Friday, October 23, 2009

Go on a journey with reading maps



Today, my former colleague and always friend Lora and I are giving a poster session at OPLA's RA in a day workshop. For regular blog readers, the following may or may not be as utterly thrilling to you as it is to us. For those of you driven here by links on our take-away bookmarks, welcome! Here are some more links and some further information about maps. Lora and I hope that you enjoyed talking with us, and that you are inspired to create your own "take" on the map idea. If you do, please share your maps with me via email (top L of this page)!

Our starting point for the presentation was a presentation at PLA 2006 entitled Readers' Maps: Blending Fiction and Nonfiction Readers' Advisory Through Reading Itineraries. It was presented by Nancy Pearl, Cathleen Towey, and Neal Wyatt. It outlined the idea of a map as a marketing tool for a specific book that defied "read-alikes." The map would "chart the themes or associations in a book," and act as a whole collection readers' advisory tool, tracing links from the chosen book to items in various library collections.

Ann Moffat, former Director of the Westmount Public Library (and shouted out to before on this blog), took this idea home to the greater Montreal library community, and formed a committee of local librarians to come up with a reading map template.

Various libraries produced some reading maps that year, and as I travelled to Ottawa I brought the idea here and developed a few more reading maps at Ottawa Public Library. Here are some links so you can peruse the examples of maps available online:


Later in 2006, Neal Wyatt wrote a column for the Library Journal series, "Redefining RA", entitled "Reading maps remake RA." This is pretty much core reading for anyone interested in mapping, and we took many of our tips in the poster session from this thoughtful and thorough overview of the concept.

Happy mapping!

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