School Library Journal declares itself “the world’s largest reviewer of books, multimedia, and technology for children and teens”. School Library Journal is a companion to Library Journal, and a sibling publication of Publisher’s Weekly, all of which are under the management of Reed Elsevier Inc.
While School Library Journal does review books for teens, much of the material in this publication is focused towards children. Limiting the articles to purely articles about teens does not leave a large amount of materials; SLJ focuses much of its attention on K – 8. However, despite the focus on children, the material that SLJ does publish on teens is particularly interesting, and would be very useful to teen librarians.
One such article was “Do You Speak Digital?: Harvard's John Palfrey Explores What It's Like to Be a Digital Native”. This article provided an interview with John Palfrey, whose new book, Born Digital, suggests a new way of conceiving of today’s youth. One of the strengths of SLJ is in these types of professional development pieces, especially the technology-focused professional development piece.
SLJ is additionally useful for its thorough reviews, which provide extensive description of the titles reviews. Inconveniently these reviews are all located under “Grade 5 and Up”; it may have been useful for them to be collocated under “Teens”, though most of SLJ’s reviews do indicate an age range.
Perhaps the most major problem with School Library Journal, however, is the RSS feeds, or lack thereof. Subscribing to the multiple RSS feeds of SLJ is very inconvenient, and there is often overlap between the different feeds, which leads to duplicate posts in one’s RSS feed reader.
Overall, SLJ has extremely useful content. It is somewhat unfortunate, though, that there are some obstacles to accessing it, such as the lack of collocation of the reviews of teen books, and the inconvenient RSS feed functions.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
School Library Journal review
Teen Genreflecting Review
Diana Tixier-Herald’s Teen Genreflecting is a useful reader’s advisory resource that does not underestimate the intellectual potential of teens. Tixier-Herald provides an overview of all of the genres of literature: Historical Novels; Science Fiction; Fantasy; Mystery, Suspense and Horror; Adventure; Contemporary; and Romance. Each category is broken down much further into its subgenres, and titles are recommended for each subgenre.
An interesting introduction gives an overview of the importance of encouraging teens to read for pleasure, and the benefits of linking teens to materials of their own interest, including comic books and graphic novels. Tixier-Herald also explains her intention behind Teen Genreflecting; which is not to give a comprehensive guide to particular authors, but to facilitate thorough understandings of the genres that do exist, and their appeal to teens.
The scope of Teen Genreflecting is very broad, and encompasses much of the world of publications for teens. It is a useful tool for librarians who may be completely unaware of the variety of materials available for teens, or for adult readers’ advisors who may be looking to teen collections to recommend cross-over titles for their patrons.
Most titles recommended by Tixier-Herald are accompanied by a one or two line plot description; however, this is often not sufficient enough to assess the book’s appeal to teens. The Genreflecting approach may not benefit teen readers’ advisory in the same way that it benefits adults’ readers’ advisory, since many of the most popular teen titles blend genres together. Additionally, Tixier-Herald does not mention publication dates in her annotations. She justifies this in the introduction by suggesting that good genre fiction is timeless; however, some teen readers may disagree and want to read more recent titles.
In my own research during this course, I have found Teen Genreflecting to be a relatively useful resource; however, it is best accompanied by The Teen Reader’s Advisor by RoseMary Honnold. The two books used in conjunction with each other provide a very complete picture of teen materials: where The Teen Reader’s Advisor could use more thorough investigations of the genres, Teen Genreflecting steps in, and where Teen Genreflecting could use more discussion of appeal, The Teen Reader’s Advisor fills the gap.
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