YALSA will be launching a new section of its website focusing on recruiting young adult and secondary school librarians — and we need your stories! There’s no better recruitment tool than the experience and wisdom of people in the field itself.

How can you help?

Visit the wiki page we’ve created and add your answers to these three questions:

1. Why did you decide to become a young adult or secondary school librarian?
2. What motivates you on a daily basis?
3. What do you enjoy most about being a librarian who serves teens?

Thanks for all you do to support teen services at your library.

There is something for everyone at the National Harbor with fun and exciting restaurants like Ketchup to the ritzy like, Graces Mandarin. If you don’t need ambiance and a good sandwich is what you are in store for; try Potbelly Sandwich Works. Those folks watching their weight should stay far away from Cake Love and Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. Cake Love is a dream bakery created by Food network host and a DC local Warren Brown. Cake Love has your favorite cakes but better than you remember. After eating, walk off those extra pounds. Stop in the Gaylord Hotel and enjoy the Atrium. Then take a relaxing water taxi ride into Old Towne Alexandria. There is plenty to see and do in Old Towne; from the street performers to the mall. There is even a park if you want to play Frisbee, walk a dog or just chill. If it’s been too long since your last meal, Old Towne has great restaurants too. The great thing is you’ll definitely be able to walk off the pounds in Old Towne. Great shops here as well. Between the two places you can spend an entire day.

Posted on behalf of Team U.

Team U from the Emerging Leaders program is working on a project for YALSA to develop a job shadowing initiative for teens to promote teen librarianship (in school or public settings). Because of Skype and other wonderful technologies we can cheaply connect teens who cannot participate in in-person job shadowing to fabulous practicing librarians. We are working on a video that will be about a half hour long to show teens before they attend a Skype or video conference with a librarian. It would be a busting-myths-about-librarians-look at the activities of librarians who work with teens.

Are you willing to grab a video camera and get one of your kids/co-workers/significant other to film you showing us what your job is *really* like in a way that would appeal to teens and bust those bun-cat-shushing myths? Or do you already have something we could cull from (maybe on YouTube or something your TAB created)? Even 60 seconds worth of footage that shows teens what librarians really do on the job is appreciated and needed!

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District Days (August 9-September 12, 2010) is a window of opportunity to get your elected officials who may be home from Washington DC to come to your library and see firsthand how busy, productive, valuable and life-changing the school or public library is.

Although August seems far away, chances are that your late summer/early fall calendar is in final planning stages, if not already complete, and VIPs who are in demand need a long lead time. So how do you get started in contacting elected officials to invite them to your library for a site visit? Some tips on contacting legislators–or any VIPs–to invite them to the library, follow.

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Looking for a great way to promote your library’s collection of YA audiobooks? Plan to promote FREE downloads of popular YA titles & classic audiobooks through Sync, an initiative of the newly-formed Audiobook Community. Sync will offer two free audiobook downloads a week all summer, from July 1^st to September 1st, allowing you to create listen-alike lists to entice teens to try more great audiobooks once they’re hooked on literature-on-the-go. Public and school librarians will be able to download promotional materials & bookmarks from the Sync website, with plenty of space to add your logo & listen-alike lists on the printables. The Sync website will be live within a week, with the complete list of titles & Tool Kit. Perfect timing for adding terrific freebies to your summer reading materials

You’ll get notification of Sync’s kick-off when you become a member of the Audiobook Community http://www.audiobookcommunity.com/, a free, open, uncensored, unbranded social network for all audiobook listeners to discover audiobooks and connect with other fans as well as publishers, authors, and narrators. Just join the Sync: YA Listening group and get updates about the free downloads, as well as tips from other audiobook fans. Here’s a great response to a group member’s question, “How are you using audiobooks in your summer reading program?”  Melissa replied, “At the beginning of summer, I also create a display of audiobooks based on listening length versus driving length. So one section of the display is “If you are going to Boston or Bar Harbor this summer, here are titles for the round-trip” with audios that are in the 4 – 6 hour range. “If you are going to New York City”, we display audios with an 8 – 10 hour range, and so forth. This display has been a big hit with parents in the past.” What a great idea!

Thank you everyone for submitting your volunteer applications for consideration of appointment to a YALSA Process Committee. The appointment process is nearly completed and all of the open slots will soon be filled. Once we are finished, all volunteers who submitter a form, but were not chosen will be notified by the Appointments Committee. Please let me know if you have any questions. You can reach me at kimpatton@kclibrary.org

Spring is ordinarily one of my favorite seasons. After a New England winter, nothing improves my mood like flowers in bloom, warm afternoon breezes, and the scent of barbecues wafting through the neighborhood.

In a school, on the other hand, spring can make a person awful cranky. Students and teachers are all impatient for summer. Seniors in particular, having committed to colleges and their other post-high school plans, run the risk of catching a nasty case of Senioritis. Then there are all the events–even before we can get to graduation, there are field trips, advanced placement exams, standardized tests, awards ceremonies and banquets all disrupting the regular schedule. And lately it seems like they’re all taking over my library.

At first, the constant displacement and disruption was making me grumpy. I wanted my library back. I had plans for the end of the year, work to be finished, kids who wanted to check out books or eat lunch rather than tiptoe around the locked doors.

Then I did something radical.

I left the library.

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The Emerging Leaders Project T has been and will be hosting weekly discussions during the month of May regarding getting more involved in YALSA. We want to hear from you, those that know best about what “getting involved” looks like.

These conversations will be held in ALA Connect in the YALSA section. Here’s what we’re discussing (please note that you can comment on any of these posts even if it’s not their designated week):

May 3rd – 9th: How did you begin your involvement with YALSA? Was it full tilt committee work, using the YALSA resources, following their listserv/blog, or something else?

May 10th – 16th: How is money (or the lack there of) been a barrier to involvement? How do you work with or around it?

Coming soon:

May 17th – 23rd: Best practices for communication from YALSA to the membership, what’s working and what could be different.

May 24th – 30th: Regional Youth Library Services organizations options and how YALSA fits in there.

The information gathered during these discussions will help YALSA improve service to its members. We invite all YALSA members to participate in this conversation.  We want to know how you are involved, your barriers to involvement, what you want to achieve from being involved and anything else you are interested in sharing.

Thank you!

Cory Doctorow has just released his second Y/A novel.  It’s entitled For the Win and, like his first, Little Brother, is available in downloadable format as well as hard copy format in both the U.S. and the U.K.  If you have gamers frequenting your Y/A collection, this may be the novel for them.  But rather than me telling your teens what they’ll like, why not let them tell you?  For a taste of the types of ideas you’ll find inside this novel, visit his short story, “Anda’s Game”.  And if you need more information, go to the Boing Boing site.  Free Educator and Librarian copies are available by emailing freeftwbook@gmail.com.

Do you have a great Teen Read Week program idea?   Team Teen Read Week is offering up ten mini-grants to needy libraries that can be used for programming, teen resources and teen services. Each recipient of the grant will recieve $450 cash as well as $50 in  Teen Read Week products! Applying is simple- YALSA members just need to fill out  an application and send it to yalsa@ala.org  by June 1st, 2010. Recipients will be notified in August 2010.

The mini-grant guidelines and the application are available at  http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/teenreading/trw/trw2010/minigrant.cfm. If you have questions please contact yalsa@ala.org!