School libraries and weblogs- a study of school librarians use of weblog as a working tool

The aim of this study is about how school librarians useweblogs as a working tool. I wanted to examine how someschool librarians use weblogs as a working tool and why theyare using them. I also wanted to know the advantages anddisadvantages they see with this tool. I believe that children andteenagers are interested in social media- tools and also are bigusers and consumers of these tools. Therefore I thought it mightbe interesting to examine how school librarians who havechildren and young people as their main target group, work withweblogs which is one of many social media tools.The methodology used for this study is interviews. I didthree face-to-face interviews and two interviews by sending theinterview guide with questions to the participants. The interviewguide was sent by e-mail as a wordfile-document. The answerswere written by the participants directly in the word-documentand then sent back to me in the same way. Farkas (2007) dividethe use of weblogs into different kinds of blogs. I used thisdivision to present and analyze my result.The conclusions of this study are that school librarians useweblogs as News Blogs, Readers’ advisory blogs, Book Clubblogs, Marketing blogs, Blogs to build community, Blogs tosupplement workshops and as reference blogs. They useweblogs as a working tool to inform, to market the library, toreach out to their users, to tip about books etc. Some of theadvantages of weblogs according to my respondents are itssimplicity, its rapid way to disseminate information on and itsability to allow users to participate and communicate. Some ofthe disadvantages of weblogs as a working tool are that it takestime to blog, it’s hard to get readers and that there are fewpeople who give comments on the blog.Program: Bibliotekari