Recently we asked our readers to tell us how they use Choice Reviews Online (CRO) and share with us any novel ways they use CRO features and content. We were pleased to receive responses from a wide range of readers from diverse institutions and geographic areas, not only in the U.S. and Canada, but from as far away as Sweden and Israel.

The interesting thing about our subscribers is that they don’t just read our reviews and features, they do things with them, e.g., compile and save lists of reviews for collection development, share lists with colleagues and faculty, use CRO content to enhance Web pages and blogs. We think you will find these comments from your peers interesting and useful, and you may even discover new and more effective ways to use CRO.

In the spirit of full disclosure: we offered a free Choice travel mug to any respondent whose comments were published. However, respondents were not coached in any way. Below are their comments, in their own words, with only minor editing for clarity.

We thank all users who responded.

We plan to publish more user comments in future issues.  If you use Choice Reviews Online in interesting and novel ways and would like to share them with our readers, please read the submission instructions at   “Win a Choice Travel Mug!”
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Perhaps the best thing for me about Choice Reviews Online is simply that the reviews are online! For years we subscribed to the printed card service, which was always useful, but more recently we began subscribing to the online service, and it is so much more convenient and useful. I am an academic librarian, and among other things, I am responsible for coordinating our reference collection development and serve as liaison to several academic departments: African American Studies, Anthropology, Business, Earth Science and Environmental Science.

I love being able to browse through Choice reviews at any location, whether in my office, at the reference desk, or elsewhere. It is so convenient to be able to sort and search using the advanced search features, which I use quite extensively to limit to certain time frames, rankings, etc. The great majority of purchases that I submit are derived from Choice Reviews Online and I am very appreciative of the service.

Charlie Cowling
Head of Instruction & Reference
Drake Memorial Library, SUNY Brockport
Brockport, NY

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I use the My Reviews section of Choice for several reasons. I’ve set up a profile so that I only receive reviews that match my criteria, which saves me a lot of time. The automatic e-mail reminds me monthly to spend some time on collection development. That is extremely helpful in my “blended” position, which includes responsibilities outside the library. I can create a list over several weeks or months, which I can easily send to our acquisitions librarian. And finally, I trust the reviews. 

Abby DeShane
Manager, Instructional and Career Resources
St. Louis Community College/Wildwood campus
Wildwood, MO

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The profile I have set up in Choice Reviews Online includes a wide range of subject areas that reflect my work as liaison librarian to several unrelated academic departments and offices on campus. Although I have shown several faculty members how to set up their own profiles, only a few actually do it. Some faculty have very specific interest areas.  As a librarian experienced in selecting relevant keywords, I add some of the more difficult- to-locate topic areas to my own profile in CRO. This helps me to ferret out interdisciplinary resources that wouldn’t normally reach faculty members in their disciplines. Many of the e-mails that I send to faculty result in book orders–as well as their appreciation.

Beth L. Mark
Instruction Coordinator
Murray Library
Messiah College
Grantham, PA

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CRO has been a great help for getting faculty involved with collection development on our small two-year campus. We do advanced searches with set criteria each month by subject area. We create lists from these reviews and then e-mail them to our faculty members. They then respond with items they think would be useful to add to our collection. We have responses from faculty members who usually don’t visit the library, but now they have input on what is being added. We have some faculty members who print off the reviews, but most of this is done electronically, which is great. And the price is right compared to receiving the cards, which include reviews for books way above the undergraduate level.

Ann Vogl
Academic Librarian
University of Wisconsin-Baraboo/Sauk County
Baraboo, WI

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We are a small community college library with four librarians. CRO is one of our main new book selection tools. The “My Profile” feature helps us divide up the workload. Each librarian sets up a profile with assigned CRO subject areas checked. Because books are only assigned to one subject, this helps us avoid duplicating our efforts. Checking appropriate readership levels and Choice recommendation categories also saves us time by excluding books for graduate students and those books that are not recommended.  Each month, when the notification e-mail arrives, I log in and click on “My Monthly Reviews” to see only the books in my area on the list.

To save time, I change the Display setting of my Monthly reviews list to “Full text” and “25” records per page. This way I can view the reviews without clicking on each title. Doing this makes the text size a bit too small for me, but IE 7’s quick Zoom tool down on the lower right corner of the browser status bar easily magnifies the texts.

I love the ISBN links because a single click enables me to check Worldcat.org to see whether our library already owns the book, how many other libraries purchased it already, whether the local public library has a copy, etc. Then, a second click on the book cover in WorldCat opens an Amazon.com window where I can browse user reviews, the TOC, and some excerpts, when available. What a great semantic Web application!

For faculty liaison, we routinely e-mail Choice reviews to faculty for input on purchases as well as notifying them of new books that have arrived. I am also working on a project to create lists of selected free Web resources recommended by Choice using an online bookmarking service, tagging them by department, and e-mailing the faculty. I believe this will promote the resources better than only adding them to the catalog.

Ying Yu
Assistant Professor/Librarian
Columbia Basin College Library
Pasco, WA

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While I still have fond memories of when we were routed subject-appropriate Choice cards (which could be handily recycled to use for making to-do lists), I do like having access to more environmentally friendly Choice Reviews Online. I find that CRO allows me to work very efficiently. I find myself having CRO, the online catalog, and Yankee Book Peddler’s GOBI open at the same time. I can easily check to see whether we already have the title in the catalog, or whether we might be receiving it from our vendor. I can also see whether or not we received a notification slip for the title in question. When I save CRO records to my list, I can be confident that I am only saving and ultimately printing out records for items we do not have.

J. Christina Smith
Anthropology/Sociology Bibliographer
Mugar Memorial Library
Boston University
Boston, MA

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Choice Reviews Online has become my most essential tool in collection development. Being a small academic library in Israel, CRO serves a crucial role in keeping both our College’s faculty and me, the librarian, up-to-date with current academic titles.  Additionally, CRO enables me to have an ongoing dialog with our faculty regarding their research needs.

I use CRO as follows: Once the online edition arrives, I browse the reviews in Current Issue. When I locate reviews relevant to our curriculum, I copy and paste the reviews and forward them to the appropriate faculty members via e-mail. The professors respond immediately, making their recommendations. The process then involves ordering the titles through our Israeli book distributor.

When the annual list of Outstanding Academic Titles appears, I again forward reviews to faculty members. This task requires a couple of days to complete, but the outcome is invaluable. The faculty is “gently” reminded that their input to the library’s collection is of primary importance. Additionally, we engage in a dialog in which faculty are able to refine their own research and curriculum needs as they relate to the library. Finally, through this interaction I often learn where there will be changes or greater emphasis in courses, and I am more aware of areas for future acquisition.

CRO also brings to my attention where gaps exist in our collection. Because the College has a limited number of majors, I try to ensure that the collection is current and strong in these areas. The browse reviews section is particularly useful here, as you can browse in several back issues.

When I was hired over a year ago as the first librarian at Touro College in Israel, I was told that the print collection needed to grow. In that time, we have expanded by nearly one thousand titles. This is in large part due to the guidance of CRO.

Bayla Pasikov
Librarian
Touro College in Israel
Jerusalem, Israel

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At The Library and IT at Malmö University we use Choice Reviews Online in many ways. As we have four libraries in our organization we have four acquisitions librarians with different emphases, for example, medicine, science, art, and humanities. We also have many subject librarians–almost every librarian is also a subject librarian who works with one or two institutions at the university. All of them have knowledge about Choice and use it in their daily work. To reach the students, teachers, and scientists at the university we use our E-resource-blog to inform about new Choice titles.  Please see: http://www.mahbloggen.se/e-resurser/.

Jan Nilsson
Senior Librarian
Malmö University
Sweden

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Late last spring, a co-librarian and I were charged with selecting nearly $80,000 worth of titles for a new community college campus library. As you can imagine, this was a real challenge–particularly since the campus was due to open in August and presumably everyone wanted the books to be on shelf at that time.

Although it is only one of several other resources, Choice Reviews Online was an excellent resource for us. We selected titles in multiple subject areas based on the profiles that we set up. This saved us lots of time and ensured that we selected a high-quality collection.  We also use Choice Reviews Online for our routine selection for our home campus library. Again, setting up our profile and viewing our Monthly Reviews is a real time-saver.

Wendy Foley
Librarian
Hillsborough Community College
Tampa, FL

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Despite my love of technology, I still enjoy the use of print in some circumstances, so I use both the print version of Choice  and the online version together. I love to browse the printed copy at my leisure mainly because that way I can do some handy collection development work while I look at the reviews. I constantly go back and forth from the print copy of Choic to the online catalog to my vendor software, checking our holdings against items reviewed and even ordering items on the fly when we don’t have an important title. The online version of Choice would be more cumbersome because of so many multiple screens. However, sometimes I see a review that is not in my subject area and I want to send a copy to another bibliographer. When that happens, I log on to CRO and e-mail the review to the bibliographer with a comment. The beauty in the online version of Choice is not just its use as a collaboration tool but also its searchability. Recently we needed to build our collection in genocide and holocaust studies. Obviously the online Choice allowed us to pull up reviews and titles using keywords, something one could not do with print.

The other use I have for Choice either online or in print is that I constantly discover the best Web resources to review in my own blogs (I maintain a blog/staff newsletter for internal library communication and an Outreach blog to my education/library science faculty community). My blog readers are not all librarians and delight in some of the great “finds” I offer them, many of which come from Choice.  For me, Choice is an essential tool, no matter what format you choose.

Susan Ariew
Academic Services Librarian for Education & Library Science
University of South Florida
http://usflibraries.typepad.com/edlibreport/
Tampa, FL

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One of my responsibilities is providing content for reference Web resources on our home page (http://lib.de.us/).  CRO is invaluable in this regard because I receive peer-reviewed and reliable Internet links via My Monthly Reviews and add most of them to our institutional Delicious.com account (http://delicious.com/DElibraries), where they are picked up by a widget on the home page and displayed for library patrons. CRO simplifies this one aspect of my job tremendously!

Richard James
Administrative Librarian
Delaware Division of Libraries
Dover, DE

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Of course, I peruse Choice Reviews Online monthly for reviews on materials to purchase in my subject areas (Biology and Geology).  But I am also getting a lot of ideas for free, online reference sites. When I get my monthly email of reviews, I keep my Delicious account open and bookmark the Web sites as I read. That way I can use them in my office, at home, or on the Desk. I also keep my EndNote library open, and use it to keep a wish list of the reviewed books. Add a cup of coffee to the mix, and the monthly reviews make a nice break from other tasks.

Enid Karr
Reference Librarian/Bibliographer for Biology and Geology
O’ Neill Library
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, MA

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Solicitations from publishers offering bundled e-book packages are becoming increasingly more common. One way to gauge the usefulness and quality of the packages has been to locate Choice reviews for the component titles. While not all the titles have Choice reviews a fairly accurate impression of the quality of the package can be determined from the reviews that are available on CRO.

Alex Toth
Social Sciences/Special Collections Librarian
Pacific University Library
Pacific University
Forest Grove, OR

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I am a new academic librarian, and Choice Reviews Online is an invaluable collection development tool. I have signed up for all of the free newsletters that apply to me, both newly reviewed titles in my subject area (business) and hot title picks, new reference items, etc. I go through each title that is sent to me carefully and get nearly all of the recommended selections. As well, if looking at purchasing older materials, I will often run it through the CRO database to see if it has been reviewed. Finally, when looking for new material on a certain subject, I do keyword searches through the reviewed lists to generate ideas of new titles.
 
Nicole Eva
Librarian
University of Lethbridge Library
Alberta, Canada

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I’m not a librarian, but I do have Reference Desk duties, so I know what sort of books our library needs. I peruse the CRO newsletter when it arrives and make suggestions to our librarians. It’s very helpful that it’s broken down by subject areas.

Rochelle Hammontree
Library Tech. Paraprofessional
Mark & Helen Osterlin Library
Northwestern Michigan College
Traverse City, MI

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I use Choice Reviews Online to help me select materials for the departments for which I am the liaison. For the English Department, I print off lists of items that I think they might be interested in and then the professor who represents their department, brings back the information for the titles they want the library to buy.  My other four departments don’t send many requests, so I use Choice Reviews Online for ordering materials for them.

I also use the Reference area to find reference materials to suggest for purchasing.  I maintain our “other” Internet resources portion of the Library’s Web site too, so I use the reviews of Internet sites as well.

Frances Hager
Acquisitions Librarian
Pendergraft Library
Arkansas Tech University
Russellville, AR

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It is very helpful to be able to copy and paste a specific review from CRO and then e-mail it to a faculty member. While I usually use the print version of Choice for selection, having the ability to copy and paste has netted great communications and numerous orders for items on which I was unclear as to faculty needs.

I can see that if I were using the online version I would be able to e-mail the item to the faculty member immediately, so I may give some thought to this approach.

Rita Blanford
Reference Librarian
Lorain County Community College
Elyria, OH

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I have had unusual opportunities in using Choice reviews over a period of many years. From 1972 until 1996, I worked in academic libraries and used the reviews to evaluate collections in four academic libraries, to make collection development selections, and to provide faculty with reviews in their disciplines for use in the classroom and in building library holdings in their disciplines. Since 1996, I have used Choice reviews for early access to newly published works which support the courses I have taught. My students are also instructed to use the reviews in selecting the best materials for their history research projects. Teaching overseas has also allowed me to make colleagues and students in other countries aware of CRO. Choice also assisted me in the selection of materials to support two Fulbright appointments. Keep up the good work!

Norma J. Hervey, Ph.D.
Emerita Professor of History
Luther College
Decorah, IA