Finding books for a teen collection, part 1

I didn't have as much time to find resources this week as I'd hoped to, so I've only got a few bits and pieces at the moment.

One of my main worries about possibly doing collection development is my own reading habits. I tend to stick to science fiction and fantasy, with an occasional splash of historical fiction and whatever nonfiction looks interesting at the moment. When I worked at a public library, the desks were near the YA or Teen fiction, and I ended up reading books from a much wider variety of genres. The problem is, I just haven't kept up with it since hitting grad school.

The first place to start is probably with the reviews in School Library Journal and Library Journal, which admittedly must be decoded to some extent.

Then there are book review blogs. While it's easy enough to find book review blogs that focus on teen and YA literature, it's a bit harder to figure out which of them actually have value - a blog that gives everything 4 or 5 stars and avoids any hard criticism at all is probably not as useful as one that has both types of review.

A teen/YA book review blog (and general book-related issues blog) that I found recently and really like is Bookalicious. The author is willing to provide reviews of books she did not like, and say why.

Finally, a nice thing about YA and teen authors nowadays is that many of them are very active online. They read books by other YA authors, they interact with their audience via Twitter, blogs, emails and websites. It's an excellent environment for discovering new books and authors.