Library Blogs

Well, there's no shortage of blogs by, about, for, and helpful to librarians. I've looked at three sources: libdex.com/weblogs.html, www.ipl.org/div/blogs, and www.blogwithoutalibrary.net. Chock-a-block full of information, though sometimes you have to search far and wide to find a blog worth reading.

The weakest of the above sources is libdex.com (though it allows one-click adding of feeds). I found myself wading through posts that were just program schedules (useful for those library systems but not for me), veiled advertisements, chat threads by another name, discontinued or hardly ever updated, aimed at students of a particular college or public school (and cryptic to the rest of us), trivial, etc. Overall, I didn't find it worth my time to browse through all the garbage.

The ipl blogs were much, much better. I found links to podcasts (try MobyLives Radio!), useful and interesting reviews of books and films that added to my Readers' Advisory knowledge, and other things. Again, though, it took a little digging to find something that actually related directly to the job of being a librarian. Yet I did find things. One blog was a step-by-step guide to implementing an IM reference librarian service, while another one (by Amanda Etches-Johnson at McMasters University) was a "rant about whatever's on my mind" blog but with lots of interesting and valuable content (it spoke to me).

The third blog source is actually one person's blog, I think (blogwithoutalibrary). It was also quite interesting and useful at the same time. I found a great Flickr category there: screen shots of web 2.0 error messages. You should take a look at it--it's very funny.