Alameda County Library

Help your fellow teens find the best books by signing up to be a Virtual Book Volunteer.  Virtual Book Volunteers use our online catalog, https://aclibrary.bibliocommons.com/, to find books to read and, once finished, write a book review for our site.  You can also create customized book lists based on a favorite topic or to recommend "readalikes" of their favorite title. Links to reviews and book lists will be sent to our librarians for review.  You might even have yours published on the library website! 

In order to volunteer as a Virtual Book Reviewer, you must meet the following requirements.

Requirements

• You must create an account on our library catalog page: https://aclibrary.bibliocommons.com/
• You must be 13 years old or older and
• You must be 17 years old or younger

Once you're signed up for this program email us using the “Contact” tab.  Please include the name of the book or book list you’ve created along with the URL of the review or list so the librarian can review it and award you volunteer hours.

Guidelines

• Book lists you write need to contain at least 10 titles and include comments about each title on the list.  Your book list must be centered around a specific topic - a "general list" or a collection of things you've read recently will not count. Good topics for book lists are themes or genres of books, books that feature a specific type of character, books from a particular era, or "read-alikes" - which are lists of book recommendations for people who like a certain author or book.  
• Book reviews you write must be between 200 - 500 words in length, written by you, and include some information about the book’s plot, as well as what you thought of the book/story/characters/setting etc. 
• Both book reviews and book lists must be made public in order to share them.

You can learn about our new catalog and creating book lists using this tutorial about creating lists.

Additional information on how to create a book list can be found here: https://help.bibliocommons.com/030lists/005creating-lists/ 

You can find additional information about adding a book review here: https://help.bibliocommons.com/025ug/010comments/