Nancy Pearl...

"...conducted workshops for all 1200 staff members. 'From pages to library managers, everyone learned new ways of approaching readers, and they generated scores of new ideas,' says KCLS director Bill Ptacek. The library’s 'Take Time To Read' program, with its simple goal 'to make King County a more literate community,' grew out of Pearl’s workshops."

"'People who [are] circulation clerks or pages in libraries work there because they love libraries. Otherwise, they’d work at McDonald’s,' says Pearl. 'We must not cut them off from being able to talk about books and other materials with the people who use the library.'"

"'A good book is a book someone likes and a bad book is one they don’t like. When someone doesn’t like a book, it doesn’t mean they will never like it. They don’t like it for that moment,' says Pearl.
'We shouldn’t be afraid to suggest a wide variety of books to people. I think libraries are the last democratic institution, small ‘d’ democratic. It wasn’t always that way. Librarians were gatekeepers.... When it comes to readers’ advisory, though, I think we need to validate a patron’s reading."

"When people ask, 'What should I read next?' we should always try to give them three books. One should be pretty close to the one they loved. The second should be a little bit different, a bit of a stretch. The third book is the real stretch book, the reach book. The book they never would have found because it is nonfiction and they only look at Westerns."

"People come into the library and head straight to the section where they have found the most pleasure.... It is our job to take them around to the rest."

"'She is neither snobbish about the old ways nor disdainful of new ideas. Ask her about audio or ebooks or gaming, and you’ll get an earful about the importance of stories told in their myriad forms,' says Janes" -U Washington iSchool Chair

"My fear is that we don’t recognize or will forget that library service is like a three-legged stool: information, outreach and programming, and reading."

"Pearl also worries about the demise of independent bookstores and the relative health of public libraries. 'Librarians must figure out what we need and how we need it, and then we have to get together and make it happen. I think we still have some power over the direction of these changes.'"

LJ January 2011