It’s been another busy month in YALSA land. Here’s what’s been going on!
Key Activities:
Collaborated with the Digital Media and Learning team to build out a month-long series about Teens and the Future of Libraries for connectedlearning.tv. Each episode is hosted every Tuesday in May with a different topic. The full schedule is:
May 2: Kick-off: Teens and the Future of Libraries
May 7: The Importance of Youth Access to Technology in Libraries
May 14: Effectively Leveraging Social Media in Library Programs
May 21: Getting Library & IT Administrators On-Board with Leveraging Social Media
May 28: Teens and the Future of Libraries: Sharing Best Practices (more…)
Happy Spring! Or is it still freezing cold where you are? Or already hot as summer? Regardless of the weather, spring is a great time for the birth of new ideas, approaches, and programming. Maybe something here will inspire you.
- You might be working and living in the “stroke belt,” did you know? Eleven states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia) are designated as areas with incredibly high prevalence of stroke, and new research shows that teens living in these areas are at higher risk for having strokes when they are older. This means that encouraging healthy habits and the cessation of unhealthy ones that could contribute to strokes, like smoking and diet, should be emphasized. Have you done any health programming lately? Read a news report on the study here, or check out the full article in Neurology. (more…)
What’s been happening at YALSA? Tons of cool stuff! From the Common Core to Connected Learning to Taskforces, Teen Tech Week and more! It’s all here…
Key Activities:
Collaborated with ALSC and AASL to create and appoint the inter-divisional Common Core Task Force, a team tasked with developing materials to educate members of all three divisions on the Common Core.
Chaired the March YALSA Board meeting via conference call. Draft minutes from the call are online at http://ow.ly/jHX4c
Attended the Digital Media & Learning Conference and met with the Connected Learning team to plan YALSA’s partnership with Connected Learning TV in May. More information is online at www.ala.org/yalsa/issues-current-projects
Convened a key discussion with YALSA members serving on various research-focused committees around the future of YALSA’s research agenda.
Represented YALSA at the Children’s Book Council Meeting on March 22 to share YALSA’s new resources and initiatives.
Appointed several new taskforces, including the Teen Tech Week and Teen Read Week Evaluation taskforces, the Programming Guidelines taskforce and more.
Outreach & Media:
Interviewed by New Jersey Public Radio on Teen Tech Week.
(more…)
How’s your team doing in March Madness? Mine just got to the Sweet Sixteen! While you’re waiting for the next time your alma mater plays, check out some of these interesting ideas and insights.
We all know that teens love to text. To respond to this, many schools and colleges now use text message alerts to notify students of school closures or safety issues. But what about health issues? It turns out, lots of doctors and researchers use text message interventions to tackle adolescent health concerns. In North Carolina, a free texting service offered teens the chance to anonymously ask questions about sexual health, and the teens involved in the study said that the service made them feel confident and encouraged them to follow up and learn more about their health. A similar study in 2011 offered teens weight management tips, and the weight and BMI of the study participants decreased after the intervention. College aged smokers participated in an intervention that left 40% of them staying away from smoking for a period of at least 7 days, while other participants reported less dependency on nicotine, which is also a good sign. Obviously as librarians, we cannot offer health advice. But what can you take from this study? Can school libraries use a texting service to alert students of new titles in the collection or upcoming book club meetings? Can public libraries partner with public health organizations to offer helpful services for teens concerned with a certain health or behavior issue? Can teen advisory groups pilot their own peer mentoring or counseling texting program? There are a lot of possibilities, and medical research shows that such programs can have really great results. (more…)
Congratulations! You’ve almost made it through February. If you’re struggling to find ideas for programs or just want to know what’s out there in the research world, maybe this will help.
Are your newer patrons the kind who wonder why librarians are relevant and useful? Just tell them that Beyoncé recently hired a personal librarian to archive and catalog her life.
A new study in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking looks at what influences teens’ decisions to disclose personal information to commercial websites. The researchers found that these decisions were linked to frequency of Internet use and social benefits of disclosing that information. It might be time to do a program on Internet security with your teens.
Wannes Heirman, Michel Walrave, and Koen Ponnet. Predicting Adolescents’ Disclosure of Personal Information in Exchange for Commercial Incentives: An Application of an Extended Theory of Planned Behavior. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. February 2013, 16(2): 81-87. doi:10.1089/cyber.2012.0041.
The Journal of Early Adolescence reported on the connections between race, ethnicity, and SES on growing BMI in children and adolescents. For girls, they found that low SES and high birth weight were big predictors of heavy weight gain, while African American and Asian American boys in higher SES brackets were more prone to obesity. It might bear looking at the full article in conjunction with the demographics of your library’s neighborhood or patron base next time you are preparing a book display on health and active lifestyles or when updating your collection, to make sure that you are showcasing materials that might hit the right age groups and cultural backgrounds so as to be extra relevant.
Fred W. Danner and Michael D. Toland. The Interactive Role of Socioeconomic Status, Race/Ethnicity, and Birth Weight on Trajectories of Body Mass Index Growth in Children and Adolescents. The Journal of Early Adolescence. February 2013, 33(3): 293-314. (more…)
