Listeners' Advisory

Readers' Advisory has been on my mind a lot lately. I took a short course on the subject last year, and learnt all sorts of interesting things. I haven't yet managed to convince anyone else to let me put that knowledge to good use, but I'm hoping to wear them down eventually.

The trouble with academic libraries is that we often forget we hold books that are interesting and entertaining, and that some people just want to read for the fun of it. We make it easy to find books with a purpose, but constantly neglect the users who want to discover books for the heck of it.

A Readers' Advisory service is like a travel agent for books. You go into a travel agent and say "I want to visit Europe", the travel agent should spend some time finding what elements of Europe you are most interested in (snow-capped mountains, beaches, vibrant cities, sleepy hamlets...) and make sure your itinerary doesn't have you spending most of your time in the north of Denmark when you'd much prefer to be in the south of Spain.

If you go to a Reader's Advisory service and say "I've just finished the Bourne books by Ludlum and would like to read something like that", then they should spend a few minutes finding out what it was you found particularly appealing about the books you have liked. It may be that what you loved about the Bourne books is not the specific spy/espionage genre, but rather the lone-man-against-an-unknown-foe side of things. In which case, you may enjoy many other books that are not spy thrillers.

I need a Listener's Advisory service. The online stores from which I tend to purchase music (such as Amazon.de and CDBaby.com) keep sending me recommendations based on genres. In the case of CDBaby.com, this isn't too bad as they have a slightly askew take on musical genres, so I am discovering new things through them. Amazon just keeps sending me recommendations that tick exactly the same boxes as the music I have bought in the past.

My real problem is that neither of them will give me recommendations based on what I want, and I don't know how to describe what I want in terms that will create a suitable result using their computer systems. At the moment, what I want is something like Ranarim, only not in Swedish. I want that kind of modernised-traditional-instrument-alt-folk-music thing that Ranarim does, but I want to find bands that do this sort of thing in German or Estonian.

It's a strange request, I'll grant you. I love listening to Ranarim for the sound of the music, but if I can get recordings in one of the two languages I'm currently learning, then my 'casual music listening' doubles up as my 'autonomous language learning', and I get to kill two birds with one stone.

CDBaby has never heard of Ranarim, so the system cannot offer me a "sounds like" option for the band. Even if I could, I would not be able to narrow that to the languages I'm after. You can search for country of origin, but not language, which means the odds of finding a German or Estonian language CD are really slim-to-none, let alone looking for one in a very specific sub-genre (for which I do not know the name).

Amazon.de is where I bought my current Ranarim CDs from, and is happy to recommend other folk groups from Sweden and Norway with a similar feel. Unfortunately, I want something in German, and when you go looking for German folk music you get something completely different. Wading through the popular stuff to see if what I'm after is lurking down the bottom is a challenge I haven't accepted as yet.

The sound I want is pretty easy to find in Celtic-themed groups (Ranarim actually performed at a couple of Celtic music gigs in Britain a few years back), but trying to feed the word "Celtic" into the machine just moves me further away from German language results.

Surely there's some service somewhere where I can say "I want something alt-folky and kind of Celtic, only in German or Estonian" and someone can make appropriate recommendations?