Blogs, Blogs, and More Blogs!

I am so very happy. So very, very happy. Delighted, in fact. I have discovered, you see, several awesome librarian blogs.

The first is "A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette" at http://libetiquette.blogspot.com/. Tragically, it has not been updated since 2013, but I still intend to spend some glorious time looking through the many short posts about how to adhere to etiquette within a library. Well, actually, it is etiquette in irony only--but that does make it even funnier! Every post is a bit of tongue-in-cheek advice that should never be followed if the librarians wish to continue to have patrons.

The second, which has already provided me with both amusement and horror, is "Awful Library Books" at http://awfullibrarybooks.net/. This blog is dedicated to cataloging the horrible library books that the bloggers are weeding from the shelves and which should probably never have been published. For example, there is a special page called The Doris Hall of Infamy, which is specifically dedicated to the horror that is the collaboration between Doris Sanforth and Graci Evans. Herein lies their joint tribute to concentration camps in "My Friend the Enemy" and worse. Be careful among these books, and, above all, DO NOT SHOW THESE BOOKS OR PICTURES TO YOUR KIDS. That said, though, the website as a whole is absolutely hilarious and horrible at the same time and is an excellent testimony to the necessity of weeding in any type of library. Just don't mistake this website for a kid-friendly one.

By the way, you might say, based on the last site alone, that I am a troll. Why, yes, I am. I am a troll. I am a terrible book-loving troll who gets crankier every year. Who's tramping over my bridge? Where did those illustrations come from? And who misspelled "government" as "governmant" on the spine of my government textbook? (True story!)

Anyway...

I have one more special blog that I would like to share with you--the award-winning "The Adventures of Library Girl" at http://www.librarygirl.net/, which is a blog by a school librarian. What I love about her blog is that she is so very enthusiastic about everything! Even when she is listing some of her problems, she is brilliantly optimistic and explains how she got past certain hurdles. For example, last fall she came in to the first day of her new school to find, to her horror, that she was expected to have a short presentation ready for all the staff, which she had not known about because she was not yet on the email list! Yeek! However, she pulled it off with great aplomb by using sticky notes. You see, she had recently read a blog post about the importance of listening, so she decided to make her first impression a good one. How? By asking teachers what they would like to see in the library--by asking them specifically what would characterize their dream library and what would motivate them to use class time to bring students into the library. It was an enormous success--and you should read the blog post here.

So, what is the moral of the story? It is that exploring the blogosphere is a great thing, trolling aside. Actually, even trolls might learn something.