Authors are everywhere at ALA. Some are signing books, promoting an upcoming one, or speaking at programs on a variety of topics. Orson Scott Card is one of the authors here who spoke at a luncheon for the Margaret A. Edwards Award. He won this award for his lifetime contribution to young adult literature, and part of  the process is to invite the winner to a luncheon to speak.

Since that luncheon I’ve heard many people say how great a speaker he is. The one thing many have taken is a that he didn’t write Ender’s Game or any of his books for children, but that they found it on their own.

I’ve heard other authors say this as well, including Stephanie Meyers and Scott Westerfeld. What so you think it is that makes a book YA or Teen?

One of my favorite things about ALA conferences is that I get to hear dozens of things people are doing in the libraries. It’s always energizing to hear about the cool programs, exciting new services, and even listen to stories about teens using the library.

However, this can be discouraging for people who are having difficulties establishing teen services in their branches. These stories can turn into a long list of things you wish you could do if only my boss would let me.

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When I started as a librarian, I wanted to help all libraries reach out to teens in meaningful ways. I’ve been at my job for a little over a year now, and while I still have a long way to go, I’m proud of some of the things I’ve done this past year to help the teens own teen services at my branch.

Working with teens takes trust, a caring heart and a willingness to listen to new things. While I would love to have a huge teen space in every branch with daily programs and amazing collections, I’ve found that teen services is more about relationships than the size of your collection, the amount of your programs, or even the amount of space dedicated to teens at your library. (more…)

Spring is a busy time for my library system. We have over a dozen branches, and in the past year they’ve doubled the amount of Youth Services including adding two new teen librarians (including me). Spring is also the time when we hold our annual Writing Contest for Teens. So as we geared up for Teen Tech Week, what everyone wanted something that was simple?

Another change that happened this spring in our library system is the transition from VHS to DVD. By March 1st we had the goal to get rid of all of our VHS tapes, with large orders of DVDs being processed.

The Youth Services Librarians that work with teens decided to do something to highlight our growing DVD collection, and also seek teen input, by holding a “Best Of” contest. We selected some basic categories, and asked teens to submit nominations in December. Then we compiled the nominees with the intention of showing some of the films as a program to get the teens excited about voting.

We didn’t promote the event largely. A few libraries created a display with cover images of the nominees directing teens to an online form, but really it was something going on in the background amongst our weekly teen programs, story times, and other services.

We hade over 151 votes in the contest, and the diversity of responses was large, but since our purpose was more to help develop our collection we were happy to see the diversity. Many teens expressed upset that what they thought was the best wasn’t represented in the nominees, and a few told me they are keeping a list for the next years contest.

This was very simple, and didn’t take much of the staff’s time. Our next step is seeing if the artists, movies, and TV shows they listed are in our catalog.

If you are interested in seeing what all they voted for, below is the compiled list of votes (many misspellings represent the actual entry. Instead of guessing what they were voting for I opted to not correct things just in case the spelling does refer to a different item than what I think it does.)

Best Youtube Video
Total 111

18 Talking Cats
16 Leave Britney Alone

13 The Landlord
13 Evolution of Dance
6 300 pg version
5 Naruto
3 Fred gets baby sat
3 Harry Potter Puppet Pals
2 Death Note
2 High School Musical 2 Videos
1 Clark and Michael

1 A real jedi night
1 Baby Funny
1 baby got back
1 Ball Jousting
1 Blackarms brawl Emissary Auto part one lucas and Ness
1 Boxman dance
1 Brotherhood 2.0
1 candion.dot
1 Charlie the Unicorn

1 Daft Hands
1 Destiny Green
1 Fred on the 4th
1 Gears of War Montag Ac3 X
1 Halo v.s. Counter Strike
1 John Pinetta
1 Laughing Babies
1 Madden 08 and 07
1 Megaman goes to Willamette

1 Muffins
1 Numa Numa
1 ROLFMAO by Oxhorn
1 Silent Hill 3: Noisy Hill Parts 1-16
1 The Chronicles of the Annoying Questing
1 The Nick Jonas Show
1 The Ultimate Sword
1 viciouscats
1 Videos of Nigahiga

1 Wheelie bus
1 Willy the Sheep

Best Video Game of 2007
Total 128

30 Guitar Hero 3
22 Portal
21 Halo 3

15 Rock Band
13 Super Mario Galaxy
7 Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass
4 Call of duty 4
4 Gears of War
2 Kingdom Hearts
1 Bleach Blade of Fate. DS
1 DDR
1 Guild wars: Nightfall

1 Hannah
1 Kingdom Hearts 2
1 Madden 08 and 07
1 Nights Journey of dreams
1 Thrillville off the rails
1 Umbrella Chronicles
1 Warioware Smooth moves

Best Song of 2007

Total 119

23 Still Alive (the Song at the end of Portal)
23 Stronger by Kanye West
18 Big Girls Don’t Cry by Fergie
16 The year 3000 by Jonas Brothers
9 Umbrella by Rihanna
8 Potential Break Up Song by Aly & AJ

3 50 Cent I get Money
2 1234 by Feist
2 Hey There Delilah by plain white T’s
1 All Star by Smash Mouth
1 Crush Crush Crush by Paramore
1 Don’t Cry Out - Shiny Toy Guns
1 Hannah Montana Hannah Montana 2
1 Hospital by the Used
1 Let’s See How Far We’ve Come — Matchbox 20

1 Low or Cyclone Baby bash
1 Never to late
1 never took the time by akon
1 One Voice Billy Gilman
1 Oozing Green by Diren Grey
1 Take Me In by Kutless
1 The four Seasons
1 Through Fire and Flames
1 Wow I can get Sexual too by Say Anything

Top Website
Total 117

45 Youtube
36 Myspace
8 www.emgp.us (during the contest they linked to our site telling people to vote for them)
4 Google

3 www.familylobby.com/firgrovefriends
2 No Stank You
1 2dplay.com
1 chir.ag/stuff/sand Dragonfable.com
1 Facebook
1 Funny or Die
1 GaiaOnline
1 gmail

1 Hotmail
1 http://mog.com/
1 Kotaku
1 MyYearbook.com
1 Neopets
1 omghalo.com
1 Peta.org
1 playedOnline.com

1 pokemon.marriland.com
1 shezyart.com
1 Veoh.com and Stage6.divx.com
1 wcradio.com
1 Wikipedia

Best Anime
Total 105
31 Naruto

16 Bleach
13 Inuyasha
7 Pokemon
5 Fullmetal Alchemist
4 Steamboy
2 Peach Girl
2 Sailor Moon
2 Samuri Champloo
2 Spongebob Squarpants

2 The Meloncholy of Hayuhi Suzumiya
1 Z-Loan
1 .Hack//Sign
1 Chibi Vampire
1 DBZ
1 Death Note
1 evoution
1 Flase away
1 Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends

1 Hayao Miyazaki films
1 Hellsing
1 Kilala Princess
1 Kindom Hearts
1 Mars Fruits Basket
1 Princess Monoke
1 Saiunkoku Monogodari The Tales of Saiunkoku
1 The Cat’s Return
1 Trigun

1 World of Warcraft
1 Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge

Best TV Show
Total 105
25 CSI
21 American Idol
18 Hannah Montana
3 Heroes

3 Naruto
2 America’s Best dance Crew
2 Buffy
2 Gossip Girls
2 House
2 Rob + Big
2 Sledgehammer
2 Supernatural
2 The Hills

1 Avatar
1 BIG BROTHER
1 Bones
1 CNN
1 Criminal Minds
1 Criss Angel Mind freak
1 Death Note
1 I Love New York
1 Lost

1 Made
1 Moment of Truth
1 Prison Break
1 Runs Houer
1 Star Trek: The Next Generation
1 The Office
1 UFO Files
1 Veronica Mars
1 Wizards of Wavery Place

1 WWE Friday Night Smackdown

Best Teen Movie
Total 100 27 Mean Girls
25 Ferris Beuller’s Day Off
15 10 Things I Hate about You
15 Juno
4 Transformer
2 Clueless

1 A Walk to Remember
1 Batman
1 Bring it on: in to win it
1 I am legend
1 Pirates who Don’t do Anything
1 Pirets of the Carabean 3
1 Rocky
1 Spiderman 3
1 Star Wars 3

1 Step Up 2
1 Superbad
1 The Breakfast Club

Best Tech Movie
Total 101

58 I Robot
10 Iron Giant

9 Stargate
6 Transformers
5 Tron
2 Serenity
2 Antitrust
1 Bicentennial Man
1 Cloverfield
1 High School Musical
1 I am Legend

1 Meet the Robinsons
1 Robocop II
1 Robots
1 Rocky III
1 The Matrix

Best Musical
Total 106
33 Grease

29 High School Musical
20 Hairspray
8 Dreamgirls
3 Rent
2 Moulin Rouge
2 Sweeney Todd
1 “O”
1 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
1 Across the Universe

1 High School Musical 2
1 Makado
1 Phantom of the Opera
1 Sound of Music
1 Transformer
1 Xanadu