Committee Updates

Sophie Brody Award

The Sophie Brody Medal Committee met on Friday January 24 during Midwinter. We had a very efficient and productive meeting to choose a winner and two honor books. The winner is Yossi Klein Halevi’s Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation (HarperCollins). The honor books are Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumoh and Tragedy of Israel (Spiegel & Grau) and Jeremy Dauber’s The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye (Schocken).

Barbara Bibel, Chair

Readers’ Advisory Research and Trends Committee

The Readers’ Advisory (RA) Research and Trends Committee will be presenting the RA Forum at ALA Annual. This year the forum will address RA marketing and features the award-winning marketing expert from Edmonton Public Library, Tina Thomas, and Duncan Smith of Novelist. Here is the program description:

 

Turning Books into a Cool New Tool: RA Marketing in the Age of Maker Spaces

Maker spaces and 3D printers are hip and libraries are using them to ensure that they remain relevant and are perceived as keeping up with the latest trends. One of the trends that hasn’t gotten much attention, however, is the fact that books are still our brand and reading is the main reason citizens view the library as valuable and continue to support it. Does the key to public library success lie in adopting new technologies or in revitalizing the one that has been at the heart of our services for more than 100 years? Join library marketing expert Tina Thomas of Edmonton Public Library and Duncan Smith of NoveList and find out at this program which argues that the key to our future is contained in our past.

This fall the RA committee partnered with Library Journal and NoveList to map the state of RA practice. The survey that we helped create has recently been complied. The survey can be found and downloaded at LibraryJournal.com.

Several times a year the RA committee hosts a CODES Conversation, a free, email-based conversation on an RA topic. Anyone can join in and participate or lurk as they desire. The last conversation was on RA training. Over 500 people signed up for the two-day event. The committee will host another conversation in early Spring. Look for details on CODES-L.

Neal Wyatt, Co-chair

Louis Shores Award

The Louis Shores Award Committee (Emily Hamstra, Barry Trott, and Ed Kownslar) met virtually on Tuesday, January 14 to select the 2014 award recipient. We had many outstanding nominations for the award this year. The committee chose Fran Graf, managing editor at Choice, as the 2014 Louis Shores Award recipient. Graf was announced as a recipient of the award at the RUSA Book and Media Awards at ALA Midwinter.

Emily Hamstra, Chair

CODES Reference Publishing Advisory Committee

The CODES Reference Publishing Advisory Committee hosted a discussion forum at the Philadelphia Midwinter jointly with the Reference Publishers Group. The forum gave reference publishers and reference librarians a chance to discuss common concerns. Discussion topics included the use and barriers to use of reference sources, the difficulty of locating reference sources spread among a number of different vendor sites, and the need for reference publisher to consider their target audience, whether it is to make information more accessible or at the other spectrum, more specialized and in-depth. Despite all of the issues surrounding the rapidly changing world of Reference Publishing, most present did affirm the continuing value of this material. The committee is planning a similar forum at the Las Vegas Annual Conference.

Bill McHugh, Chair

Listen List Council

The Listen List Council, Jen Baker, Reader Services Librarian, Seattle Public Library; Di Herald, Program & Outreach Manager, Delta County Libraries (Colorado); Joyce Saricks, Readers’ Advisory Consultant, Downers Grove, Illinois (chair); Neal Wyatt, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia; and Renee Young, NoveList audiobook project team lead, Durham, North Carolina, selected outstanding audiobook titles for 2014, and will be publishing a Reader’s Shelf column in Library Journals’ March 1 issue.

Renee Young, council member

Conference Program Coordinating Committee

The Conference Program Coordinating Committee will be focusing on the following items for the coming year: Working with the RUSA board to continue formalizing a new process for selecting and approving programs for presentation at ALA Annual; explore possibility of partnering with the Learning Round Table to improve ALA programming; consideration of planning an “unconference” for RUSA.

Kaite Mediatore-Stover, CODES Rep.