YALSA blog review

I have subscribed to the YALSA blog for approximately the last 3 months, and I have found it fairly interesting. “Fairly” is an important qualifier – while I think it is a particularly useful professional resource, I do not read YALSA’s blog when I am doing my own leisure reading. Considering my leisure blog reading involves multiple book and library blogs, that is a bit of a critique. YALSA’s blog posts are often overly informative, or simply too long, and not visually broken up very well.

However, though YALSA’s blog has little appeal to those outside of professionals working with teens, it functions extremely well as a professional blog. It would keep a YA librarian well-informed; for example, I had no idea that WWE had a reading program that my library could participate in. These kind of notices of corporate sponsorships, or grants that libraries can apply for, are the types of things that would be quite easy to miss in one’s everyday work, but when they are amalgamated by the YALSA blog, it is quite easy to stay up-to-date.

Another useful aspect of YALSA is using it to stay on top of teen trends. An October post discussed whether or not teens use Twitter (they don’t), and what that means for the future of social media. There has been significant discussion over what is the appropriate use of social media, and which ones appeal to teens (Facebook), and how to apply this type of advertising / publicity in one’s own library.

Something I do not find useful in the YALSA blogs are the book reviews. These reviews are overly long, tend to be fairly boring, and do not compare with some of the reviews written by popular bloggers. When a YALSA book review appears in my Google Reader, I simply scroll past it – these reviews are not written in an interesting enough voice for me to make it through the lengthy plot summaries.

What I do really enjoy about the YALSA blog is the “personal” posts by certain YA librarians. Recently, there have been a few posts on the Twilight craze, and how individual public or school libraries have dealt with the “Edward and Bella” problem. In October, there was an interesting post about the organization and layout of a particular school library, and potential problems that teens run into in this library in trying to find the books they are looking for. These types of posts promote a professional enthusiasm and camaraderie among YA librarians, which makes the profession more dynamic and appealing.