It’s happened, YALSA’s three virtual town halls on the future of libraries and teens that are a part of the year-long National Forum on Libraries and Teens have all taken place. The first event in March was all about libraries and partnerships. You can view the archive. The second event in April focused on informal and formal teen learning spaces. You can view that recording too. Today, the third event took place. It focused broadly on the future of libraries and teens. You can view that recording as well. (We apologize that the final recording is missing the first few minutes of audio.)

In today’s virtual town hall participants were asked to imagine their ideal library services. What did participants talk about? Ideal library services would: (more…)

by Heather Booth

If you saw our recent post on what your teens will gain when you bring them to the BFYA Teen Session at Annual 2013, you may have been wondering, “Sure, that’s great – but what’s in it for me?”*

Publicity. What’s that? Local teens are speaking on a national level? Call in the press! This is a great opportunity for you to snap cool photos of local teens with famous authors, pull pithy quotes from their speeches, and share your teen’s McCormick Place Adventure with your Facebook fans, local social media, and neighborhood newspapers. When people see your library’s teens highlighted in this way, it’s going to reflect so well on your teens, your institution, and you.

Respect. It takes some guts, a whole lot of energy, and tremendous leadership skills to shepherd a group of teens around the convention center, but just think about what a great leadership opportunity it’s going to be! Your supervisor will know, once each sweet teenaged head is dog tired and tucked into his parent’s passenger seat at the end of the day, that you are a librarian to be reckoned with. You really can pull off a tricky event with grace and efficiency.

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A weekly short list of tweets that librarians and the teens that they serve may find interesting.

Do you have a favorite Tweet from the past week? If so add it in the comments for this post. Or, if you read a Twitter post between May 10 and May 16 that you think is a must for the next Tweets of the Week send a direct or @ message to lbraun2000 on Twitter.
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One of my mentors in a leadership program I’m participating in this year said to me this week that other than going to Happy Hour with his wife, a certain aspect of his job was his “most favorite thing in the world.” In his case it’s work he has been doing for over thirty years – and he is excellent at it. We talked about how challenging it can be to back off enough to let others excel at – and learn – in an area that we’re good at and love to do.

It made me reflect about the aspects of my work that I love the most. I love to start new relationships and partnerships – meeting and then getting to know new individuals and organizations – talking about ideas and possible ways to work together – launching a new project and then working together to help it succeed. I’m much more energized by the start of something new – the as-yet-unrealized potential – than in all the details that come afterwards—the negotiations, the implementation and the evaluation. I work hard to manage details because that’s part of every job – but I know it will never be my strength.

Often in our work, we focus on the areas that we need to improve rather than our natural strengths. The Strengths approach says that if we try to be too well-rounded, we’ll never be truly great at anything. If you haven’t dug into the Gallup Strengthsfinder work yet, take a look to see if it’s something that can benefit you in your work – or if it gives you a new way to talk with young people about their strengths.
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First, our thanks to Gretchen Kolderup for her leadership as The Hub’s member manager since 2011. Thank you, Gretchen!

Gretchen will be leaving her role as manager of The Hub when her term ends on August 14, 2013, so YALSA is seeking a new member manager to begin in August 2013. Interested in the job? Read on  to see the position description and qualifications and find out how you can apply. Applications are due to jfinneke@ala.org by July 1, 2013.

YALSA is seeking a Member Manager for its YA literature-focused blog, The Hub, with the mission to provide a one-stop-shop for teens and librarians to help them locate high quality audio, video, and text content related to young adult literature. The deadline for applications is July 1, 2013.

The Member Manager will lead an advisory board and together the group will be responsible for the site, including recruiting bloggers and soliciting content submissions from the YALSA community. (more…)

Title: Schoology
Platform: iOS, Android, Web
Cost: Free

This week’s app comes to you from Kayla,  a teen who works as a page at my library. The other day she came to tell me about the easy way she was doing biology homework on her phone. Since she was using the app, and if I downloaded it I would not have a class to practice with, I asked Kayla to tell us about how it works:

“Your teacher can upload multiple choice questions for you to answer for homework. They can limit how many times you can answer them, so it can give you a challenge by only having you do it once, or you can re-do it a few times and fix your mistakes. It’s a good learning site, because it’s hands on.  It’s a good way to review for big tests because the multiple choice questions reflect what you’ve done in class.  Teachers and students can post notes on it, and can comments on each other’s notes.  You can look at the schedule for future assignments.  You can put photos, vidoes, and files from drop box to share with the class. Students might upload their notes.”

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Do you sometimes wonder what you could do to get more administrative support for teen services in your library? There are some relatively simple steps you can take to win friends and influence managers! This is a six-part series that shares some tips from managers that you can integrate into your work life and maybe make some positive changes in your library.

Last week I talked about presenting yourself as a professional. This week, the topic is:

Speaking the Language

When YA librarians talk about teen services they often–naturally enough–focus on the teens. They are likely to describe programs and activities in terms of the benefits to teens. Talking about how much fun a program or service will be, or how it’s the latest rage may be what’s on the top of your mind, or that of your teens, but it’s not necessarily what your library’s director thinks is important. Generally, upper-level managers are more interested in big-picture issues. In YALSA’s recent survey of members who are identified as supervisors or managers, several of the respondents commented that the upper-level administrators at their libraries want to hear about programs in terms of issues like community engagement, community health, collaboration, purpose, sustainability, partnerships, and return on investment (ROI). (more…)

There are three basic ways to incorporate religion into teen programming: collaborate with religious organizations, outreach programming at a religious event or location, and programming with a religious theme.   By the end of this post, you should feel empowered to take these best practices into your own programming, and to your coworkers.

Just like the civic groups libraries frequently collaborate with (Kiwanis, United Way, schools, etc.), religious organizations have what libraries desire most in our programming: people.  When you collaborate with a religious organization, you’ve automatically got an audience, who you can now market to more effectively, and, if you’ve planned your program well, participation in the collaborative effort will be natural.  By opening the library to collaborations with religious institutions, you also gain access to additional funding—either monetary in nature or in volunteer hours.  Collaborations with religious organizations help the library expand services to a greater number of its patrons than it could have done on its own.
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On June 24, 2013, YALSA will celebrate it’s 56th anniversary and we want you to be a part of the festivities!In 1957, when YALSA was founded, it wasn’t the large organization we know today. Originally called the Young Adult Services Division (YASD), there are many things you would recognize in today’s organization. YASD was committed to librarians who served teens in all kinds of libraries and focused on selected booklists and a professional publication (a joint venture with ALSC). For 56 years YALSA has been committeed to serving and connecting young adult librarians, and this year we want to celebrate our organization’s accomplishments.
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Religion is commonly grouped with politics as a topic libraries avoid programming with, bypass in reference interviews, and circumlocute in collection development.  Treating religion this way is a disservice to our teens as well as other library patrons.  Religion is intrinsic to our patrons’ lives; every individual — even those who do not opt in to religious observance — has a religious life.  Religion informs our news, culture, education, and community life.  No library is exempt from this; every library has religious patrons.  A Facebook graph search is a simple way to test this assertion. (more…)