Week Five Prompt

I feel that collection development depends fairly heavily on how books are reviewed. If books are never given a bad review a-la Booklist, then how do librarians know if they're biased or not? If a book has hardly any reviews at all, how do they know they're getting a quality book? It makes it difficult to develop a good, comprehensive collection if the resources for judging a book are limited or skewed.

In regards to the two romance reviews for week five, I feel that neither review, on its own, would be wholly reliable. They're both too personal. However, if I had to depend on one or the other, I would go for the blog review.  It's well written and gives important points such as length, genre, and pros and cons.  The Amazon review is poorly written and doesn't really tell why other readers would be interested in the book.

The Angela's Ashes reviews make me feel comfortable about adding this book to the collection.With multiple sources following the same positive trend, you know that the reviews aren't just biased personally.

I don't think that it's fair that one type of book is reviewed heavily and others are not, but there's not much we can do about that. Books that become popular, have the potential to become popular, are in a popular genre, or are published by a popular author are always going to be given priority over relatively unknown books. Library collections that rely too heavily on reviews and don't take chances on unknowns run the risk of falling into a rut; readers that have already read the popular ones and are looking for something new and/or different may be left wanting. Review resources that won't print negative content are less reliable, to me. Reviews shouldn't be insulting to the author, but honest reviews are necessary. Not everyone will enjoy every book, and it's important to show that.

I don't buy for a library, and I mostly only read from a select pool of authors. When I do choose something to read, I read the summary and use that to decide if I like it or not. As I've stated before, I don't like to involve others in my reading process. However, if I had to use a review source, Kirkus is my favorite source.