We had a VERY busy TTW in the Eagle Valley Library District! Our Library District includes 3 branches in Eagle County, CO, serving an area that encompasses everything from the ski resorts of Vail and Beaver Creek to cattle ranches and very small towns (but no big cities).
We spent our mornings and early afternoons this week doing presentations to almost every 8th grader in the Eagle County School District (241 kids in 11 classes) on how to access and use our numerous online databases for research. We also explained about audiobooks and downloadable eaudiobooks, and gave them each a booklet of all of the teen titles we have in each format.
Additionally, we were fortunate that singer/songwriter/recording artist Kathy Moser, who is from Pennsylvania, was going to be in our area this week and had some time to fit in a songwriting and recording program for each of our 3 branches. She has a portable recording studio, using the Garage Band program, to record songs to which the teens themselves write the lyrics. Kathy has the kids do almost everything, from running the computer to adding some of the background sounds. This time she called her program “Living in the Digital Age” and had them write lyrics about both good and bad aspects of technology. She also had a conversation with them in which she brought up the effects on the environment, both good and bad, of technology. Even the shyest teens were enticed to join in the rap recording, all 3 of which can be heard on Kathy’s MySpace page
Gypsum’s lyrics
I check my myspace everyday
just to see what my friends say
even though my friend’s page is really stacked
my myspace keeps getting hacked
one thing you can say about hackers
they work like dogs, they ain’t no slackers
my computer’s soooo sloooooooow
I just want to kill it, to make it go
Eagle’s Lyrics
So Much information is such a frustration
everything is digital for our generation
I-pod, cellphone, Blackberry, laptop
smaller, faster, coming to the shop
gigabyte, megabyte, touch screen, touch screen, what a sight
internet connecting, texting all night
fits in your pocket- take it anywhere
with all those screens, all you do is stare
Each library also had individual programs. At the Avon Library teens will spend this afternoon eating pizza and watching the movie “School of Rock”; the Eagle Library teens were given a music trivia scavenger hunt to do for a prize; and at the Gypsum Library the teens created their own anime music videos (AMVs) and showed them at a Teen Night Thursday night. The AMVs ran the gamut from drama and love stories to comedy, and were amazing. These take a lot of patience, creativity, and knowledge of anime. We plan to expand on this and create an AMV club this spring.
We want to give a HUGE thank you to YALSA and Dungeons and Dragons for the mini-grant that allowed us to fit so much programming into the week!
Julie Richards, Teen Services Librarian, Eagle Valley Library District