Michael Sullivan (3) (1967–)

Read in 2025. The book suggestions are a bit dated now, but we did discover some true gems my son loved. I recommend this book. Grain of salt, a bit of gender essentialism in here, though my specific child mirrors much of it so it worked for us.

This is a good basic introduction to children's services in libraries. It covers a wide range of topics, and is highly readable. Recommended for youth services librarians or any library worker who does children's programming.

Fundamentals of Children's Services is an essential title in my personal / professional library. Work in a school library is, at its core, library service to children (as well as service to school staff and parents as members of the school community). The value of Michael Sullivan's book is that it covers a lot of ground: principles of effective services, service to different types of customers, collection development, "weeding" outdated materials, effective cataloging, and more. It's show more written from the perspective of a person who works in a public library, but most of the information is just as applicable to school-library work as well. As a bonus, the book also gave me ideas about how I might make it easier for my public-library counterparts to assist my library's customers. This is a book that I'll refer to often as an aspiring Youth Services Librarian. show less

A popular speaker on boys and books, Sullivan continues his essays, often the topics of his speeches defending the idea that boys are quite different than girls in a number of ways and in particular, what they will and will not read and how to influence them to read more. Sullivan is talking to adults about the various approaches and techniques that work and in doing so supplies us with some recommendation for specific titles, but mostly treats the kinds of genres to promote to this group. show more His essays spur the idea that conversation with our own patrons is the best way to find out interests and invite them to help us as adults explore the topics of interest to them. Do we have book discussion groups with boys or girls only? If we have a number of digital discussion groups going all the time, then as we read the various reactions, we discover what works and what doesn’t work. Sullivan’s book is a quick read. I’d suggest cutting the book up in chapters; passing it around at a teacher or teacher librarian group and then charting the various approaches with additions of our own. It would certainly be a way of pushing everyone to try something and report back. This is a book to talk about. Talk about the issues with boys. Then switch the conversation to girls or gang members or geeks, or Christian readers, or whatever groups seem to be reading or ignoring that they would love if they just knew about it. Recommended as a discussion starter. Oh, don’t forget to talk to the kids about all this – not just decide as adults what we want them to read. show less