Readers' Advisory: We Owe Our Work to Theirs

Neal Wyatt

Abstract


Anniversaries are a time for celebration. We are provided with opportunities for looking back at the beginning of a journey, its triumphs and hardships and taking time to reflect on the foundation that the anniversary was built on. For this issue, the RA column is celebrating a special anniversary: the twenty-fifth anniversary of Joyce Saricks and Nancy Brown's publication Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Library. We are also fortunate to have Neal Wyatt author this piece, which includes an audio file capturing her interviews with Saricks and Brown.

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References


Nancy Brown, interviewed by author, April 12, 2011. All subsequent quotations, both direct and indirect, by Saricks and Brown are from same. Historical details are drawn from that interview, subsequent emails with both Saricks and Brown, and a second interview conducted with Saricks and Brown on August 12, 2014.

The 1989 edition of Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Library offers a set order of appeal terms. Saricks and Brown numbered them, suggesting advisors first consider pacing, then characterization, followed by story line, and ending with setting. While characterization was the first appeal the pair articulated, when they wrote the book they put pacing first because they believed it was straightforward and easiest to determine.

In the subsequent editions of Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Library Saricks reconfigured both point of view and the concept of white space on the page. She decided that point of view was an aspect of characterization and that dialogue (white space) was related to pacing.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.5860/rusq.54n2.24

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