| Readers' advisory is a typical library service that provides reading advice to patrons based on their reading interests. Generally people seek readers' advisory for leisure reading. Some people, however, seek readers' advisory for a more serious reason: to gain new insights into their personal problems. This enhanced type of readers' advisory is the focus of my study. This study seeks to better understand the children's librarian's role as a reading advisor in helping children cope with their developmental problems or life difficulties such as potty training, moving to a new place, night scares, death of a family member, and so forth. Using qualitative methods, the study examines how children, or their primary caregivers, approach a children's librarian for reading advice, how they interact with the librarian, and what function this service plays in our society.; My preliminary findings show that this type of service is fundamentally different from the way that we ordinarily construe Readers' Advisory. My results show that the users, the query contents, the book selection foci, and the goals of the two services are distinct from each other. More importantly, this type of library query seems to be gaining in popularity among parents and their children, even outpacing the number of questions related to traditional readers' advisory. There is no doubt that the boundaries and expectations of Reader's Advisory have diversified since it first emerged as a formal library service in the 1930s. This notable shift becomes immediately apparent with regard to children's services.; My research suggests that it has placed increasing professional demands on children's librarians to advise and guide---or not---a receptive patron in dealing with emotional, psychological, educational and social challenges. For these reasons, I argue that this shift in readers' advisory is emerging as an important component of library service and as such should be more fully explored and evaluated, specifically the persistent phenomenon of how librarians address diverse issues. |
