Tailored Titles on Facebook: Old Fashioned Library Service in a Virtual Setting

Last spring, the Northwest Library started a new readers’ advisory service called Tailored Titles. With Tailored Titles, our librarians ask customers a series of in-depth questions about their reading tastes and preferences and then create a personalized reading list for those customers based on their answers.

Beyond providing high quality service to our customers, one of our goals with Tailored Titles is to build relationships with the people in our community, especially since Northwest is a new library in a part of OKC that has never had a library (or at least a close library). In an age of Amazon algorithms and Goodreads, we wanted to showcase the unique, customized services that librarians and libraries provide. These face-to-face interactions are an excellent opportunity for us to get to know our customers on a personal level. Of course, we also wanted our customers to discover new favorites in our collection and foster a love of reading, too.

We’ve made Tailored Title lists for many different kinds of readers from science fiction fans to lovers of romantic suspense, for seniors with vision problems looking for audiobooks to a kindergartener looking for books to read to her parents. It’s been very rewarding to help our customers find more reasons to love the library.

Recently, we took Tailored Titles into the digital sphere when Tim Spindle, our virtual librarian, approached us last fall about providing our Tailored Titles service on Facebook. We’ve had to modify our normal procedures to accommodate the zippy nature of social media. Instead of interviewing our customers and then providing a list of books, we do what I like to think of as “lightning rounds.” This is how it works: Tim advertises on Facebook and Twitter that we will be providing reading suggestions on a certain day and time. And then, when the appointed hour rolls around, Tim will post something along the lines of “Name one or two books you’ve read and enjoyed recently and we will suggest a Tailored Title just for you!” What follows is a flurry of activity – customers are posting their recent reads and our librarians at Northwest are typing away furiously at their computers researching and sharing a response.  

To meet the demand, we have four librarians on the job (in our suddenly hushed workroom) that are creating book suggestions, calling out to claim customers, and searching Novelist and other resources with furrowed brows. We even employ a wipe board to keep track of which librarians are helping which customers. The next two hours fly by for the Tailored Titles librarians and at the end of it we feel like we’ve run a race…. one that we’ve just won. As one of us said after a recent online session, “Whew! That was exhausting, but fun! Somebody ought to pay us for this! Oh wait, they do!”

Over the course of three Tailored Titles sessions on Facebook back in November, we provided 63 personalized reading recommendations! We’ll start a new round of Tailored Titles on Facebook this afternoon and it will continue every Wednesday afternoon in February from 2-4. I am really excited that we are bringing this readers’ advisory program to social media. Even though RA is traditionally a face-to-face service that librarians have provided for a long time, it has found a new audience online. As a community-based organization, we need to be where our customers are, and a great many of our customers are using Facebook. Providing Tailored Titles on Facebook creates a dynamic, interactive, and personalized relationship between the library and our online customers. The mash up of traditional library services like readers’ advisory and social media is just another great example of how flexible and evolving libraries can increase their relevancy to their communities.

If you have some free time this afternoon, tune in to Facebook from 2-4 to see how it goes.