While reviewing the responses to YALSA’s Future Topics 2009 survey, the Program Clearinghouse Committee noted the many questions about ticketed conference events. There were many questions about what the ticket price paid for (i.e. did the ticket price only cover food). The answer is that your ticket money goes directly to YALSA. YALSA gets 26% of its revenue from ticketed conference events.

Recently I graded a set of library school student projects. For these projects students needed to talk with teens about the ways teens spend their time, how they find out about the materials and activities in which they are interested, and what they think of libraries – school and public. As I read through the assignments something became very clear. For at least some teens, the library is not much more than a supermarket. It’s a place where you go when you have to “pick something up.” It’s a place that you visit as quickly as possible and only when you have to. Like a supermarket, it’s a place that can be confusing if the signs are not helpful and there isn’t staff that is willing to engage and answer questions in a friendly manner. (more…)

Every fall the executive committees of ALA divisions meet in Chicago in order to plan for the upcoming months and year. The weekend of meetings is often referred to as Fall Exec and this year’s meetings take place this weekend.

For YALSA, the Executive Committee (made up of the president, president-elect, immediate past president, secretary, fiscal officer and division councilor) meets on Friday morning and all day Saturday. On Friday afternoon YALSA’s Executive Committee members join with other division leaders at a large group meeting to talk about ALA’s strategic plan. (more…)

Recently, two ALA projects have come to my attention that could be perfect for some YALSA blog readers.

• Do You ALA? is a project of the Young Librarians Task Force of ALA. The group is asking young librarians to create videos that answer the questions do you belong to ALA, if so why, and if not why not? If you are a member of ALA and YALSA why not produce a video that explains what you value in those memberships? If you do not belong to either, a video on your reasons for not joining would also be useful to the young librarians group.
  
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With major revelations in the Shepard Fairey copyright case hitting the news, image citation and copyright has been on my mind lately.  Maybe I’m a little over-sensitive because I hold a degree in art history, but failure to properly cite images has always been a pet peeve of mine. I cringe when I see students pulling photos and diagrams straight from a Google image search without bothering to find out the source of the image or credit its creator in any way.

But here’s my sad little secret: half the time I’m just as confused as my students when it comes to properly citing.

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In dream library world, planning would probably be Step 1 in building a graphic novel collection.  But in real library world, I didn’t make a plan for how to define, collect, catalog, process, and shelve graphic novels.  I just started buying them.

As I’ve blithely added materials to my graphic-novel-and-nonfiction collection, I’ve run into all kinds of interesting questions: If I shelve my graphic novels by author, am I devaluing the role of artists?  If I have a graphic adaptation of a novel, like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, do I shelve it under the name of the adaptor, or the original author?  Can I make a meaningful distinction between superhero comic books and other graphic novels?  If I do make that distinction, where do I put series about heroes without superpowers?  And don’t even get me started on nonfiction. (more…)

During YALSA’s October echat on advocacy, there was a lot of discussion about how the economy is having an impact on the advocacy efforts of teen librarians. (Chat participants remarked on difficulties in gaining sponsorships for programs as a result of limited funds within the community.) I’d been thinking prior to the chat about another way that the economy is having an impact on teen librarians – their own finances. (more…)

When it comes to the Internet, how many lives do you lead? Yesterday I read Ellyssa Kroski’s article in School Library Journal, about libraries creating policies for staff social media use. Some of the recommendations include showing respect for your colleagues, not spilling organizational secrets, and adhering to your library manual’s code of conduct. Wow, I thought, we could really use something like this. But then I thought about it some more, and I wonder: to what extent can we enforce such a policy? It’s reasonable to monitor library accounts, but what about personal accounts? Here’s where it gets fuzzy.

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Last night some friends and I were sitting around at dinner, and conversation turned to the recent National Equality March. Don’t recognize the name? You’re not alone–though news organizations report tens of thousands of participants, almost none of us at the table had heard about the march before it happened.

This came as some surprise, as we were a table full of very politically involved women–many of us participated in rallies in the wake of Proposition 8, or phone-banked for marriage equality in Maine and New Hampshire, or stumped for candidates in local elections. And we’d certainly gotten wind of other marches and events in the past, often making sure to mention them well ahead of time at our weekly dinners.

And then it dawned on me: we weren’t on Facebook.

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Once upon a time, being homosexual in a YA novel meant you were the sidekick, if you were lucky.  If you were the main character, you could be abused, raped, beaten, or even killed.  Homosexual characters didn’t get happy endings–until Annie on My Mind.

Annie on My Mind
Nancy Garden
Published 1982
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