Blogging about Professional Blogs

Good Afternoon,

Today I am going to look into two professional blogs. The two I chose are No Shelf Required and YALSA. Let's dive in!

No Shelf Required by Sue Polanka and Mirela Roncevic

No Shelf Required is a blog about e-books and material on the internet for libraries. They focus on letting librarians know what is new in the world of technology. On the blog librarians and anyone really has the opportunity to ask questions and get more informed on new things happening with digital libraries. These ladies cover so many topics from new apps, to new reference sites. They make new entires very frequently, sometimes more then once a day. As long as it relates to the library and technology they are going to post it to the blog. They want to make sure they cover all of their bases. They also have readers send in information that they feel everyone should know about. It is amazing the amount of articles begin with I was emailed about this topic. I think it is great how interactive and involved this blog seems to be.

One very interesting entry I read was about book snatching. The entry talked about how e-books disappear at a certain time on your e-device. This is very different than how it used to be with an actual book, where you had to take it back to the library (S Polanka, 2014). I found this one very interesting because technology has become so advanced that we can expire e-books and emails after so long. I have no idea how they do it, but it is very fascinating. 

YALSA by Sarah Flowers

Yalsa stands for the Young Adult Library Services Association. YALSA is a blog that reaches out to young adults and their interests. They want to get teens involved and keep them interested in the library. This blog posts almost everyday and they do a lot of cool things. They have more informational posts along with some fun ones. They have an app of the week along with tweets of the week post. That's right YALSA even has a twitter account. Social Media is very important in society now and YALSA knows that it's a great way to get out there and reach even more teens. Another interesting thing about YALSA is that if you join and are 13 and older you can even write blog entries. I think it is really interesting that these teens also get the ability to write on the blog about libraries or cool new tech stuff they find. It is a very interesting blog that lets the teens use their voice as well. I think that is really unique to find. 

For YALSA the interesting article to me is the app of the week, which they do every week. I think that it is a great way to get good apps out there for the teens that involve library and information science in some way. I really think this blog is great and a very educational tool for teens. 

Ashley


References:

Flowers, S. (n. d.). YALSA [blog]. Retrieved from http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/

Polanka, S., & Roncevic, M. (n.d.). No shelf required [blog]. Retrieved from http://www.libraries.wright.edu/noshelfrequired/