Batting 1,000

This post is the 1,000th we have published on our blog since we started it in April 2009.  Since then we have featured regular posts, such as Books to Get You Thinking (114 posts) by Nita at our West Windsor Branch and Tech Topics (this is #120) from our information technology department, as well as posts for kids and adults on a variety of topics.  Kids Corner so far has 180 posts about music, books, crafts, and other activities for younger children.  Not surprising, since we are a library, the top adult topics feature 115 posts that offer advice on research and 112 on reading suggestions.  We also have produced 40 each on food, hobbies, and history.  But, it isn’t all about the numbers, although we are happy that we have thousands of regular monthly readers – our posts have been read 613,427 times in just under ten years!

I have been involved with the blog since that first post in 2009.  Heck, I wrote that first post in 2009!  Since then, I have gotten to know a lot by helping to edit this blog, from how to use ctrl+A to select all the contents in a Word document to how to make a yard chicken-friendly.  Hopefully, if you are a long-time reader, you have learned a few things as well.  If you are new to our blog, do go back and look at the other 999 posts and see what you have missed.  Note that a few topics repeat from time to time, either to update information or to remind you of how much we think you would like our Virtual Branch or can stay up to date on the latest library programs and newest titles with our NextReads newsletters.

Because our blog is a joint effort by almost the entire library staff, we never seem to be short on topics or personal stories to share with our patrons.  There are anecdotes about raising kids, planning weddings, epic vacations, saying goodbye to a beloved pet; we’ve strolled down memory lane at holiday time, and, last year alone, three staff members told us what they will miss the most about working in a library now that they are retired.

So I thought it would be fun for this 1,000th post to take a look at ten of our most popular posts over the years.

Ocean in a Bottle Craft for Kids (July 12, 2013) Who really knows why things go viral on the internet, but if we were to have a post that would qualify, it would be this one.  It isn’t even a complete post anymore, as it seems half of it somehow got deleted over time.  Yet every year it has the most views of any post and is linked on craft sites and in mom’s groups all over social media.  While the book suggestions are gone, the simple craft remains and we suspect there may be thousands of seltzer bottles with tiny oceans in them all because of our blog.

Paste Options and Paste Special in Word 2007 (January 25, 2011) Office Guru was one of our most popular regular columns.  So popular, in fact, that six of the top ten popular posts could have been Office Guru posts.  So, I cheated and just put the most popular one on the list.  Apparently many people have needed help with cutting and pasting in Word over the years.  Fortunately, not much has changed since the 2007 version of the software and the tips in this post still apply today.

How Dewey Decimal Classification Works (September 13, 2013) This is a one-page library 101 guide that really does make it easy to learn how to find books on our (or any Dewey-based library’s) shelves.  As a bonus, you get to learn the history and about the flexibility of the Dewey system.

Walt Disney: Through The Eyes of An Adult (December 4, 2015) Do you think you know Walt Disney?  Think again.  The post is an annotated bibliography of resources that do more than tell the tale (tail?) of the man who created the mouse.

“Pasta Diving” and Baseball By The Numbers (June 27, 2014) Moneyball was only the start, the numbers really don’t lie – a lot of you were curious about what WARP, WAR, OBP, ERA, and a host of other baseball stats really tell us about the game.

Book Club In A Bag: “The Door” by Magda Szabo and More Things Hungarian (January 24, 2017) One of our librarians chose to showcase our Book Club In A Bag collection by crafting a post using one of the titles and the resources we provided in the bag for leading a book club discussion about the book.  The post also includes a list of other Hungarian authors to consider.

Neil Gaiman Ruined My Life (October 3, 2017) The author may have ruined one librarian’s life, but not our blog.  This post covers his entire catalog and has a few nice personal stories.  And it was a pretty popular post since Mr. Gaiman retweeted it for us.  Thanks Neil!

Cross-Over Authors: Adult to Young Adult to Children’s (September 7, 2012) James Patterson writing for teens?  Check.  How about John Grisham?  Check.  Plus, you get a list of teen authors that are totally cool or awesome, or whatever word the teens use these days, for an adult to read.

A Children’s Librarian’s Version of “My Favorite Things” (March 23, 2012) A list of all-time favorite children’s books by a youth services librarian who read many of them dozens of times in her career, along with her reasons for picking each one as a favorite.

Aaron Burr: A Founding Father and “The Guy That Shot Him” (September 23, 2016) Once upon a time, there was a new, little Broadway musical about the guy who shot Aaron Burr.  Maybe someday it will make it big :)  In either case, our post offers a nice collection of books to learn more about the founding gun-slinger.  And we still have that same guy who shot Burr on the $10 bill.

Your Great-Great-Grandchildren Will Thank You (June 10, 2016) OK, so why stop at ten posts when this one on genealogy was so fun and packed with information on how to record your family’s history?  The tips here are about recording the stories and not just the bare-bones facts, giving more depth to the names and numbers on a chart.

- Laura N., Information Technology

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