Each spring, the YALSA President-elect appoints members to serve on process committees and juries. These groups are the backbone of the organization, making sure that core initiatives like Teen Read Week and Teen Tech Week happen in a suitably dynamic YALSA fashion and select recipients of awards and grants. They also find ways to engage new members, support our amazing blogs, plan conference programs, maintain our wikis, and implement genius plans to support the organization, its members, and initiatives financially. And… much much much more.
In my own experience, these groups provide a perfect opportunity to get your feet wet, learn something new about the division, develop your professional chops, and of course, work with genuinely awesome people. Plus, they’re entirely virtual, so conference travel (though welcomed) is not mandatory. Volunteer forms will be collected through the beginning of February and appointments will be made in March. A list of committees and juries as well as the volunteer form, can be found here: http://www.ala.org/yalsa/workingwithyalsa/yalsacommittee.
Please feel free to get in touch with current Chairs with questions http://www.ala.org/yalsa/workingwithyalsa/committees/committeechair or contact me at shannon.peterson@gmail.com.
Thanks, and I look forward to serving with you!
The 2012 YALSA/VOYA Frances Henne Research Grant Committee congratulates this year’s grant recipient, Sylvia Vardell. Her research proposal is entitled, Poetry Books and Apps: Complement or Competition? Dr. Vardell’s research seeks to investigate student attitudes toward poetry apps and the impact of use of apps on poetry book reading and circulation.
In the research proposal, Dr. Vardell poses these questions and ideas:
“Where do we begin in selecting poetry that children will like? No one has yet considered the impact of the new format of the poetry application or ‘app.’ It seems logical to hypothesize that access to this new innovation might have a positive impact on young people’s attitudes toward the poetry content, but it has not been investigated. In addition, this raises the question about whether poetry in print format will suffer as a result. Does new technology trump old books? The proposed project will attempt to address these questions.”
Dr. Vardell notes that although this small study focuses exclusively on poetry, this look at the impact of apps on student attitudes and the relationship to book reading offers wider applications that interest professionals and researchers in libraries and literacy.
Sylvia Vardell is Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman’s University, where she teaches graduate courses in children’s and young adult literature.
The YALSA/VOYA Frances Henne Research Grant offers seed money to research that supports the YALSA Research Agenda. Applications for the 2013 grant are due on December 1, 2012. For more information, please see http://www.ala.org/yalsa/awardsandgrants/franceshenne .
The applications are in! The YALSA/VOYA Frances Henne Research Grant applications have been submitted, and the review committee is currently reading the innovative research ideas of this year’s pool of grant proposals.
We are looking forward to announcing the 2012 recipient at the ALA Midwinter Meeting. You are invited to join us for the official announcement during the “YALSA Research Forum: What’s Next for YA?” event on Friday, January 20, to be held from 1:30 PM-3:30 PM, Dallas Convention Center, Room D225. As part of the Research Forum, we will announce the winning grant proposal and tell you how to apply for the 2013 Henne Research Grant.
We will also share the news of the 2012 recipient during the “YALSA Trends in YA Presentation” on Saturday, January 21, to be held from 4:00-5:30PM, in the Dallas Convention Center, Room C141. This event will feature a paper presentation from Jeanie Austin called “Critical Issues in Juvenile Detention Center Libraries.” The paper will explore the tensions present in juvenile detention center library services (such as institutional limitations and access to technologies) and how youth and librarians can and do navigate these tensions within the library setting.
For more information on these programs, please go to http://wikis.ala.org/yalsa/index.php/YALSA_at_ALA%27s_2012_Midwinter_Meeting. We hope that you can join us for one of these YALSA events at Midwinter, and we look forward to celebrating this year’s Frances Henne Research Grant recipient with you in Dallas!
Now that we’re done with ALA Annual (well, almost done—there are still those post-conference reports that committees need to send in), it’s time to start thinking about the upcoming year, which is my year as President-Elect. One of the exciting parts of being President-Elect is that I get to appoint people to YALSA’s committees. This summer and fall, I will be appointing people to next year’s selection committees. These are the committees that select titles for the YALSA lists such as Best Fiction, Quick Picks, Popular Paperbacks, Amazing Audiobooks, Fabulous Films, etc.
In the spring, I’ll make appointments for the process committees. These are the committees that help YALSA run smoothly day-by-day, week-by-week, and month-by-month and include Legislation, Research, Intellectual Freedom, Teen Tech Week, Teen Read Week, Web Advisory, and more. Award committee appointments will come after next spring’s election results.
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