Graphic Novels

Graphic novels are something that I am very interested in, both personally and professionally. At my previous job I was in charge of starting and maintaining the adult graphic novel section. In my personal life, I read about as many graphic novels as I do regular books in a year. But even with these experiences, I do not have special insight into how to be able to serve patrons that like these materials. The thing that I did while developing the collection was to treat it like I did every other section of the library. I had a budget for it and I would do my best to get titles that I think the patrons would enjoy. I think it is our role as librarians to make sure that all patrons are served equally. We should not be cowed by the opinions that some patrons do not think that those books are worth reading. They same was said about science fiction and fantasy books for a long time and now they are one of the few genres that are almost always broken out from the general collection. The other thing that I think we should do to help patrons with this is to make sure that they are easily accessible and that patrons know where they are. One of the problems that the collection I developed had was that there was not a good location of them to be housed so they ended up being neglected in a corner.