Each year, YALSA sponsors preconference workshops and programs for the ALA Annual Conference. Through May 31, we’re seeking your proposals for a conference presentation at next year’s event in Chicago, June 27 to July 2. As you can see from our request for proposal, next year we are emphasizing creative conference proposals, highlighting best practices and innovations in five priority areas:

• Young Adult Literature/Readers’ Advisory
• Advocacy & Activism
• Programming & Outreach
• Research & Best Practices
• Teen Spaces (physical & virtual)
• Youth Participation

What innovations have you brought in these five areas? What inspiration have you found in our 30 Days series that could apply to them? YALSA is as creative and innovative as its members, which is to say very creative and highly innovative. So fill out our Annual 2013 request for proposal and tell your peers about everything you’ve accomplished at your library!

Monthly President’s Report – March 2012

Below is a summary of activities that I have completed or am working on.

Completed Tasks

• Committee Chairs: I had phone conversations with several YALSA committee chairs about the work of their committees.
• Committee/Jury/Taskforce Appointments:  I  appointed members to fill vacancies on several committees and continued appointing members to fill new task forces created by Board action at Midwinter.

Monthly President’s Report – February 2012

March kind of sneaked up on me, I guess because February is a short month. Below is a summary of activities that I have completed or am working on. Happy Teen Tech Week!

Completed Tasks

• Committee Chairs:  I had phone conversations with several YALSA committee chairs about the work of their committees.

• Board Activities:  
  • The Board had an online chat on February 1. Board members offered suggestions for the content of the selection and award committee chair and member webinars.
  • The Board met by telephone on February 29 to discuss chair quarterly reports and to take action on two requests for Board action that came from committees.
  • The Board voted to accept a proposal from the Morris Award committee to amend the eligibility rules to exclude self-published and e-book only books from consideration. The new rule will be re-evaluated after the 2013 award. (more…)

When it comes to advocating for teen services, many of us have had to justify the importance of our role to our communities, library boards, and sometimes even fellow staff members; the unfortunate reality is that we will need to continue doing so for the unforeseeable future. With cuts to staffing and operating hours affecting how we do our day-to-day jobs, it can be easy to put advocacy on the back burner instead of keeping it at the forefront of all that we do. As we rush from program to program, patron to patron, we could all use more help advocating on behalf of the teens we serve. What better resource than the teens themselves to help promote libraries and, more specifically, teen services! (more…)

YALSA’s Board of Directors will meet via conference call on Feb. 29 from 1 to 2:30 p.m. Eastern to review quarterly board reports. Any YALSA members interested in sitting in on the meeting can send a message to yalsa@ala.org to receive the phone number and access code.

Are you excited about the YALSA elections? They are coming up soon (March 19th-April 27th), and your participation is vital! This is your chance to help determine the who will be deciding on those books featured in our wonderful awards in the next few years. Many positions are appointed, but three lists rely on elections to fully populate them. This year the positions open on the YALSA awards slate are (the full slate with candidates is available on the YALSAblog):

• Margaret A Edwards
• Excellence in Nonfiction
• Michael L. Printz

While you are no doubt very familiar with the awards themselves, you might be less familiar with what is expected of the folks serving on those committees.
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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!

Hello! I’m Hannah Gómez, a new blogger and new member of YALSA, thanks in part to the Spectrum Scholarship. I’ll be blogging regularly about research and other topics, but today I wanted to start by telling you who I am, what I do, and why I’m here. Also, I’ll let you know why I find YALSA’s new research agenda so interesting, and why you should as well.

First things first. I’m a Tucson, Arizona, native who went to the University of Arizona for undergrad, studying creative writing, music, and Spanish. A few months ago, an airplane I was on touched down in Boston, the last flight to be allowed into the closed airport before Hurricane Irene hit. I’ve just started graduate school here at Simmons College, where I’m enrolled in their dual degree program, which will leave me with an MA in children’s literature and an MLS with a focus on youth services.

The future in library science just hit me one day. I had been answering people’s “So what will you do with your Bachelor’s?” with a general “Dunno. Go to grad school” for so long and all of a sudden I just blurted out “Be a librarian.” But it made since. In high school I never had to work at the mall or the car wash–I was lucky enough to get a job in social services, and though I held a variety of different jobs and internships over high school and college, most of them were related to the world of non-profits and at-risk youth. My favorite job was when I got promoted to community service project leader, supervising 8-14-year-olds who had been arrested and had court-ordered service hours to perform. I, at 19, was deemed responsible enough to oversee their work, keep them on task, and, I hoped, help them see something meaningful in what they were doing, whether it was painting in a community art project or picking up trash at a neighborhood park. I got to be a big sister type to the kids I worked with, and while doing our work we would also talk about the books, music, and movies they liked. So it seems to make sense. I love teenagers, especially middle schoolers, and I am a huge nerd who is always trying to find the right book for someone. I’m also the child of two teachers and the sister of a teacher, so I know how much, especially in these times, both teachers and students need the help of librarians, and both school and library settings are essential to developing youths. Compound that with my interest in social justice and non-profits, and voila! I want to be something like all of you.

So why the extra degree? Why the crit classes where you read as much Freud and Barthes as you do Virginia Hamilton and nursery rhymes? Well, (more…)

Curious about how to integrate QR codes into your library? Join Jennifer Velasquez, Teen Services Librarian at the San Antonio Public Library, for a discussion of QR codes. Learn how any librarian, from the tech-novice to the tech-guru, can start using QR codes in the library at no cost.

Participants will learn

• How QR codes work and where to find programs that will create QR codes for free
• How to incorporate QR codes into existing programming and build new programming using QR codes
• How to use QR codes to present and market programming at their library
• How QR codes can be used to build bridges between teen created content and print and digital material in the library.

Register today! This webinar occurs on Thursday, October 20 at 2pm Eastern. Registration costs $29 for students, $39 for individual YALSA members, $49 for all other individuals, and $195 for group registrations. YALSA’s group rate applies to a group of people that will watch the webinar together in one location.