Horror Training Update: New Webinar, an Academic Look At Dark Fiction in Libraries, and a Visual RA Training Tool

Happy Halfway to Halloween!!! [Yes, I am still trying to make that a thing]

Over on the main blog, I have this post with a brand new update to my very popular Horror RA presentation.  Click through for all of the details including why you should care, links to the slides, info on how you can watch the webinar, and a handout.

That is the primer though. It is the bare minimum you need as a public library worker to help horror readers. That’s why it is on the general blog.

But you came here, to RA for All’s evil twin to learn more, and that is what I will give you.

Seriously though, this blog is for those wanting to delve further into helping horror readers and developing their horror collections so I have a bit more info here today.

I want to start by highlighting the work of J.T. Glover, a Humanities Research Librarian/Assistant Professor at VCU who looks at dark fiction from an academic perspective. Click here for his blog. Much of his research is very useful to our work in the public library world. I have added him as his own category in my Resources page.

I think this recent post, “Libraried and Under-Libraried Authors” which looks at some of the most acclaimed weird fiction authors and how their titles are represented on North American library shelves, is a great example of how much we can learn from his perspective.

Back in October, I also featured Glover in this post.

My second addition to today’s presentation for all of you brave enough to click over to the horror blog comes from me but it is via my Australian colleague Ellen Forsyth.  While I was at StokerCon last week, I set about on a mission to take selfies with horror authors who I felt libraries should make sure they knew about and, in a perfect world, add to their collections.

Since I was busy with the conference, I was putting them up as fast as I could, but was doing nothing to gather them. Thankfully, Ellen had all of our backs, and she put the entire series together in one Storify. You can click here to see this full visual training tool all in one place. Thank you so much Ellen. [Please also check out Ellen’s amazing work with Read Watch Play for another RA tool].

As you will see, there are authors in this Twitter project who do not appear in my updated horror presentation. That is because there is only so much room on the slides and only so much information people can handle being thrown at them in 50 minutes. But, if you put the presentation and the Twitter selfies together, you have a great example of the authors you should have in a modern horror collection. Again, it is not everything, but it is a great start.

So get to work. You have 6 months to get yourself and your shelves in tip top haunting shape. I have done all the prep work, all you have to do is click and read.