Juris Dilevko

After a while, this book pretty much boils down to the following: reader's advisory today is bad because it pretty much mirrors commercial interests and follows the bookstore model. RA pre-1980 and earlier good because it had an educational goal. Dilevko simply leaves no room for a middle ground pretty much the book devolves into denigrating current RA services. I will grant that to an extent librarians do need to have an active educational role. I often struggle with that idea and where the lines are drawn. But there is also value to reading for pleasure and fun, which is something that seems to be missing for this author. After the first two chapters and the same tone, I skimmed the rest of the book. If you pretty much read the first and last chapters, you will likely get the gist of the book. Overall, this was pretty disappointing.… (mehr)

A well written failure. The core problem with this text is that the authors clearly had a narrow first impression of archival collections in libraries. Instead of really researching current cataloging and exhibition polemics and practices, the authors fixated on the concept of "edutainment". The topic would have had merit had the authors limited it to a realistic level. But the book ended up an exhausting warning on how librarians will save all cultural heritage institutions from failure. Yet their own research repeatedly debunks their obvious prejudice. The merit of keeping this book is that there is some excellent research despite the authors' prejudice against museums and archives. The subject matter has high relevancy and should be revisited by a new generation of authors.

I hope to see some update from these authors now that the tech apocalypse has not really happened as they saw it in the dawn of the current millennium.… (mehr)