Blogpost #2 School Library 2.0

Being an old fogey, I'm still reeling from the amount of new information in our readings, and am unsure what to make of a lot of it. I have to say, though, that I am very enthusiastic about the ideas in "School Library 2.0" by Christopher Harris. He talks about librarians creating an interface for students to create their own "virtual bookshelf" of favorite books, with reviews and ratings. This reminds me of the "shelf talkers" we had in the bookstore where I used to work. People love to get a little bit of information about a book from someone who loved it, and the shelf talkers enabled them to get it without having to move out of their personal browsing mode - not everyone likes to talk to a salesperson or a librarian. In the kids' section, we would have shelf talkers with reviews from our young customers (we also put some in our store newsletter).

I really like the idea of having students creating these "bookshelves" to collect their own ideas and to share them with others. It's probably much handier to jot some words online than to remember to ask for a form to fill out the next time you're in the library, and to hope that the librarian will be diligent about posting your review.

I've been looking at librarything.com/, and thought I'd better untangle myself from the fun and get to work writing this blog entry before the day is over. It's a great idea, and one that I know I would have loved as a teen, since I was always carrying around with me lists of book and album titles that friends recommended so that I'd remember what to get. I think that in the context of schools and school libraries, an interface through the LMC's webpage could be very useful for teachers as well as students, for creating book discussions, writing journal entries, and involving all the school's readers in booktalking.