School Library Journal review

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.