This year’s RUSA President’s Program at the American Library Association Annual Conference stretched the definition of readers’ advisory to include identifying and suggesting music and art. Three subject experts showed how different disciplines organize and distribute their collections. Central to all these efforts is identifying appeal factors.

Nathan Altice, adjunct professor of sound communications at Virginia Commonwealth University, addressed the subject of musical appeal. Altice described the Music Genome Project, an effort to understand the origins and development of music in human history. The website Pandora is a practical application of this research, as it tries to pick music to please the listener, using the input from the user to create personal musical profiles. Appeal factors include sound, harmony, rhythm, melody, mood, genre, and text. The study of how these create the pieces that please listeners is in its early stages.

Susan Chan of the Steve Project addressed social tagging of art images on the Internet. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums have spent millions of dollars scanning images of digital libraries to their websites but are unhappy with client access of these images. The Steve Project began as a test to see if social tagging could create descriptors that nonspecialist would understand and use to find art online. Looking at one block of project records, the Steve team found that 86 percent of the tags created by digital library visitors were new (not in the descriptions provided by subject experts), often identifying either objects in the images or moods that the images evoked. Specialists removed a small number of inappropriate tags but kept most. Some tags were corrected for spelling.

The tags have proven to have side benefits with undocumented photographs. Some viewers are able to identify items in the images for dates that those items were in vogue, allowing collection catalogers to assign dates to the images. Unknown places and people are also sometimes identified.

Nora Rawlinson of Early Word spoke about book marketers using appeal factors to sell their books. Pointing out that booksellers and librarians see differently, she showed book covers used in market tests of appeal. We chose the losing cover as the best in several of the cases, perhaps indicating that librarians are not market savvy.

Rawlinson reported on why shoppers buy the books they do:

favorite author (63 %)
book category or genre (48 %)
flap copy persuasive (48 %)
cover art appealing (29 %)
book title catchy (23 %)

Rawlinson recommended that in addition to putting book reviews on library websites, we should be putting them directly on the books, perhaps with post-its. Booksellers call these shelftalkers. She said booksellers understand the value of marketing that grabs the readers’ attention.