Did you know that the Great Graphic Novels for Teens committee discussions are open to the public?  Our discussions and final votes are happening at Mid-winter in Boston (at the Fairmont Copley Plaza from Saturday through Tuesday, to be exact).  If you drop by, you can listen to our discussions and say your own piece about what was nominated (or even what should have been but wasn’t).  The list of final nominations is right here, so have a look, make up your mind and come tell us all about it.

Grant “writing” does not begin with writing; it begins with gathering people and information. Successful grants are not created and implemented in a vacuum. Grants are a collaborative process and include those who are willing to assume one or more roles:

• Visionary[ies]: those who can take information (data) and identify trends and needs
• Communication expert[s]: those who can successfully communicate needs, form partnerships, communicate data results, and draw conclusions
• Data trackers: those who can design methods of collecting data and track the data to show whether the needs are being met
• Community liaisons: those people who “know people”
• Stakeholders: those who will peripherally benefit from grant sponsored programs
• Target population: those who will receive direct benefits from grant monies (more…)

January 18, 2010 is the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service. This is a day when people around the country are invited to volunteer in their community in order to “do for others.”

Why not get teens and adults in your community involved by working on library projects on January 18? Community members might: (more…)

Abundance of Teens…

When I first saw this topic, my first thought was of Colin Singleton in John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines. Child prodigy that he was, Colin was afraid he would never do anything of worth that would classify him as a genius…so he went on a road trip to work it all out. He knew he would not find the answers at home in Chicago. What he was searching for was “out there,” and he ended up in a small town, Gutshot, Tennessee. It was here in this seemingly small, insignificant town with a powerfully painful name where he would find the answers to his conundrum amid people of large character.

Thinking about Colin’s story reminded me that most teens do not live in our libraries. We have to go “out on the road” to find them where they are, working out their own identities and problems. We have to have Colin’s tenacity and confidence that we can truly make a difference for the teens in our community, but we have to go “out there” where they live. This is a perfect opportunity to form collaborative partnerships with local junior high and high school librarians. (more…)

Welcome to the continuing series of interviews with the authors who are on the 2010 Morris Award Shortlist. Today we have Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, authors of Beautiful Creatures.

The Morris Award Committee on Beautiful Creatures: “Sixteen-year-old Ethan has lived all his life in Gatlin, South Carolina, a town that hasn’t changed much since the Civil War. While coping with the loss of his mother, a father who spends all of his time in his study, and high school, his world turns upside down with the arrival of Lena, a new girl with whom he seems to share a psychic connection. As they grow closer, Ethan discovers that Lena and her family share a dark secret and that she is headed for doom on her sixteenth birthday.”

YALSA Blog: Congratulations on Beautiful Creatures being on the Morris Award shortlist! Where were you when you found out you’d been shortlisted for the Morris Award? And who was the first person you told?

Margaret Stohl: I was sitting on the curb down the street from my brother’s house, because his actual house gets no cell reception, and Little, Brown – our amazing editors, Julie Scheina and Jen Hunt, along with the dazzling Victoria Stapleton – was trying to call us. We assumed we were in trouble. I think I walked into the house and told my sister-in-law, Ashly. Who said something like, that’s great, get in the car, we’re late for swim team. As you can see, I lead a very glamorous life.

Kami Garcia: I rushed home from my teaching job so I could make the call with Jen, Julie, and Victoria. I shut myself in my bedroom because it’s the only quiet place in my house – although you could still hear my five-year-old son’s pirate music blaring in the background. (more…)

At Midwinter 2010 in Boston, the winner of the inaugural YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults will be announced.  To celebrate this award, the YALSA blog will be publishing interviews with some of the shortlisted authors.  First is Sally M. Walker, author of Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland.

Written in Bone

Written in Bone as described by the Nonfiction Award Committee:  “By presenting a detailed examination into the work of different types of forensic archaeology at excavations in both Jamestown, Virginia, and Colonial Maryland, readers are rewarded with both a picture of this fascinating work and an appreciation for what it contributes to our knowledge of history.”

YALSA Blog:  Congratulations on being included in the shortlist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults!  What was your reaction to finding out you were on the shortlist for this first-ever award?

Sally Walker:  My heart started racing, like I’d been using the elliptical at the YMCA. Of all my books, WRITTEN IN BONE is the dearest to my heart, so maybe that was the most fitting first response. Now, I’ve settled into incredibly happy. All in all, getting the news was a great way to start my day.

(more…)

Some days are harder than others.  Everywhere we look, we see rapid change taking place.  Budget cuts are reducing staff and affecting families across the United States.  One has to ask: How do we keep morale up in the workplace when all of this is going on? (more…)

In recent years many libraries have invested energy and resources in creating or enhancing teen areas.   As author Kimberly Bolan points out in her great YALSA white paper The Need for Teen Spaces in Public Libraries we all know that this investment in physical space is an essential part of successfully serving teens in any library. The significant increase in the number of libraries with teen spaces has been terrific to see, but with the recent economic challenges many libraries are facing finding the staff, programming budget and general resources to make the most of a teen space can be tough.  What’s a teen librarian to do when you’ve got lots of teens with lots of energy and a shrinking budget to serve them?

(more…)

You always seem to need one when there aren’t any around, and you always seem to have too many when there isn’t anything for them to do! What are they? Volunteers! This is all especially true of teen volunteers, who range from the bored-nothing-else-to-do variety to the I-need-sixty-hours-of-community-service-for-Honor-Society sect. So how do you make the most of them (and manage to keep your sanity in the process?) (more…)

The coolest thing about forming partnerships between libraries, city agencies and community-based organizations is that they seem to develop exponentially.  Maybe it’s just the nature of networking, maybe it’s that, like librarians, social workers and case managers in service agencies are used to doing more with less.  Whatever the reason, every partnership I’ve gone into with folks in other youth-serving agencies has been worth more than the sum of its parts.

(more…)