and that’s a, that’s a sad other story, but yeah, those – that’s the slide titled “A numbers game” if you’re flipping through the slides and you want to read all these details without me reading them to you.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  This would be 6 of 29 as we follow along at home.  I’m actually going to record, I’m going to record in the intro, I’m going to give a short link:  if you want to follow along at home with this podcast, you could see the slides right now.  [Laughs]

Alene:  That’d be great.

Sarah:  Follow along at home with us.  You can just follow the bouncing ball.  You also quoted Nora Rawlinson, who is the cofounder of Early Word, that the actual size of the library market may be equal to that of independent booksellers.

Alene:  I, and I would agree with Nora on that.  I think that Nora is –

Sarah:  [Whispers] Wow!

Alene:  – a, a brilliant visionary, and I think that she really knows what she’s doing, and she’s probably pretty spot on with that, and the reason I would, one of the reasons that I would say that is that there are a lot more libraries than independent booksellers out there, and I think that, you know, in places, where I am in western Massachusetts in a college town where we have three independent booksellers is going to be, those numbers are going to be skewed here where they’re not going, they’re going to be very different in the rural Midwest where there aren’t seventeen independent bookstores in every county.

Sarah:  Of course.  Or, for me, I have one.  Maybe two.

Alene:  Right, and you’re in a pretty metropolitan area.

Sarah:  I’m in a very metropolitan area, but my local bookstore is a wonderful independent that does not stock romance, so I buy holiday gifts and I buy books for my kids there, but I don’t shop for me there.

Alene:  Yep, yep, that’s similar to my situation, both in Seattle, in my previous life, and here.

Sarah:  Yep.  So, if you’re an author, how do you find out whether or not libraries are buying your book?

Alene:  Well, you can find out if your book is in libraries and cataloged by looking at OCLC WorldCat, which is also linked in the slides.  It is a, it’s a library catalog for the entire world, as WorldCat may seem to indicate.  This only covers cataloged materials, and I made reference to mass market paperbacks not being cataloged really prevalently throughout libraries or consistently?  So if you are a genre published writer, that might not be an accurate representation of your stuff in libraries.  If you publish sort of your hardcover fiction or midlist trade paper, you’re probably going to find yourself there.

Sarah:  I know that when I’ve spoken in previous years at the ALA, it was only a couple of years ago, and people were still discussing very, very loudly the idea that not every library catalogs and tracks the circulation of their paperbacks.

Alene:  Right.

Sarah:  Which I am baffled by, because I, one thing I know about libraries is that y’all love some data.

Alene:  Oh, my goodness, yes!  And I have never really been able to understand that.  As a librarian working on the inside –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Alene:  – I’ve, I worked for the New York Public Library as a baby librarian, and then I worked for the King County Library System, both of which are very large library systems and –

Sarah:  They’re huge!

Alene:  Both of which treat their, they treated their mass market paperbacks very differently.  I am no longer privy to the operations of the New York Public Library, but at that time we had title and author entries for even category romance, and it was great because you could go to your library, and you could look up Vicki Lewis Thompson, and you could get all of those Silhouette Desires and Blazes that she published, in addition to the things that she published more mainstream-ly, ‘cause category romances are the ones that most slip throughout the cracks –

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Alene:  – and then I’m working, then when I was working for the King County Library System, we would buy and catalog a certain number of mass market paperbacks, but we also had what we called the Choice Reads collections where we bought lots and lots and lots of new release paperbacks, mass market and trade, and did not catalog them and circulated them, and they circulate like wildfire, and we don’t know which ones do what.

Sarah:  That’s frustrating.

Alene:  It was, it was, well, it’s hard to, to document the success of the collection itself, and it’s also hard to tailor that collection to meet and exceed its current success.

Sarah:  So, one thing I know about libraries is that you guys are very protective of your data and your user information.  You don’t share it ever.

Alene:  We don’t share any patron information ever.  We are happy to talk about how particular books and titles and genres and formats perform.

Sarah:  But you, never, never patron data.

Alene:  So it’s, it’s the patron thing that we’re hyper-protective of, yes.

Sarah:  Which, thank you.

Alene:  Because we don’t want to – right, exactly – you’re very welcome!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Alene:  We don’t want to be asked and then to tell people, oh, yeah, well, you know, Sarah was checking out some romances –

Sarah:  Yep.

Alene:  – and so, yeah.

Sarah:  I also find it fascinating that for me as a consumer, in a lot of ways I presume that the minute I engage with something digitally, I – even if it’s not spelled out – I presume that that digital information is using to track what I do in some way.  Whether I’m using my grocery store card, and they’re going to analyze my purchases to make recommendations, to analyze what products are selling, and to, you know, figure out how I use their different programs, and then I know my E-ZPass is used to not only pay my tolls but also track traffic and how fast I’m going.  I’m, I’m just, I have accepted that that is something that happens when I engage digitally.

Alene:  Yes.

Sarah:  Then the knowledge that when I check a book out of the library, no one’s going to know that I checked that book is out is kind of weird.  Like, it’s so different from what I am, I am used to, and it says a lot about how I need to reflect my own acceptance of lack of privacy.

Alene:  Well, absolutely.  And it’s something that libraries have struggled with over, particularly over the last ten years, when the, the internet has, has compromised privacy in such a way that we as libraries are still trying desperately to protect patron privacy, and our patrons either don’t know or don’t care any longer about their privacy.  And in some cases we want to educate y’all to know that, you know, this is what your E-ZPass is doing, and this is what your Kindle is doing, and this is what your, your grocery card is doing, but, but we’re not about that, and we want to know your name and address and birth date, but we’re not going to tell anybody.

Sarah:  it’s a rare thing.

Alene:  And, well, and it’s, of course it’s hard to believe, too, because there are contexts in which it’s out of our hands.  For example, if you are checking out eBooks from your library, which you can do at many, many libraries across the country – please go check it out at your library – if you’re using the, the OverDrive platform through your library and you’re using the Kindle version of the book, you’re actually going out to Amazon to check that book out.

Sarah:  Yes.

Alene:  And so there, that is sort of like this blurry line – this is what I was referring to when I was talking about libraries being desperate to, to protect this and patrons not caring as much because of the convenience –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Alene:  – because they want it on their Kindle, or they want it on their Kindle app.  Maybe they have an iPhone and they don’t even need to use Kindle, but they’re used to it.

Sarah:  Yep!  I, I spoke this weekend with someone who shares a Kindle with several family members, and I was asking if she ever sideloaded books that she bought independently, and she looked at me as if I had just begun speaking a language from many years ago.  Sideloading?  Oh –

Alene:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  She’s like, I, I, I just turn it on and shop on the thing.  And I was like, okay, I totally know what that means.  I totally understand.  Okay.  So here’s how you get this book if it’s not here, and then she was just like, I had no idea.

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  It’s, it’s, it’s amazing the way that, you know, the, the perception slowly evolves to just accept there’s no privacy, or what you do is being monitored.

Alene:  Yep.

Sarah:  But the fact that y’all don’t share things:  thank you!  That’s pretty rad.

Alene:  Yeah, yeah.  So, your public library is really the place to go if you are wanting to get sneaky or pursue some interest that you don’t want anybody to know about.

Sarah:  One thing I saw recently on Twitter that I thought was very, very smart and very kind was a poster at a library of the Dewey codes for specific things that teens might want to be researching, such as sexuality, gender, addiction, self-harm, self-help, things like that.  You know, if you’re looking for information about this, this is the Dewey code to go look for, and I thought –

Alene:  Wasn’t that awesome?

Sarah:  That was just the kindest thing.

Alene:  Can I tell you that every librarian who saw that who hadn’t thought of it just cried?

Sarah:  Yeah!  Because it’s, it’s brilliant.

Alene:  Yeah, yeah.  I, when I was moving from the New York Public Library to the King County Library System, I was touring the library I was going to be working at, and they had really comprehensive signs with the Dewey numbers on the shelves.  They weren’t as focused as that particular one –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Alene:  – but that was the reason that I was like, oh, I want to work in this library, because they have these awesome signs.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And, and, like, I’ve, I’ve worked in libraries, particularly libraries at universities where, for example, the graduate school I went to, I had to have an hour-long tutorial with the librarian about how to use their library.  Because it was unlike any other library, for some reason it was very complicated for me to find what it was that I wanted, and I was like, I don’t want to have to ask a person.  Sometimes I don’t want to talk to people; I just want to go find what I want!

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  So being able to locate quickly what it is you’re interested in, especially when you’re using a code like the, the Dewey system that makes perfect sense to librarians and is very baffling to the rest of us, that’s really helpful.

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  I also saw on Pinterest, because I have reason to be on Pinterest, and it’s terrible –

Alene:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – ‘cause Pinterest is like an hour time suck.  It’s like Target:  you go in for light bulbs, and then you come out $200 later like, what the hell just happened?  I go on Pinterest for one thing, and an hour later it’s like, wow, I’ve redecorated a house I don’t own, and I’m no closer to getting done what I thought I was going to do.  Great.

Alene:  Yes.

Sarah:  But there are a lot of librarians I follow on Pinterest, and there are some really interesting library interaction programs.  Not just like, here are some things you can do at your library, but hiding tickets inside books.  You found the secret ticket:  bring this to the library and to collect a prize, and thanks for trying a new book.

Alene:  That’s cool!

Sarah:  And I was like, that’s so cute!  Like, there was, there, and they were coded for, for genre, so there was a different color for each of the major subgenres in genre fiction, for example, and people were writing notes on the back of them, like, I found this in this book; it was really great!  And it, I just thought, that’s just like a secret interactive, like, scavenger hunt in your library that’s, like, a surprise for patrons.  I think it’s so cool!

Alene:  That’s really fun.  I’m going to see if they’ll let me do that.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I’ll send you a link to it.  It was really cute.

Alene:  That’d be great!

Sarah:  So what are some things that patrons can do to make their libraries more awesomer?

Alene:  One of the most important things that patrons can do to make their libraries awesome is to use them.  When you go, many patrons use their libraries primarily through their library websites.  You go online, and you look up the book you want, and you put a hold on it, and you get the email when your book is in, and you toddle up to the library and grab it off the hold shelf and check it out and Self Checkout, and then you go home.  That is a huge number of library patrons who we never talk to.  [Laughs] You should totally –

Sarah:  I am that patron.  Sorry.  [Laughs]

Alene:  No, I am that patron.  I would be that patron in stores, in the grocery store, if I could.  I, at, but, those are the, and your behaviors are definitely informing us, because you’re checking out books that you want, and we can tell, but come in and talk to us.  Come in and look at what we have put on display for you, because often, even near the hold shelf or on your way in or out of the library, there’s going to be something that librarians have put together because we think you might like to see it.  You should check that stuff out.  You should talk to the librarian.  If you have a library that does not have a Self Checkout machine, talk to the person you’re checking your books out from.  Say, hey!  This was good!  Or hey!  Have you read this one?  Because the folks at the desk like to talk to you about books.  We.  Love.  To talk.  About books.  We spend a lot of time refilling the printer paper at the computers, and we spend a lot of time pointing out the bathroom, and we just love to talk about books, and if you come in and say, I’m looking for something good to read, we’re like, hey, what’s the last book you loved?  You’re going to make our day.  We have a program at my library that’s called Your Next Great Read where you can fill out an online form and, like, all of the librarians will be like, whee!  We got a form!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Alene:  And we’ll all, like, start talking:  what do you think they would like?  Do you think they want this?  Do you think they want this?  And we’ll send, we send out a book list, like, within a couple of days, of ten books that we think you’ll like.

Sarah:  Oh, that’s cool.

Alene:  So, and if you talk to us about that stuff, then we’re going to know what you want, and we’re going to be better able to do that, so telling us what you want, and some of us have forms online where you can say, this is my favorite author, and they have a new book coming out, make sure you buy it, or I really loved coming to this particular program when you had that classical guitarist in, and I wondered if you had any books on learning to play the guitar, and I could say, well, yes, and actually we even have a guitar you can check out.

Sarah:  Oh, dude!

Alene:  Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

Sarah:  So, librarians are really good sources of recommendation.

Alene:  Yes!

Sarah:  Because I, I’ve met a few readers, and certainly this is not, abs-, absolutely not true of you, but I’ve met a few readers who have felt that their reading choices were shamed by the person who was checking them out.

Alene:  Ah, yes.

Sarah:  And that’s a, that is, unfortunately, a thing that happens, and –

Alene:  It really is.

Sarah:  – and is it more rare, it’s, it’s more rare, I think, now than it has been, but much like romance readers at the independent bookstores, many of us have stories of the librarian who sniffs at what we’re checking out, or tries to interfere in what we’re reading because they don’t think it’s appropriate for us.  What, what do you do if that happens?  Like, ‘cause the answer for many readers is, okay, I’m never coming back, which is not what we want!  Is there something we can do if that happens?

Alene:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Other than, like, yelling on Twitter, which is what we would do?

[Laughter]

Sarah:  Possibly also Facebook?

Alene:  Definitely ask a different librarian the next time you’re in.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Ah, yeah, that’s a good start.  [Laughs]

Alene:  Because, I mean, and of course I’m thinking, like, well, well, if I ever catch anybody doing that, then I’d certainly talk to them afterwards.  I don’t usually come sweeping in like a harpy and saying, stop talking like that!  And whisk my, my beloved reader away to a nice corner and give them tea and talk to them about romances, or whatever it is that they want to read.  Like you said, it’s happening a lot less, but it only takes one time happening in fourth grade, as the school librarian tells you that that book is, like, below your reading level or whatever the case may be.  I have an, I have an experience.  My mom was a librarian, and I’ve been a librarian my entire life, and I had an experience with a school librarian just like that that I still remember.

Sarah:  Noooo!  Oh, no.

Alene:  And so, so you are not alone out there in book world.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Alene:  And it has happened to all of us, and maybe it’s happened to us for wearing acid-wash jeans, or maybe it’s happened to us for reading romances, but nobody should have shame, should be shamed for the choices that they make for themselves.  I, I feel really strongly about that, and I think it’s okay to say to the librarian who you’re talking to, okay, well, this is what I’m interested, and this is what I want to read, and maybe we can talk more about what you think I ought to read later.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  Or, you know, and thank you very much and fuck you, bye!

Alene:  Yeah.  You can just extract yourself as quickly as possible.

Sarah:  [Laughs] And you can fuck right off.  Good bye!  I’m going out the door.

Alene:  And, and try to, try to get somebody who’s more reasonable to talk to you.  I, I know that it’s really, it’s, it’s a thing that happens, and I know that there are librarians of all ages.  I am a middle-aged librarian, but I, I remember the old librarians when I was a baby librarian, and I remember and I, you know, but I’ve worked, I work with super, I’ve worked with super young people who were just as, you shouldn’t read that, as you would expect someone older to be.  It’s not an age thing; it’s, like, a snooty thing.

Sarah:  Yes.  And it’s also a, a rigidity thing.

Alene:  Yep.

Sarah:  It’s a, I often think of it, it’s, like, a control thing, like they need to control what other people are doing, which, dude, if that’s a habit that you’re holding onto, you’d give yourself a lot less stress if you just let go of that one.

Alene:  Yes.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  Having cats will help rid you of the idea that you’re in control of things, and if not that, if not cats, then kids.  That’ll also cure you.

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Dogs pretty much can do what you want most of the time.  [Laughs] This is why librarians should have cats, right?

Alene:  This, I thought, I think that it’s why they do have cats.

Sarah:  Yes.

Alene:  [Laughs] ‘Cause really, most librarians have cats.

Sarah:  It’s, it’s, like, a requirement.

Alene:  Yeah, and I’m stereotyping, and I’m sure that you’ll get all kinds of email about it, and I, like –

Sarah:  No, they’re going to be like, no, I wanted to be mad, but I’ve got four cats.

Alene:  Right, okay, good.

Sarah:  [Laughs] So when you are working in the library with your collection and you want to add books to your collection, what makes you pick a book versus another book to put into your library?  What are the things that make you go, oh, well, got to buy that?

Alene:  Libraries use a variety of methods to get materials into their libraries, and we are, we’re limited by our budgets and our space most of the time, and it can vary from library to library which is the most limiting factor, the budget or space –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Alene:  – and we apply what we, what we may call selection criteria to what we buy.  A lot of us are looking at new releases, but we’re also looking at refreshing backlist copies of things, because in libraries books get used, and sometimes books get used up, and if something’s in print and we have a really ratty copy that is obviously well-loved by our community, we’re probably going to buy something, we’re going to buy to replace that, as well as buying the new one by that same author.  We think about the needs of our patrons, the desires of our patrons.  We think about, we look at reviews in what we call the professional journals, like Library Journal and Booklist and Publishers Weekly and Kirkus.  We look at the qualifications and reputation of the author, so if we’re looking at nonfiction we’re probably going to be buying something by somebody who is a noted voice in the field.  We’re going to buy things by established authors that our patrons have already let us know that they loved.  We look at award nominations.  We look at, we actually look at points of view represented because we want to have things that represent the spectrum of viewpoints in our communities and in the world so that if you find something that is about cats, we want you to find something that’s about dogs, too.  And we, and we look at the, the quality of production.  We want something that’s going to hold up to library use.

Sarah:  When a, a, a patron comes in and says, do you have this book, can you buy it, can you order it, what are your usual responses?   Do you first go to interlibrary loan or do patrons, more than one patron requesting a book, does that spur a purchase?

Alene:  You know, it can vary.  [Laughs] It depends! is the answer to everything, of course.

Sarah:  In Library Land?  Of course it is!

Alene:  In Library Land, everywhere.  And so if we get several requests for a book that we, that is new, say, came out in the last year, and that multiple patrons are wanting, then we’re going to look pretty hard at buying that, because we want to have things in our libraries that our patrons want.  If it’s something that folks are coming in asking for that is ten years old and there was an infomercial on or it was a flash-in-the-pan diet fad or something –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Alene:  – we might go back to interlibrary loan for something that’s older.  So one of the, one of the selection criteria is the, is the timeliness of the content, something that, something that we’ll consider, and so we’re not going to be, if we don’t actually have The Pritikin Diet from the ‘70s on the shelf, we might just go ahead and get that for you from interlibrary loan –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Alene:  – but if you’re looking at, if you’re looking for a gluten-free vegan cookbook because that’s all the rage, we’re going to try to make sure that we’ve got some stuff representing things that are being, that are in demand right now.

Sarah:  How much do reviews that you read online, how much weight do they have in terms of adding to your collection?

Alene:  That’s a really good question, and librarians are, are pretty smart cookies and can, can tell if all your Goodreads and Amazon reviews are your cousins.

Sarah:  [Laughs] So can the average reader.  We’re getting more and more savvy about that –

Alene:  Yeah, so –

Sarah:  – I hate to say.

Alene:  – so we do look at – and that’s why I referenced professional literature.  We look, we start out with Library Journal and Kirkus and Booklist and Publishers Weekly, and we’re looking at reviews there.  Now Kirkus and Publishers Weekly have a pay-to-review program, and we can actually tell when your review has come from that channel when we’re looking at review sources for the materials we’re going to buy.  If we don’t find reviews – so say you’re self-published, or say you are a mainstream author who has chosen to take your, your series self-published, off the, off to the self-published route.  I met several authors at NINC who are doing that.

Sarah:  Yes.

Alene:  They have, like, established readership, they have an established series, and for whatever reason, their relationship with their publisher is not what it once was.  They are self-publishing henceforth –

Sarah:  Yep!

Alene:  – except now they have to pick up the stuff that the publisher was doing for them –

Sarah:  Yep.

Alene:  – for themselves.

Sarah:  I know many as well.

Alene:  Yeah, and so I was like, wow!  Well, here’s what you do!  [Laughs] And, you know, if you’ve got an established readership and you’re putting something out, all you need to do is make sure that your readers are asking their libraries to get your books, and we will pursue that.  So, we’re, we’re looking at reviews, so we see things online, but, like, you were talking about manga earlier.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Alene:  We buy a lot, and there’re not a lot of professional review sources for it, so we are looking at fan sites and looking at reviews and seeing what kind of audience and what kind of interests are going to be met by these different areas of publishing for our patrons, and we do that with, we do that with romances; we do that with, with manga; we do that with various areas that we can’t find in Library Journal, for example, and we do look at Goodreads, and we do look at Amazon reviews, too.  We just can tell if it’s your mom.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Yeah.  I, I as a reader, aside from the part where I review books, I as a reader get very frustrated with reviews that don’t actually say anything?

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  It’s like, here is a string of words, some of which mean good things, the end.  And it’s like, well that didn’t help me at all.  Is it harder for you as a librarian who acquires things when a book is only available digitally?

Alene:  It’s harder, it’s hard if it’s only available digitally by the author emailing me a PDF, yes.

Sarah:  [Laughs] You mean you can’t just pop that in a collection and call it a day?

Alene:  No, not exactly.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Ah, bummer.

Alene:  To have your eBooks in libraries and circulatable by libraries, you need to have a relationship with a, a platform that libraries use to circulate eBooks.  We actually don’t have the IT infrastructure to get your PDF in our email and then make it available to our patrons.  We pay services like OverDrive or 3M or Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360 or seventeen other things that I’m neglecting to name here, for which I am deeply sorry, and –

Sarah:  Don’t worry about it; it’s okay.

Alene:  [Laughs] But we need your book to be available through a platform that we use in order to be able to buy it.  If you are an e-published-only author or publisher, that’s fine.  Just make stuff available to us, because we have, we have lots and lots of stuff available through OverDrive.  My, I, we use OverDrive at the King County Library System, and it’s a really great way for us to buy specialized content that some authors publish, or to buy that novella prequel that the author wrote for Christmas one year that is actually a slim little thing that would get lost on the shelf, but your readers want.

Sarah:  What about Amazon?  Is Amazon a source that’s accessible to you?

Alene:  Not to circulate eBooks, no.

Sarah:  Ah!

Alene:  We, but there was an Amazon guy at NINC, so stay tuned.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  That poor guy.

Alene:  I know.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  He must have had people at the, listen, listen, dude.  Like, there used to be stories about, you know, aspiring writers following editors into the bathroom and passing manuscripts under the toilet door.  You know people were thinking, I could follow that Amazon dude into the bathroom and just get, like, two minutes.  [Laughs]

Alene:  Yeah, well, he came to our program and –

Sarah:  [Gasps!]

Alene:  – and at the end he’s like, yeah, I work at Amazon.  I’m like, oh, my God, did we say anything bad?  He’s like, no, no!  We’re trying, we’re trying to figure it out, and I said, okay, well, here’s what you need to do.

Sarah:  Yes, exactly!  [Laughs] Oh, my goodness.  I did learn recently, and I did not know this, that if an author chooses to self-publish her audio content through Audible, it is not accessible by libraries.  Is that correct?

Alene:  Yes.  Audible, Audible is like Kindle.  It is Amazon exclusive, and there is not, and Audible-exclusive content is not actually accessible through OverDrive the way that, that some Kindle content is.  And not all Kindle content is available through OverDrive for libraries.

Sarah:  Wow.  So there is a, there’s a sort of a downside to assuming that your, your book world begins and ends with Amazon, because it cuts off all of the things that, that libraries could do with that same book.

Alene:  It, it cuts off a lot, and like I said, the, the Amazon dude said that they were working on it and that they were trying to figure something out, and he, he thought it was hilarious that we were from Seattle and he was from Seattle and we were in Florida talking about this.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Of course, because, like, that’s where you’re going to meet.  You’re never going to meet –

Alene:  Right.

Sarah:  – local people who you do business with in the town where you live.  That’s silly!

Alene:  No, of course not.

Sarah:  Why would you do that?

Alene:  No, no.  So, you know, I think that, I think that Amazon knows that libraries are a market, and I think that they also know that when, when they’re at NINC and we’re talking to self-published authors about how they can get some of their stuff published and their audiobooks published and so on, and Amazon is promoting their services as a publisher but they’re cutting off a, a part of the market that –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Alene:  – that authors would like to be participant in, that that’s something that it, it needs a solution, and it’s something that may warrant a solution in the not-so-distant future, so we’re hopeful.

Sarah:  When you were giving your presentation, what slides, or what pieces of information got the biggest reaction?

Alene:  I was talking about selection criteria just now, and one of the things, there was a little bit of, like, ohhh, really?  Was like, yes, we actually do sort of check out the, the quality as reported in the review media, because we don’t have time to read every single book that comes across our desks.

Sarah:  Whaat?

Alene:  Yeah, hard to believe.

Sarah:  Shocking!

Alene:  One of the things that we, we talked about, sort of the nature of a library collection and how libraries continue to have demand for things that the retail market does not produce any longer.

Sarah:  Oh, really!

Alene:  There are many, many libraries that still have VHS and cassettes.

Sarah:  No.

Alene:  Yes.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Wow!

Alene:  And there is demand for them.  You know, there are – and it’s not a lot of demand, but I mean –

Sarah:  There’s some.

Alene:  – I’ve got a VCR over here, and if they haven’t converted that old Claudette Colbert movie to DVD, I’m still going to want to watch it.

Sarah:  On VHS.

Alene:  Right.  So, that was, that was an interesting thing.  Just sort of, just sort of helping these others recognize that, you know, the library is for the long term, and longer term than even we want to be.  I mean, I did spend most of my time facilitating collection management at King County trying to figure out how to get rid of the VHS.

[Laughter]

Alene:  Because we needed room for other things.

Sarah:  Right, and they do take up a bit of space.

Alene:  But it was, you know, it was a thing that, that our patrons wanted.  I think that, you know, we showed a couple of library websites toward the end of our presentation, where we were like, this is something that libraries do.  We give, we will make personalized book lists.  We put books on display.  We make book lists and put them on our websites because we think they’re awesome because, you know, everybody’s watching Downton Abbey.  Well, there is so much in the Upstairs, Downstairs genre of historical fiction –

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Alene:  – that, here, read some of this stuff because it’s delicious!  And we talked about sort of the nature of digital content purchasing and circulation, which I already talked a little bit about.  That was stuff that was very revelatory to our audience at, at NINC.

Sarah:  In your perspective as a librarian, and forgive this question for being vaguely insulting; I do not mean it to be –

Alene:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Libraries are a very healthy thing.

Alene:  Yeah!

Sarah:  They’re doing okay.

Alene:  Of course.

Sarah:  I’m reminded when you were talking about cassettes and VHS, whenever people start talking about, oh, the book is dying and people aren’t reading anymore, I always roll my eyes really hard, which is bad, ‘cause I’m cross-eyed.  My eyes are way too flexible.

Alene:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  But, you know, when I buy a car, it doesn’t have a cassette deck.  It might have an auxiliary port for my phone or my iPod, it might have a CD player, but it still has a radio.  A terrestrial radio!  You know –

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – that technology from, what, 1920s?

Alene:  Yep.

Sarah:  Yeah, so reading isn’t going anywhere.

Alene:  No, no.  Reading is not going anywhere, and you know, people’s interests are so, so varied.  We’re always looking – oh, that was another thing that, that caught some attention in our, in our presentation.  We talked a little bit about, we talked very briefly about weeding a library’s collection.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Alene:  You know, we’re limited by our budget and space in terms of purchasing new materials, and that space limitation means that we don’t actually keep everything for all eternity.  We, we provide shelf space for things that are relevant to the needs of our patrons, and when we’re looking at, say, a mile of shelving and there are, say, 20 to 40% of those books have not been checked out –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Alene:  – in the last ten years, we may make some decisions about those materials that we want to have something that people are interested in available to them, rather than things that they, that we have evidence are, they’re not interested in.

Sarah:  You’re making me think of Awful Library Books, the blog.

Alene:  Is that the best thing in the world?  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Hoarding is not a collection strategy.  [Laughs]

Alene:  Oh, my God.  It is not a collection strategy.  They do, they do some wonderful work out there, and I can tell you that probably about half the time that they are showing a book or they are retweeting a cover image, I have seen that in a library in the last twenty years.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Oh, no!

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Oh, no!

Alene:  I remember, I wish that I had had a camera phone at the time, because of course this was fifteen years ago –

Sarah:  Of course.

Alene:  – but I remember looking at books on a, the shelf in a library when we were doing some collection evaluation, and this was 2000, probably 2002, I guess, and the book I pulled off the shelf was The Soviet Union Today.

Sarah:  Oh, God!  [Laughs] Well –

Alene:  And I, and I stood there for a minute, and I was like, tell me again when the Wall came down?  Tell me again?  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, no.  Nononononooo.

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Yeah, the Soviet Union today.  Well, for starters, that’s not what it’s called.

Alene:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, my gosh.  [Laughs]

Alene:  Yeah, and there’s all kinds of stuff like that.  I mean, you can look, you, you’ll see things.  If you follow library Twitter, you’re, there’s always, if you follow the #weeding hashtag or you look at Awful Library Books  and see what they’re retweeting, there’s some really awesome stuff out there.

Sarah:  And there’re librarians like Tuphlos on, on Twitter.

Alene:  I love Robin!

Sarah:  Robin, yes!  I always remember her by her Twitter name, because that’s where I interact with her most often, but when she does the, the, basically, her, her giant job of book shopping, I’m like, oh, my gosh, keep, please keep going.  This is, this is evil for my budget, but I’m enjoying this.

Alene:  I love her romance covers.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, me too.  But then, that’s kind of like, you know, I’m, I’m totally here for that generally.  [Laughs] So the most important question I ask each podcast guest – no, no pressure or anything – what books have you read recently that you really enjoyed and want to talk to everybody about?

Alene:  Well, I think that it’s totally a copout to talk about The Martian, but I’ve got to tell you, I read it, like, a year ago, and I could not put it down, and this is coming from a non-science-fiction reader, a non-space girl kind of person, and –

Sarah:  That’s so cool.

Alene:  – and, and it was something that I have been just, like, talking about and putting in people’s hands, and it’s, and then it was like, whoo!  They’re making a movie with Matt Damon, and people are like, ew!  I’m like, I know, read it fast.  I’m going to go see it because I have heard wonderful things about how they managed that.  That’s something that I’ve been talking about.  I’ve actually been sort of taking a little departure from my, my tastes of the last ten years.  I was a strictly historical Regency reader for many, many years for some weird psychological reason.  If it wasn’t set in London in 1813 with an anachronistically saucy heroine, I did not want to have anything to do with it.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Alene:  And so I’ve just been picking up some, some contemporary romance where, and so I’m reading Suzanne Brockmann’s Alyssa Locke series, which are kind of awesome.  Alyssa Locke is, her romance is in the sixth one of the – Troubleshooters, Troubleshooters series, sorry Suzanne.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.  Yep.

Alene:  And, and that’s actually really a lot of fun, and there are fourteen of them, I think?  If you – and I like something like that.  I like a series where I can find out all of the stories of all of the peripheral characters over the course of series.  And I’m reading some compilation publications of webcomics like Nimona.

Sarah:  Yep.

Alene:  And I am also reading – let me reach across the table and see – Bad Machinery.  I’ve been reading that one; it’s really great.  I love these – Bad Machinery is twelve-year-old kids who solve mysteries.  It’s kind of got a Scooby-Doo thing going on in the UK at a private school, which I’m loving!  And if you haven’t read Lumberjanes, you need to read Lumberjanes.

Sarah:  We reviewed it, and there was so much squeeing.

Alene:  Yeah.

Sarah:  So much entirely justified squeeing.

Alene:  Well, and the, you know, they, the novel, the graphic novel publication doesn’t cover any of it, because it’s a comic that comes out every couple of weeks, and you need to just get thee to your comic book store for that.

Sarah:  Yes, or order it digitally online.

Alene:  Oh, yeah, you can do that too.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  What do you do when you have patrons who are like, I kind of want to read this thing, but I don’t know – I’m, I am also that patron who says, the, the cover was, had, she had a yellow dress?  And she wasn’t wearing a bra, and it was a historical.

Alene:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I am that patron.  I’ll just apologize right up front.  But what, what do you do when you have a reader who’s like, I, I kind of want to read a book – no pressure – help me find something?

Alene:  Oh, my God, I, that’s my favorite thing in the world!

Sarah:  [Laughs] Awesome!

Alene:  I, I want, I start by, I usually start by asking if they can tell me about something that they’ve read recently that they enjoyed –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Alene:  – and I don’t care what it was called, and I don’t care who wrote it.  I want them to tell me about it, because that’s going to tell me more.  If they said, oh, my God, I totally loved The Martian by Andy Weir, I don’t know if they liked the science or if they liked the humor or if they liked the, the people back at home, or whatever the case may be, so if they’re telling me about what they like, then I’m going to be able to put something else in their hands that they’re going to like, because the feeling and the pacing and the characters, and there’re all kinds of other things that we listen to to find out about what books you like.  One of the reasons that I was reading these historical romances for so long is because I knew that there was going to be a Happily Ever After, and I knew that it was going to be set somewhere that I knew enough about to enjoy, but I didn’t know enough about to get picky about the details?

Sarah:  Are there any other books that you want to recommend or mention?

Alene:  Well, you know, if you haven’t got your hands on Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, then you should probably get your hands on it.  I have managed not to stay up all night, but only by the, the pure force of will, to finish it.  I’m trying to ration myself –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Alene:  – and there was something else.  Sarah MacLean is starting a new series.  I don’t think it comes out until December, but for your advance readers, it is out in the electronic advance reader world.  I can’t remember the –

Sarah:  The, The Rogue Not Taken?

Alene:  Yes!  The Rogue Not Taken!  Thank you so much!  I knew you’d know about it.

Sarah:  I usually don’t remember titles, so you can’t see me right now, but I am fist-bumping myself so hard.

Alene:  [Laughs] You should!

Sarah:  Yes!  I remembered a title.  At the accurate time, not at three in the morning!  That’s not like me.  [Laughs] I have heard that The Rogue Not Taken is terrific.  Have you already read it, you lucky, lucky being?

Alene:  I have not already read it.  It is next on my list.  I actually have it on my, it’s open in my reader on my phone –

Sarah:  Ohhh!

Alene:  – just waiting for me to get stuck in a queue somewhere.

Sarah:  You’re so close!

Alene:  Yes.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  [Gasps] That’s awesome.  Do you recommend that if someone is interested in going into library science, do you recommend entering the field, or is it sort of more like law, where there aren’t a lot of jobs and you should really not?

Alene:  Well, it’s somewhere in the middle there.  I think that the library world needs people that are passionate about books and reading in order to sustain us?  There are a lot of library science programs out there that are more and more technology oriented, and, you know, I’ve worked in public libraries my whole life, and so I am, I am a library advocate.  I think that there are a lot of, lot of ways that you can work in libraries and be part of libraries in the book world without necessarily being a degree-holding librarian –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Alene:  – so I think you should explore your options.  You should volunteer at your library, you should talk to your librarians, you should find out what sorts of things and prospects are appropriate for, like, where you are, because I also went to college and became a librarian and moved across the country a couple of times for my work, so.

Sarah:  Seattle to western Massachusetts is pretty far.

Alene:  [Laughs] It is pretty far, yes, and there are, there are wonderful, wonderful jobs available all over the country.  You don’t have to move 2400 miles just to do what you want to do, but in some cases it can be good to have, have some dynamic availability to your, to your life.

Sarah:  [Laughs] That’s a good way of putting it.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s episode.  I hope you enjoyed that interview.  I want to thank Alene and also Mel Jolly because this was a lot of fun, and I always enjoy a podcast where I learn more about what my library does and what secretive, magical things go on behind the reference desk.

This podcast was brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Hot Holiday Nights by New York Times bestselling author Jaci Burton, on sale wherever eBooks are sold.

I will have links to the books that we discussed, as well as some of the resources that we discussed in this podcast, including the different libraries, NINC, the option to put hidden tickets in your library books if you’re a librarian, and some of the resources that are available for readers as well.

And if you would like to see Alene and Brenna Shanks’s presentation, you can go to bit.ly/radlibrary.

The music you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is the Peatbog Faeries from their most recent, most excellent album Blackhouse.  This track is called “The Chatham Lassies.”  You can find this album on Amazon or iTunes or wherever you like to buy your music, digital or physical.

Future podcasts will include me, Jane, other people, talking about romance novels, ‘cause that’s what we do here, but if you have a suggestion or an idea or a question or you’re looking for a recommendation or you just have some feedback, you should totally email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com.  And I’ve noticed that there have been a few more reviews left in various places where you can leave reviews for podcasts, and as I am a huge fan of reviews, I really appreciate that.  Thank you very much.  I also appreciate the feedback.  If you’ve got ideas or suggestions, you know where to find me:  sbjpodcast@gmail.com.

But on behalf of Alene and all of the librarians everywhere and Jane and myself, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[most excellent music]