Blogging in Libraries

I must begin by saying that although I do consider myself to be somewhat of a techie and a fan of social software in general, I am completely new to the "blogging" world. So I unlike many of my classmates, I have no past experience to draw on for point of comparison. I also lack experience in the field and am ashamed to say that my interaction with any library settings is limited to the Rutgers libraries . So please understand that these findings are coming from a novice :)

• Find a library that uses a blog that you think is a good model for other libraries, link to it, and explain why.

I started by searching for public libraries in New Jersey that utilize a blogging feature. I must say I was quite surprised to find a good number of the blogs I came across were using blogger. In fact despite my attempts to find variety, all of the blogs I discuss in this posting are on the blogspot domain.

For example, The West Long Branch library uses the service to advertise new books, and DVDs. I do find the streamlined format of blogger to be quite nice, however I thought there was much more that could be accomplished and continued my search.

I then came stumbled across the Newark Public library blog. Although this library is located in New York I thought it was worth mentioning as I thought it advertised a lot of the events and success stories nicely and I imagine it to be a great resource for events in the local community. And who doesn't enjoy pictures of children of having fun :)

The Berkley Heights Public Library blog contains library news and book reviews and was also very informative. However, I found that the site could have been more user friendly by grouping the posts into categories such as reviews, news, interviews etc. Although the blog had a lot of useful information and found the content to be quite interesting, the patron would be better served if the site utilized sometype of category tagging.

The blog I ultimately chose was the Old Bridge Library Weblog. Although there are still some aspects of the site that I would change, I chose this blog as it nicely advertised the library's events with graphics and organized the content by tagging the information. I must say I was also was drawn to the content itself, and am interested in attendig a few of the events.