Secret Shopper Assignment

For this assignment I visited the tiny library in the small town where my sons attend school. I had never been inside before, even though I drive by it every day, and I have been curious to see what it was like inside and if they actually had anything to read. Upon entering it was immediately apparent that it was a library for readers, but not if your tastes were too out of the mainstream. There were many books on display, a few Young Adult but mainly recently published bestsellers.

I was greeted by a friendly librarian who asked if she could help me find something. I told her I was looking for something to read. She asked if there was anything specific I was looking for, and I said, "Not really", which seemed to stump her. So I volunteered that I loved the Miss Read series, both Thrush Green and Fairacre, hoping to find a Gentle Read for my next annotation. She asked if they were mysteries, romance, etc. I told her that they weren't really those, just books about life in an English village. She then turned to the computer and started searching. I couldn't see what website she was searching, but she found the author and read me a description with a few appeal terms, so I thought we were getting there. Unfortunately, the library is so small the author read-a-likes she tried were not in the library. She then tried what looked to me like Amazon from the sideways view I had of the screen. As she was looking this time the conversation finally started rolling. She started recommending authors to me that I had either read and liked, or others that were on my to-read list, and we also began discussing mysteries. However, she seemed to miss the fact that the series I mentioned were set in England, and although one of the subsequent series she mentioned is also set in England I don't think she made the connection. I ended up checking out a couple of books I had already read (and liked) because I had to get to school and pick up the boys and I couldn't be there forever.

If she had asked me more questions at the beginning of the conversation I think she might have been able to be even more accurate in her search, but she was hampered by the lack of conversation and the fact that the library was so small. Also, she never offered me ILL, which led me to believe it wasn't available.

So, overall it was a good experience and a bad one. Good that she did manage to come up with some things of interest to me, and bad that they were nothing I had not already found on my own. Given the size of the library I really didn't expect much more, so I was pleased to see that the inside of the library was mostly dedicated to fiction. I also felt that I experienced some of the correct things to do in Reader's Advisory, but maybe not in that particular way.