We Would Love Your Input!!!
We’re beginning a redesign of the Storypath blog and are excited about trying to make it more useful to our wonderful readers. We have some ideas from comments you’ve sent us earlier, but now’s your chance to make an impact in the early stages of redesign.
We are particularly interested in your responses to the following questions:
1. How do you most often search for books/resources on this site? By categories? By themes (or tags)? By Scripture passage?
2. Are there ways of searching for resources that we don’t now offer? How could we make it easier for you to find what you need?
3. We primarily offer book reviews with optional discusson questions, bibliographies, some curriculum based on children’s literature and the Lectionary Links that connect books with three Scriptures on any given Sunday. What other resources that connect children’s literature and faith would you be interested in seeing on this site?
We are open to any and all ideas – and will keep our wonderful readers informed of our schedule for going live on the new site. (You can reply to comments here or send an email to aknox@upsem.edu.)
We Would Love Your Input!!! by Storypath is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
HI I love your website and being able to contect with books that related to what we are doing with the. lectionary. I find books I would otherwise would not have heard of. However being in Australia, where there is a much smaller book market so we do not have the range you have in america and books are very expensive. it is vertually imposible to get books for the lectionary in the time frame in which you place the books up. If you where able to place the lectionry another couple of weeks earlier we would stand more chance. I do look up by theme and bible readings a lot because of this as a look for books suited to a service I am doing and know to order books in I need at least a month to get them and the lectionary lists are not up yet. It would also be good to see more input from more people through people sharing good books they have used.
Cathy, thank you so much for your suggestions. We are currently posting the Links four weeks (minus one day) early. But I hadn’t thought about our readers who don’t have access to the fairly robust used book market here. I will talk with Noell, our wonderful Links writer, and see what we can do. I know it will take a little while if we ARE able to back it up a little but it is one of the requests we hear most and it makes so much sense since we do have a lot of international readers. And I absolutely agree….we would LOVE to have more input from folks who use the blog. Did this book work in your setting? Did you use another one that worked for a particular passage? If so, let us know! I’ve been thinking in the redesign about how to encourage that more. Ann
I find the site very user friendly. I am a former public librarian where I read stories to many children. You site allows me to search by scripture, date, author and story. I use this site most weeks for worship prep and I’ve been called a “kid-lit junkie!” I often use a children’s story as a sermon illustration for God’s children of every age. Occasionally I use a children’s book as the main part of the sermon. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for giving us input, Janet. If there is anything else we can do to make it more user friendly, we will certainly try to work it into the redesign!
This is a great site as it is and that you want to improve it is amazing!
I use the RSS feature to read the site weekly. Because I program much farther out than the site — I am complete through Sept 8 at this point — I make note of books that sound wonderful or useful and consult the notes later when I order, most often from the used market. Occasionally something is too wonderful and I order it right away because I know it will get used — like More by Springman.
I’ve gotten trained a bit by reading the site. Now my prep for volunteers refers more specifically to the scripture verse or verses and the three sentence description makes a specific connection. I add a short prayer culled from our collection or composed. We program only for one passage, usually Gospel, for an age range of 3 to 7. I am not a trained Christian educator, just a former Sunday School teacher, children’s book lover, and ad hoc librarian. But truly it is the English major in me that loves finding the narrative connections.
I find your tags useful. I spent quite a while on the site 18 months ago building a resource list that I have used in programming. We also use picture book versions of bible stories. Tho I am picky about which versions, I know how deeply affecting an illustrator’s vision can be for kids (and for me).
The lectionary focus has been a good way to add and remove books from our library picture book collection and I would love insight from Union Sem’s librarians about collection development generally and promoting use of books by chapter reading kids in summer or when on vacation. This is very underused part of our library.
Cathy, that’s a lot of good information! I’m curious – when you say you are programming, are you using the site for a children’s worship time during worship, church school or some other place/time? I’ve heard from parents who use the books/questions with their children and pastors who use the books in sermons. I’m thinking there are people using these in lots of other ways too so it is helpful to know more about those settings. I was curious about your use of our RSS feed because I just had a discussion today with the woman who is really helping with the redesign. With Google Reader shutting down because Google doesn’t see RSS having much of a future (news to me who DEPENDEDED on it!) we were wondering whether we should keep the RSS feed link or just have the subscribe by email feature. Sounds like we may need to rethink our decision to drop the RSS!
And MORE was one of my favorite book reviews and an absolutely wonderful book on so many levels. (And I didn’t write the review!)