Week 13 prompt response

I agree that we as librarians should work to ensure that we are serving adults who enjoy YA books and/or graphic novels. The book club I attended a few weeks back for this class was actually an adult book club that exclusively read YA books, which I thought was a fantastic idea for serving this demographic. Even if a book club isn’t reading YA books exclusively, one way to promote YA books to adults would be to add YA books into the rotation of existing library book clubs. By doing so, the staff member leading the book club would be demonstrating that they view YA books as a legitimate reading choice for adults, which could in turn make participants feel more comfortable asking for those books in the future. Additionally, I think it is important for librarians who provide readers’ advisory services in the adult department to maintain some familiarity with YA books, authors, and trends so that if adult patrons ask about YA books the adult services librarian is able to provide at least some advisory help and doesn’t seem surprised or confused by the request. However, in my opinion, the most important thing a librarian can do to ensure that adults who enjoy reading YA books or graphic novels are served well is simply to treat those reading choices with the same respect as other reading choices. By doing so, even if a librarian isn’t very familiar with YA books or graphic novels themselves and needs to refer the patron to another staff member, the patron will still sense that their reading choices are valued and taken seriously by their library. I think YA books and graphic novels should be viewed in a similar way to the different genres of adult fiction; even if a librarian doesn’t personally enjoy a certain genre, they should still treat it with respect and dedicate time to expanding their knowledge of that genre to better serve patrons.