Pop Goes the Library: Using Pop Culture to Connect with Your Whole Community

Citation

Calvert, P. (2009), "Pop Goes the Library: Using Pop Culture to Connect with Your Whole Community", The Electronic Library, Vol. 27 No. 1, pp. 194-195. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470910934939

You will either love this book or treat it with disdain. The very idea that libraries can mix with pop culture will fill some with horror. But there are enough librarians who either like pop culture themselves, or who recognise its significance with many current or potential customers, that they are ready to engage with pop culture – whatever it is – as a part of their regular activities. So the opening of this book is a quick and light hearted attempt to define pop culture, though the authors know that this can't be done with any real precision. To understand pop culture, you actually have to be there!

There is a chapter on how to discover more, if you feel the need to know, by using surveys, focus groups, statistics, and perhaps the most useful, just keeping your eyes and ears open for “what's hot”.

In the core of the book is a chapter of collection development. Yes, quite a lot is about new pop, but I like the author's point that youngsters may well enjoy being introduced to Fred and Ginger's musicals by their grandparents. So there is detail here about selection tools to use, the formats to watch out for, and how to match a collection to its community.

There is also a chapter called “Information technology is everyone's job”. The author's reason for including this in the book it that technology is not just a means of delivery, it is also pop culture in itself. You need to know about Facebook and Flick'r (and all the other social networking sites) before you really know how the culture works. Here the authors deal with technologies that can enhance the delivery of information, such as RSS, podcasts, blogs and wikis. Each one is given a simple description of what it is and how it works, without going into the sorts of details that could be disconcerting to a beginner.

Add to that a chapter on promotion of the collection and the technology, and it makes for a well‐rounded book. Naturally it will be most useful to school librarians and those in public libraries serving teens and children, but pop culture is not only for the young. The “calendar” of activities is a great idea, though obviously librarians outside the USA will need to look for local alternatives to the Super Bowl, and so on.

To add value to an already useful book there are two appendices full of references and links to resources.