YALSA blog feed

YALSA or the Young Adult Library Services Association contains a RSS feed for its blog which is used to provide librarians working with young adult readers with different types of information including reviews of apps to assist in providing services, somewhere to show relevant tweets which people have found and a variety of other topics.

The feed is displayed on the blog site in reverse chronological order with the option of checking previous posting based on the date of publication being the only navigational aid so subscribing to the feed is a useful feature. Also the text is a bit small to be read comfortably so this is another reason that subscribing to the feed is useful.


YALSA. 2013. YALSA. [online] Available at: http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/ [Accessed: 31 Jul 2013].

 The YALSA blog is established as being authoritative due in part to the organisation being a division of the American Libraries Association and partly due to the procedures used to determine that only suitably qualified bloggers can submit posts which have to meet certain standards. The comments are also subjected to those standards and are moderated by the blog manager.

The stated purpose of the blog is to provide a means of publishing information about issues relevant to the young adult librarianship community.

The blog site contains only two ads which are both for YALSA projects so indicates independence of the blog from outside influences.

The blog is aimed primarily at library staff serving young adults and their clients.

This is a useful blog to subscribe to as there is a range of information to interest staff and student alike with the RSS feed including images to help break up the text.

Adult Books 4 Teens

Adult Books 4 Teens is one of a number of blogs which form part of the School Library Journal website. It was created to assist librarians to find books for the adult market which will appeal to the teen readers that they serve. The blog features reviews, recommendations (almost all reviews published are positive so a book appearing on the blog should be considered a recommendation), commentary and news on a wide range of genres and formats.

The blog is easy to navigate due to the genre options near the top of the page and the presence of lists displaying recent posts and recent comments in the right hand column. The tags box in the right hand column assists in locating items of a certain format or from a specific publisher making it easier to find specific reviews.

Each blog entry takes one of several forms including weekly reviews which consist of an introduction and a description of the book including the bibliographic information needed to order the book from a supplier followed by a review of the book(s) by a librarian who works with young people and an image of the cover.

Carstensen, A. and M. Flowers, 2012. Adult Books 4 Teens — @AngeReads and @droogmark A School Library Journal Blog. [online] Available at: http://blogs.slj.com/adult4teen/ [Accessed: 25 Jul 2013].

This blog is authoritative as the two authors primarily responsible for the content the blog entry are librarians working in areas that involve contact with young people so they have experience catering for the needs of teenage readers and editing or peer reviewing books relating to assisting libraries to better service teenage readers.

The main purpose of the blog is providing librarians in school and public libraries which provide reading resources to teenagers with information that they need to evaluate how useful certain books written for adults will be to their teenage clients and to assist the librarian in making recommendations for purchases.

The presence of advertisements in the blog appear to have been placed there as part of the School library Journal’s hosting of the blog so do not indicate bias. The authors also have chosen to avoid negative reviews to avoid biasing their readers against any particular book.

The blog is intended to be read by librarians working with young people but should be accessible to some teenagers as well.

This blog is well written and covers a wide range of topics and genres. The positive approach in selecting reviews is a good example to the readers.