Week 5 Prompt

Different types of reviews:

When thinking about various types of reviews, I believe as a person who does collection development, it is important to consider what each review publication has to offer and take that at face value. I think that is important to read reviews that are both positive and negative because reading is such a personal thing and just because one reviewer at Booklist believes that the book is bad, doesn’t mean that others would, therefore including the negative reviews puts the choosing power in the hands of collection development librarians.

When it comes to ebook only books and their lack of professional reviews unless it’s a big-name author, I believe a few factors affect collection development. The first thing that I would say is that in a today’s time when budgets are tight, including ebook allocations, libraries may only have the money to purchase ebooks by more well-known authors. If this is the case, having reviews of more independent authors/publishers may not be all that big of a deal. For those specific genres that you know have pockets in reviews, it may be necessary to search for or even forget about the review sources and go with your gut. Another thing that can be done is a survey sent out to patrons asking what they want in ebooks and see if those types of books are even there. This affects collection development in that the person choosing titles may have to do a little more work, but the work if necessary could come with great rewards in circulation.

Ebook Only Romantic Suspense Novel:

Reliability: When looking at both book reviews, you can tell that neither of them are professional reviewers. With that said, I believe the second “blog review” one would be more reliable. Other than the reviewers own personal anecdote towards the beginning of the review, they state a decent amount of information about the book, and then give more information surrounding why the book is good/bad. The first review seems to be more about themselves and how they love Christmas, so everyone should love Christmas and that specific book.

Would you buy: After reading these two books, I probably wouldn’t purchase this book for the library or add it to the collection. It seems to fit a very niche market of Christmas and approachs that holiday in a way that not everyone would probably appreciate it. When there is a tight budget, it would be important to try and get books that have great ratings all around and the fact that the reviewer who seems more reliable only gives it a 3 out of 5 stars, leads me to believe that it wouldn’t be worth adding to the library’s collection.

Is it Romantic Suspense: After reading the reviews, I would not classify this as a romantic suspense novel. The first reviewer described the book as a “beautiful, clean CHRISTMAS romance” and one of the characteristics of this genre is explicit romance. The storyline also doesn’t include much violence or much suspense. It seems to be more of a contemporary romance, reminiscent of Lifetime movies.

Angela's Ashes:

Would you add to collection: Based off the reviews given about this book, I would most definitely add the book to the collection. Each of the reviews I read were highly positive, and totted this as a book they couldn't put down. With the accessibility of the BBC and their television programs, literature set in the UK and Ireland are very popular. The fact that this book is a tale of life's struggles set during a very popular period of time, only makes my choice easier. The book also seems to include some humor as relief to the very serious nature of the work, which I believe patrons will find welcoming.

Fairness in Reviews:

As a person who works in libraries, I don't think that it's necessarily fair for one type of book to be reviewed way more than a different one. With that said, I believe reviews are written with the books/genres that are more popular in mind because these are books that libraries are most likely going to look into purchasing and are books that readers are going to want to hear about. The smaller niche genres and books that are written by less known authors, may not garner attention and the reviews may not be wanted as much as those by more well known writers. Because reviews are mostly written about popular books and titles, many library collections don't contain books which are independently published or may not have widespread appeal. 

I personally don't appreciate or understand review sources that won't print negative content. For me books are a personal thing, so one person may find the book as not very good, while someone else may find it good. If you censor reviews that find books bad people who are searching for reviews may be withheld of information that would be important to them and their decision making. I think that it is necessary to post both positive and negative reviews. Currently, I do not do any of the decision making at my library, but as a personal reader I don't typically use professional review sources. If I use reviews they are mostly off of Goodreads. However, if I were going to choose a professional review to make decisions it would be Kirkus because they give both positive and negative reviews, as well as having a layout that is easy to get a feel for the book.