It was useful to consider how nonfiction might be folded into an encounter that starts off about fiction advisory.
My continuing frustrations with advisory were not addressed, namely how to deal with the customer who has read everything, with the customer who is too impatient or rushed to be introduced to tools for finding books, and with the customer who knows so little about what he is looking for that it results in a stupidly broad list of suggestions, none of which are satisfactory for inexpressible reasons. When the process works, it is a beautiful thing, but some days are just frustrating.
Another big issue of mine is how much time to spend prepping for advisory queries that never come. I've gotten exactly two questions about westerns, for example, and they were both so general that they were easily answerable without deep knowledge of the genre. Urban fiction is popular at Towson, but I've never gotten a query about it much beyond where to find a particular author. Given those experiences, my inclination is to spend much more time with children's fiction than westerns and urban fiction combined.
This program also did some damage to my TBR pile.
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