Blogs and Blog Readers

Hello Readers,

This week I wanted to talk to you about the opportunity I had learning about information regarding blog readers and feed reader apps. All of this was new to me, as I am not a blogger and have just ventured into this new world and learning lots of cool things the more I explore. One thing that I think we all know by now is that the internet is filled with information just waiting for us to learn about and can often times be a bit overwhelming. That’s where the feed reader apps come in to help clear up some of the confusion we may feel when searching blogs for information.

After careful deliberation and spending hours searching, I decided to join Feedly for several valid reasons. First, Feedly is FREE to join, you can’t get any better than that. It allows me to easily navigate and search the blogs that I want to follow and save by inputting what I am looking for in the search tool. I can easily read the font and understand the format without any extra or unnecessary details and steps. The search tool displays a graphic and quick description of the blog which is great. Feedly, offers a way to save articles that I can view and come back to and also allows me to share content through social media. It basically takes everything I want and wraps it into a nice, neat little package for me!

I decided to highlight 5 of the blogs that I decided to follow through my search on Feedly and Tumblr:

Mighty Little Librarian

I must tell you that this was one of the first blogs that caught my eye and it was mainly because of the blog’s title , Mighty Little Librarian. Considering that I am bit on the short side, I absolutely fell in love with the name of this blog that belongs to Tiffany Whitehead, the new school librarian at Episcopal School of Baton Rouge in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is a presenter, avid reader, and technology geek and I absolutely love it. Her past posts have been about her wonderful and innovative ideas that she used at her former school as a middle school librarian. Even though I fell in love with the name, I decide o follow because I really enjoyed her posts about proper library procedures featuring the students from her school and her thoughts on how she would like to replace the Dewey Decimal System in the library. I liked that in one of her older posts she refers to how she would categorize her fiction books then as more categories were introduced she updated he categories, which shows that she really wants her readers to stay current. I am a big fan of projects and with my current school always pushing cross curriculum activities, I enjoyed gathering and reading information on the 6^th grade project she collaborated with using the book “Wonder”. I look forward to possibly using the same format and tools in my own library one day.

Awful Library Books

This site also caught my attention because of the name Awful Library Books. As I searched through the site I realized the sole purpose is to help librarians weed out books that just shouldn’t be in the library for kids. I liked the comment used for the caption of the title that states “hoarding is not collection development”. As I am currently taking a collection development class and have taken a course that spends a lot of time discussing the importance of weeding out books in a collection, I found the caption to be amusing. I think the site would be great for someone who may consider themselves a hoarder or even a new librarian who is coming into a situation where the previous librarian was and they need help starting the “weeding out” process. This blog gives insight to why certain books are “awful” in hopes that a school library can be revamped.

YA Book Blog Directory

This YA Book Blog Directory  site is awesome for a lover of YA books like myself. It gives a list of links to book blogs that feature the latest book releases and book reviews. Students who choose to follow this bog site and book lovers can spend several days trying to explore this site and all the information it holds. It is truly a book lovers’ gold mine.

Library Displays

Elaine Pearson is the Librarian at Horowhenua College in Levin, New Zealand and works towards creating innovative ways to promote library books with her Library Displays blog. I work at a Title 1 campus and often need ways to be creative with a low budget, so her blog is great as she gives great ways to display books in the library using a limited budget. She gives links to articles and websites and also tips to generate a great display to showcase books that have been “forgotten”. With a low budget, the books in her library aren’t the newest, so she tries to find ways to get readers hooked on the existing books in the school, which I think can benefit all school librarians.

Alafaya Library

The Alafaya Library used great ideas for interactive displays that I found while searching “Library Displays” on Tumblr. They used a lot of great library displays connecting current pop cultures to different genres of books.  Some of the ones I really liked were the If You Liked This…TV Edition and the display featuring all red books. I think that a lot of these ideas and the way they tie in crafts will spark an interest in any reader and may also spark an idea in teachers to motivate reading in the classroom.

I got so inspired, I decided to create a  Tumblr Account, check it out!