Unshelve your collection with help from RA for All and the New York Times

 Don't be afraid to grab ideas for promoting your collection from anywhere and anyone. Recently, readers advisory expert Becky Spratford featured the New York Times's Summer Reading Bucket List on her blog. She does include a gift link in her post so go there first to read it. Becky explains why this recent shift in the Times's book coverage is so welcome. I recommend that you read her blog every day for news, commentary and great readers advisory ideas. 

This bucket list is a great summer book display or online post for your library. You can do a ten week series and feature one idea a week with recommendations. Another idea would be to feature staff suggestions for the various entries and to mix up the entries since they are not in a particular order. 

Adult summer reading programs are sometimes overshadowed by youth programs and this list from the Times is an easy way to up your collection promotion while giving adults something fun to do!

Using the NYT Best Books of the 21st Century List

The New York Times Book Review staff along with 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and others created a list of the 100 best books of the 21st century (so far). As you can imagine, this this is very heavily weighted towards "literary" fiction. The most simple way to use it is to simply take the list, see what is in your collection but could use some more attention to boost circulation and put those on a display. You can print out the information for the title that the NYT has online. Include information about where patrons can find the whole list as well as details about which of the titles are in your eBook collection. 

Another way would be to also look at the read alikes they provide and to promote those titles which are in your collection, physical or digital. You can also find your own read alikes for the books. Focus on the titles which could use some help with circulation. If a title is being checked out regularly, you can skip it and move on to those which could use the spotlight. 

Finally, don't forget the lists that were posted from authors' ballots. My experience is that patrons love to get recommendations from famous people. Review the lists and put them on a display with something that indicates which author made the recommendation. Include information about where patrons can find the information online. 

Obviously, NYT does have a paywall which limits the number of articles that one can read without a subscription which does complicate this but if your library provides NYT access to patrons, this is a great way to highlight that access. Promoting databases and eResources is challenging but this is a fun way to do it while promoting your collection.