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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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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