You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello

Abstract

Saying goodbye has never been a favorite part of my life. For the past eight years, beginning with RUSQ 44:3, I have been privileged to edit the readers' advisory column. What a wonderful time it has been. I have had the chance to talk with and work with some of the best writers and practitioners in the readers' advisory world. I will be forever grateful that they took the time out of their busy work schedules to put together articles for the journal, sharing their expertise and building a stronger readers' advisory community through these pieces. As I move on to take up the role of editor of RUSQ, I want to use this last column, or at least the first part of it, to both reflect and to look forward. I would be remiss in leaving not to thank several people, without whom I would not have been able to make the column as good as it has been. First would be the editors of RUSQ. I have had the good fortune to work with three superb editors. In 2004, Danny Wallace and Connie Van Fleet were generous enough to offer me the position of RA column editor for RUSQ, and to get me started in the business of finding authors and crafting articles. I learned a great deal from them about working with word counts, manuscripts, writers, and deadlines, and I am grateful for their guidance. When Danny and Connie finished their terms, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work for Diane Zabel. For the past six years, Diane has encouraged and enthusiastically supported the readers' advisory column. The articles that have appeared in the RA column are in part a tribute to Danny, Connie, and Diane's patience and attention to detail. Any column editor would be lucky to have worked with and for three such fine readers and editors. I would also like to thank all of the authors who have written for the column. To me, their pieces reflect some of the best thinking about the intersection of reading, readers, and librarians. It is not always a simple thing to write a column to someone else's schedule and to accept editorial suggestions. Each of the authors I have worked with has done both of these things with grace and style. In developing the readers' advisory column, I was building on the work of Mary K. Chelton, who had previously edited the column. Under Mary K.'s guidance, the RA column offered the RUSQ community articles that presented practical advice about working with readers as well as examinations of the recent history and potential future of readers' advisory services in the United States. Her work was indeed a firm foundation on which to build. In the past eight years, the readers' advisory column has sought to blend theory and practice, looking not only at how to work with readers but also at why readers' advisory is essential in all sorts of libraries. Articles have covered a wide range of topics: book discussion groups (in both public and academic libraries as well as online), form-based readers' advisory, RA in library school education, theories of genre separation (one of my favorite topics), fiction and the brain, and readers' advisory and the library catalog among others. In each of these cases, and in the other articles too numerous to mention, the authors looked for new ways to approach readers and reading and began a conversation that often carried over into the broader RA world. That really is the goal, I believe, for any column, that it serve not as an ending point but as a beginning for reflection, discussion, and then application of the ideas it promotes. A real strength of RUSA is its varied and passionate membership. The opportunity to work with librarians outside your type of library is one that should not be under-valued. During my time in RUSA, and in particular as a column editor for RUSQ, I have learned a great deal from working closely with academic librarians and LIS faculty as well as with librarians in non-traditional roles. I hope that they have had the same experience in working with public librarians. …