{"id":26496,"date":"2018-07-20T08:00:24","date_gmt":"2018-07-20T12:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=26496"},"modified":"2018-07-20T08:00:24","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T12:00:24","slug":"tapping-into-our-bookseller-braintrust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=26496","title":{"rendered":"Tapping into Our Own Bookseller Braintrust"},"content":{"rendered":"

All day long, booksellers in all our stores field questions, give recommendations, run quick research on books for special requests, and more. The children’s department is a hotbed for tricky questions because customers are so often buying for a reader\u00a0other than themselves. For a long \"\"<\/a>time, we’ve talked about how to best pool our resources and round out our individual knowledge bases, but it’s not easy. When I came to BookPeople, the children’s department relied heavily on\u00a0comprehensive searchable notes in book files in our POS system. But that became cumbersome over time to keep updated, consistent and current as the searches became burdened by books no longer carried. Then we experimented with a shared Google reference doc that could help direct people to the right books for common requests\u2014as well as help find stories for specific historical fiction periods (which comes up for school assignments). This was an excellent tool for a couple of years, until the same issues\u00a0began to raise their heads and the whole thing started to feel overloaded. We have, over the last few years, done a lot of work honing our section titles in the store to help customer (and staff) more easily find book for commonly asked questions, but I feel like we can still do more to share knowledge amongst ourselves\u2014especially\u00a0within our core group of children’s book specialists.
\nIn a store like ours, we get pretty spread out, not all working at the same time in the same place.\u00a0Given that,\u00a0how do we make sure we are collectively learning from our daily interactions so that we all keep getting better at what we do? If someone comes up with a genius answer to a tricky question, we all benefit from adding that to our mental archives. And if someone has a missed opportunity, either in a query that didn’t end with a book found or some other puzzle, we\u00a0could all up our game by trying to\u00a0brainstorm it after the fact. At a Children’s Institute panel, I heard someone mention that their store shares a nightly wrap-up email among kids’ staffers with some quick hits from the day \u2014 either funny moments, triumphant successes, or an interaction when someone felt like they struck out.
\nI loved the concept, although I don’t know that a daily email work for us. But it jogged a thought… what if we started a department journal for people to jot notes in at the end of their shift? Non-specialists would be welcome to add notes as well (which might help us track what they need help with), but our core team can use it as a sort of journal that we can pull out at our biweekly team meetings to remind us about what’s been going on and possibly prompt valuable discussions. I’ve gotten some good feedback about this idea internally, but tell me, what does your store do? I’m on vacation this week and am blogging from a hotel room, but I plan to\u00a0start get something started when I get back.\u00a0Any genius tips out there to help us round this idea out?
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A question for fellow booksellers about knowledge-sharing best practices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}