I really enjoyed subscribing to and reading posts from the five blogs in this assignment. While they are all from a librarian’s point of view, there are distinct differences in the approach each blog follows. They are all generally written from a personal perspective, but one of them seems to be more formal in its writing than the others. In the Library with a Lead Pipe is a collaborative blog that has several bloggers and guest writers, and the writing is lengthy and reads more like academic papers with cited articles appearing at the end of each post. While the topics can be interesting, including lengthy pieces on Facebook and WikiLeaks, it is a blog that requires more investment of time to delve through the postings one at a time.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, The Distant Librarian contains posts that are short, to the point, and very casual in their writing. Paul Pival is the sole blogger and his blog contains mainly short book reviews, and blurbs about the electronic side of librarianship such as screencasting, electronic databases, and e-books. Librarian By Day also contains posts from a sole blogger (Bobbi Newman) about the tech side of libraries, but her posts seem to be more fleshed out and contain numerous links to other articles, plus embedded videos and images that make the posts more interesting.
The blog David Lee King is run by a librarian who posts frequently and about many different topics related to librarianship. His “Top 10 Tips To Do Presentations Like Me” is an interesting series that every librarian or librarian-to-be can learn a thing or two from. It takes a certain boldness or chutzpah to name a blog after yourself and display images of yourself on your blog, but in Mr. King’s case it comes across as more gregarious than arrogant. And after I read on his blog that he is also a musician, his outgoing approach to blogging makes more sense.
My favorite blog of the five is The Librarian’s Commute by Olivia Nellums. Her topics are all over the map, including writing about patrons, weeding, e-books, blogging, among many others. It’s not too tech-heavy, which appeals to me since I’m not a super techy person. And the simplicity with how she lays out her posts with bullets or numbers to indicate her talking points and examples is a plus. I will certainly continue to read the other four blogs but I will probably navigate over to The Librarian’s Commute more often.
The three additional blogs I subscribed to are Genre X from the Oak Park Public Library, Marin County Free Library, and Shelf Talk from Seattle Public Library. Genre X is a blog whose subtitle is “A Twenties and Thirties Book Group”. I am no longer in my twenties or thirties but I thought I’d peek in on what the blogging staff at OPPL was recommending to readers of that age group. The blog contains mostly readers’ advisory recommendations and announcements of events that would appeal to their designated demographic, such as trivia night, holiday book swap, and a Guitar Hero competition (all great ideas, in my opinion). Marin County Free Library’s blog has more general information and announcements, such as a new Overdrive app for eBooks and audiobooks on the iPad, tax help, audiobook download of the week, and upcoming events. It’s very simply laid out with a Blogger template and very easy to read. I’ve scanned Shelf Talk years ago and I seem to recall its being mostly book reviews, but they have expanded the scope of their blog and provide information about digital downloads, movie reviews, a Question of the Month series in which the tackle a reference question and answer it, as well as the informative book reviews.
Of the blogs that I chose to subscribe to, the ones that I found to be successful had a simple layout that was not too busy on the page, were frequently updated, expressed a personal “voice” to the writing (i.e., informal) and were not too tech-oriented. There were certain blogs that were more tech-y than others, but I found the blogs that described the technical stuff in layman’s terms were more effective.
No comments:
Post a Comment