Reader's Best Friend: Jessica Moyer, College of St. Catherine

Jessica Moyer's course was set when she discovered that librarians could spend their days matching readers with books they would love. Both an avid reader and a born scholar, she wanted to see the research on best practices in readers' advisory (RA). She discovered there wasn't much research on the topic—and librarians didn't seem to be applying its lessons.

So Moyer started conducting research herself and spreading that knowledge to help librarians improve their RA service and to use 2.0 services for NextGens. As an LIS educator, she preaches the RA gospel to future librarians. Her missionary work includes writing numerous articles on RA, speaking frequently about it at library conferences, and writing Research-Based Readers' Advisory (ALA, 2008).

If this seems like all work and no play, remember, she's obliged to keep up with trends in popular fiction—those 150-plus novels she reads each year are research. (A dirty job, but someone loves to do it.)