Monday, August 3, 2009

Thing #9 Library-Related Blogs and News Feeds

I know I skipped Thing number 9, but I finally decided to get back to it.
Syndic8
I tried Syndic8 first to find some school library related news feeds. It was somewhat confusing and when I used to the terms "School Library" to search for school library related news feeds, it came up with only 9 feeds. Most of the feeds were about various Universities' SLIS programs. To be honest, once you become an actual school librarian, the advancement of these programs probably won't be of particular concern to you. I know if I were a school librarian, I wouldn't much care if Dr. so-and-so from Big Name University had an email interview posted on such-and-such website (unless it were one of my professors ^_^). Syndic8 allows you to subscribe to a feed directly from their site, but for some reason they don't have Google Reader in their list of readers to send to. So I'd have to either start using one of listed readers or open up google reader and copy and paste the URL info into it.
I decided sometime later to give Syndic8 another shot and decided to use expand my search by using "library" as my search term and managed to get back more results, about 800. At least you can tell by the icons which links might be broken or which feeds need repair, but Syndic8 was still confusing and disappointing nonetheless.
Google Blog Search
Next I tried Google Blog Search to find library related blogs. This one produced results much more relevant to my interest than Syndic8. Google Blog Search (GBS) isn't perfect. I used the same search terms as last time and several posts from School Library Journal's blog showed up in the results. I realize that some some websites have more than one blog attached to it. I would like to have seen the results listed in some other format so that the blog's title was the main focus and not the post. However, I get more results (and more relevance) than with Syndic8 and that satisfied me.
I found one of many blogs via GBS on the School Library Journal's site. It's called Good Comics for Kids. It was kind of neat and an unusual blog as it has multiple maintainers and it's all about comics made for children. The existence of School Library Journal's various blogs of course most of us in the biz already know about. But one non-SLJ blog I found through GBS that you might not have heard of is School Library Activities Monthly Blog. Librarians who have to run professional development sessions on technology and online media will be very interested in this blog. They also have a magazine for sale. (Note: School Library Activities Monthly Blog will be moving to a new address on August 5th to http://blog.schoollibrarymonthly.com.)

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