Happy Birthday, BFGB!

I’m interrupting the week’s postings on the authors coming to Mysteries @ Your Library to recognize this milestone in our Blogging for a Good Book site.

If the tone of this post is too self-congratulatory, please know it isn’t meant to be. When you pull off a project that has widespread backing among your co-workers and managers, that gets mentioned in your profession’s publications, and that regularly receives positive feedback from people you don’t even know, then you know you’ve something worthwhile on your hands. So it is with Blogging for a Good Book, and that’s hard not to be happy about.

Statistics can’t tell the whole story, but we’ve had over 60,000 page views of our 275 posts; our best single day had 2712 visitors. Better yet, we were selected as a “Website You Can Trust” by The Librarians’ Internet Index, and were chosen (randomly?) by our bloghost WordPress as a ‘Hot New Blog’. As the number of reviews has grown, we have found more and more to say. Our first entry ran 75 words. We’ve gotten much longer since then; not always a good thing when you’re on deadline!

Our readers have written to tell us how much they like the blog, to chide us for adding more books or films to their ‘to do’ lists, and to politely let us know that we’ve misspelled words, gotten facts wrong, or misinterpreted the books we’ve posted. That’s OK – the whole idea is to share viewpoints and engage in conversations with people as interested in books as we are. As we work on implementing the idea of social networking (through things like instant messaging reference and adding user reviews to the catalog), we want to keep in mind that everything we do ought to be designed to make the library more accessible, more interactive, and more interesting.

So thanks Penelope and Jessica for getting us moving on Blogging for a Good Book; thanks to the library administration for supporting the project; thanks to all the WRL staff who have contributed their time and considerable talent to creating the content; and thanks to everyone who has stopped by, linked to us, and commented on our work. Now, back to our regularly scheduled posting.