Week Five Prompt Response

Here are my responses to the Week Five Prompt questions, and I have numbered out the paragraphs in which the questions were asked by Professor Cataldi.

1. Booklist's no-negative-reviews policy forces reviewers to only point out the positive aspects of a book, and this makes it more difficult for collection developers to discern between the best, most worth-while book purchases and the fluffed up ones.  It seems like Kirkus allows their reviewers to be more honest with their reviews and to point out the flaws in books while still highlighting the positives.  This should make it easier for collection developers to decide which items to purchase with their limited budgets.  Also, when eBook-only books are not reviewed or rarely reviewed, this makes it difficult for librarians to not only select the best books for their eBook collections but to suggest new titles to patrons in RA interviews.  We can't suggest titles we know nothing about, even if they would match the patron's request perfectly.

2. From what I read of the two reviews, The Billionaire's First Christmas is not a romantic suspense novel, it is a contemporary romance story.  The short Amazon.com review mostly retold the summary of the book and how there are apparently going to be more books with this couple, which is already obvious from the fact that this book is listed as part of a series.  The blog review gets more into different aspects of the book, like the hot guy's somewhat strange dislike of Christmas and the fact that it is a short, clean romance.  Even though the blog review only gave the book three stars, both reviews were quite positive, so I would probably choose this title for my library as a cleaner, less steamy Christmas romance that is on the shorter side for people who want quicker reads.

3.The reviews for Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt make me believe this book would make an excellent edition to my library's collection.  While all of the reviewers point out how this book does not shy away from the harsh and graphic reality of the desperately poor in the 1930s in both Brooklyn and Ireland, they also all describe the humor and love found in the book.  I found it interesting that each review seemed to say the same things but in different ways-- they all recommended the book and each describe a unique aspect of the book that stuck out to them the most.

4. While I don't think it is "fair" that some titles seem to get all of the reviews and others are neglected in this area, I don't think there is any realistic way to even the playing field in terms of number of reviews per title.  Unfortunately, I think this uneven reviewing of titles makes it more difficult for libraries to find quality books outside of the most popular titles.  For titles that have few to no reviews, it is almost a gamble to purchase these books for a library, whereas for titles that have many reviews, a collection developer has a better idea about the book and whether or not their patrons would enjoy it. 

As I mentioned before, I think forced-positivity in review sites is not a good thing, in that it forces the reviewer to only mention the positive aspects of a title, and they make it more difficult for the "best," high quality books to stand out among the others.  Some books just are not going to be very good-- maybe there is poor writing, the character development leaves much to be desired, or the story's plot is filled with gaping holes.  People and especially collection developers should get the reviewers true thoughts on the books they review, not just the superficial review with only the good points highlighted.

I do not purchase books for my library, but in my collection development MLS course, we learned that looking at reviews is one good way to learn about titles to select.  To be honest, I do not really look at reviews when selecting titles for personal reading.  I rely more closely on the summary of the book and genre and book appeals to make my selections.  However, from the review sources I have explored, I enjoy the honesty of Kirkus reviews the most.