Be More Bookish - Week 1 Assignment 1 & 2

For this first week's assignment one is given the task for a book cover quiz for children and adults. The first one I took on Sporcle.com was the adult covers with a twelve by twelve grid is divided up into twenty-four books with a point system and five minutes to guess them all. A small portion of the book jack was displayed without the title and one had to guess the name of the book. I thought how hard could it be to recall books that I mostly grew up with generally assuming I'd do better than what I actually would. Out of the twenty-four book covers I only got thirteen of them correct. I will say that I felt a little cheated from my score. It could have been higher but syntax issues diminished the score. For example I'd type "Where the Red Fern Grow" versus the correct answer "Where the Red Fern Grows". That happened about three times. However it was fun to visit the site.

Unfortunately, I fared worse on a similar quiz with the children's books, given twenty book covers and five minutes to guess the titles. Though I've recognized many of them because I've shelved most of them mostly from working circulation. I'm embarrassed enough about the children's book quiz to not post my score for that one.

See how you might do with the same book cover quiz:
http://www.sporcle.com/games/mgwiley26/covers

http://www.sporcle.com/games/g/bookcovers

The two Sporcale.com quizzes do apply to working with patrons of the library. Often I been told that customers may not be able to remember what a title is for a book that they are looking for. But if they can be shown book covers from keyword searches from the library's collection, that may trigger a response for what it is they are looking for.

For assignment number two, it was similar to the first two quizzes from Sporcle.com but was a little different in it's objective. Instead of guessing the titles to book covers, one had to guess what the sub genre of book jacket art implied. Though some book jacket are was obvious (mostly the romance sub genres) others were not so much. For example there was one book jacket that had a fighter jet on its cover. The answer to the question of what was the sub genre category was "Techno". However to me it could have been the cover for a spy-thriller or war drama. I certainly still don't see how "Techno"  could be derived about the fighter jet unless it was a non-fiction selection which I don't think that is exactly the theme of the book cover quiz was from what I observed.

All in all though, not bad for assignment 1 and 2 for week 1. The take away for me is to use visual stimulus, such as book jackets, with patrons as a strategy, when appropriate, for reader interviews.