YALSA Information Session-Sign Up Today!

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Do you have a question you’ve always wanted to know about YALSA? Now is your chance! Join the virtual information session during the YALSA Symposium! This will be a drop-in relaxed opportunity for you to hang out with some of the wonderful YALSA Board members. On Saturday, November 6 starting at 10am Central, Board members will be available to talk about YALSA membership and answer any questions you might have. Don’t wait-register here! You will receive a confirmation email on joining the meeting.

“ASK” by otama is licensed under CC BY 2.0

 

YALSA Seeks Member Volunteers

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Have you ever presented at a local or national conference? Or are you a long-time participant at YALSA webinars or conference and Symposium sessions? YALSA is currently seeking member volunteers, including a committee chair, for the newly created Education Advisory Committee (EAC). The date to apply has been extended to June 10, 2020. 

The role of the Education Advisory Committee is to assist with providing appropriate and timely topics for continuing education offerings and identifying qualified individuals to facilitate continuing education sessions. Our communities are quickly changing and evolving in response to current issues which requires library staff to remain up to date on information and skills if libraries are to remain relevant in the 21st century. 

Providing your voice and direction to the EAC will help guide YALSA in its educational endeavors. Becoming a member volunteer of the EAC is an excellent opportunity to collaborate with your peers and make a difference in continuing education by assuring YALSA is offering relevant and timely content. YALSA needs your leadership in promoting CE opportunities and recognizing the contribution of facilitators and presenters, which is crucial for the growth of our profession and the teens that we impact.

The chair for the EAC serves in an Ex-Officio position on the Board of Directors and attends two board meetings a year. The EAC is a virtual committee with a one year (12 months) term beginning July 1 and is renewable. Complete this form by June 10th to apply.

YALSA Board created the Education Advisory Committee (EAC) to assist with identifying and providing feedback on Continuing Education topics to YALSA’s Executive Director and the newly created position of Program Officer for Continuing Education and Development. You may find more information about the board document here.

Run for YALSA Board in 2019!

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Interested in Serving on YALSA’s Board of Directors?

The YALSA Board Development Committee is looking for candidates for next year’s slate for the following positions: President-Elect, Secretary, and Directors-at-Large.  Successful candidates will stand for election in the spring of 2019 and begin their term during at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.

For more information on the responsibilities of each role on the Board, please visit the Governance page which includes some handy links under the topic Get Involved in Governance & Leadership.

Are you ready to put your name forward? Please submit the online nomination form soon and a committee member will be in touch.

Not quite ready yet?  Please feel free to contact me, the Board Development Committee Chair, at gsarahthelibrarian@gmail.com with any questions or to request additional information.  

The Board Development Committee will also be hosting YALSA 301 at Annual 2018 in New Orleans on Saturday, June 23, from 9-10 am. Pencil it in and hope to see you there! If you can’t make it, we’ll have a virtual session this summer, too.

Thank you for considering if YALSA Board is right for you!

Meet the YALSA Board of Directors

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What is the YALSA Board? What do they do? Who is on the YALSA Board? These could be questions you may have and if they are you’ve come to the right place. Each month, two YALSA Board of Directors are interviewed and their responses are shared here in order to help members get to know more about the Board members, the Board itself and things the Board is working on.

YALSA’s board of directors has the principal responsibility for fulfillment of YALSA’s mission and the legal accountability for its operations. The board has specific fiduciary duties of care, loyalty, and obedience to the law. As a group they are in charge of:

  • establishing a clear organizational mission
  • forming the strategic plan to accomplish the mission
  • overseeing and evaluating the plan’s success
  • hiring a competent executive director
  • providing adequate supervision and support to the executive director

This month meet Franklin Escovedo, Principal Librarian for the City of Coronado, California.

What drew you to the Board?  

I think I have a strange back story for my involvement with the YALSA Board.  So at Annual in 2008 in Anaheim, my first ALA conference, I went to the member meeting GLBT-RT, and they were asking if any members were members of YALSA, “the perky librarians” the chair asked at the meeting.  Myself and a colleague who is no longer with us, were the only two members hopping up and down trying to get their attention.  We laughed about this later, since we did indeed fall into the category of perky librarian.  They were looking to fill a Liaison position for the round table, since the Liaison position had become vacant.  So I was appointed to be the liaison.  They didn’t seem to know what had happened to the previous one, they just told contact two people.  One of those was Beth Yoke and the other was a Board Member who was also a member of the GLBT-RT.  Since this was my first official activity in ALA, I was pretty lost at what to do, figured the best way to find out what YALSA was doing was to go to Board meetings.  So at Midwinter in 2009, I attended my first board meeting and was the only observer.  Sometimes they forgot I was there and would get into really heated debates, then someone would point out that there was an observer.  But from that first meeting in Denver, I was really impressed at the work that the Board did.  And from then on people kept asking me to be more involved and run for board.  So for several years I kept telling them I wanted to learn more about YALSA before I would run.  But what has kept my interest is the passion that the members of the board have for YALSA and the future of teen services, the need to adapt to the current and future landscape of teen services and for the librarians working with teens.  This is a division that hasn’t rested on its laurels but one that is trying to keep pace with the ever changing landscape of information and library services for teens, whether physically or virtually.     

What do you do on the board?  I’m one of the Board of Directors; I’m helping to shape the future of YALSA by helping to implement the new organizational plan.  I also liaison with few Chairs, the Teen Top Ten Committee, the Interdivisional Committee.  I’m also our liaison for the Division to ALA Advocacy group.  I’m currently working on a way to evaluate some of our older committees and to see what needs to be changed so that they will align with the new org plan.

What the board is doing for its members

One of the biggest challenges that the division has had over the past few years is how do you make YALSA more accessible to it’s members.  How to do you get more of the members involved?  One of biggest changes and exciting change is the ability to get more members involved in virtual committees.  The move of PPYA to a virtual committee made it possible for members who can’t afford to go to conference accessible.  One of the biggest road blocks for many members is the cost of attending a conference.  Like a lot of my colleagues, my library doesn’t cover the cost of me attending let a lot membership dues.  A not everyone is crazy like me, who pays for everything themselves.  Going to conference is no cheap affair.  So changing the charges of the selection committees has allowed more of our colleagues to participate.  This new change will allow many more librarians to get involved and help create selection list faster and hopefully get librarians who may not have participated in the past more actively involve.  YALSA is still trying to create better resources for its members and I believe for teen librarians in general.   We know that YA Librarians are often rare in libraries and that there a lot of generalist as well as paraprofessionals who serve as the Teen Librarian.  We want to continue to advocate for YA Librarians being added to the payrolls of libraries and schools.  We want to help with the continuing education of a YA Librarians, the new, the old, and the newly reassigned librarians who want to provided better services for teens.

Are you reading a teen book you may want to share or a recent program you may have done with and for teens.  I’m currently reading several books, one book is the first of the Magnus Chase series by Rick Riordan. I’m also reading Echo Park by Michael Connelly for my mystery book club that I run at my library. And I’m halfway through this year’s Stonewall Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award winner, If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo.  I was lucky enough to meet Meredith at the Coffee Klatch in Orlando.  I’m so thrilled that it won! 

President’s Report – September 2016

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Fall Greetings! The YALSA board is busy preparing for the Symposium and the Executive Committee meeting. Please see the report below about my activities over the past month.

Accomplishments

  • Advocated for libraries at an ESSA listening session for the Illinois State Board of Education
  • Lead the September monthly chat with the YALSA Board about membership survey results, strategic committee task lists, and quarterly reports
  • Completed my registration for ALA Midwinter in Atlanta–have you?
  • Filled the Selection List Transition Task Force and participated in calls with the chair
  • Followed up with the YALSA representative to the annual IFLA conference–look for a blog post coming soon!
  • Wrote welcome for printed symposium booklet
  • Interviewed by a student for the Columbia Chronicle for article about the stigma of young adult literature
  • Filled vacancies on various strategic committees
  • Reminded the YALSA Board of a need to communicate with members–look for YALSA blog posts coming soon from each board member
  • Led a YALSA board vote about recommending but not requiring a MLIS degree for the next ALA Executive Director

Works in Progress

  • Developing the transition plan for the new way juries will work. Are you a YALSA member with time to serve on a virtual jury over the next few months? Volunteer here!
  • Preparing for YALSA’s YA Services Symposium & Fall Executive Committee meeting
  • Preparing for ALA Midwinter in Atlanta
  • Answering questions and working with YALSA board members as they prepare board documents in the standing board committees

Stats and Data

  • August Membership: 4973, down 2.2% from last year at this time
  • August Donations: Raised $480 for Emerging Leader program

Join me for the next YALSA Town Hall meeting!  It will be on Weds., November 16, from 5-6 ET via the online Zoom platform.  Look for access information coming soon in the November weekly enews or email yalsa@ala.org for login information.

THANK YOU to the awesome YALSA Board members who have been hard at work in their standing board committees to make positive changes that will result in improved library services to teens!

THANK YOU to all our members for all that you do to support teens and teen library services in your communities!

Respectfully submitted,

Sarah Hill, YALSA President 2016-2017

President’s Report – July 2016

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I can’t believe it’s already time for my first monthly president’s report! Tune in monthly to find out what I’ve been up to.   Most importantly, a huge thank you to the YALSA Board, staff, and members who made Annual 2016 great!

Here’s what I’ve been working on since then:

Completed

  • Appointments to the Edwards, Printz, and Nonfiction committees
  • Virtual online training for new board members
  • Assigned board mentors, board liaisons, and standing board committee members
  • Wrote column for Fall 2016 issue of YALS
  • Wrote YALSA Blog post on Presidential Initiative: Real Teens, Real Ready
  • Worked with YALSA board to appoint Nick Buron to fill Linda Braun’s vacancy as Fiscal Officer
  • Hosted first monthly chat with the YALSA Board to continue the work from Annual
  • Contacted YALSA’s IFLA rep to discuss what YALSA information should be shared with the group in August
  • Met with chair of presidential program task force to plan program activities
  • Voted for ALA Conference Committee representatives

Read More →

Thoughts about Book Selection Lists

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enhanced-buzz-24540-1374618713-43In the afterglow of the Youth Media Awards comes the distribution of YALSA’s latest selection lists. These lists have long been resources for both readers’ advisory and collection development, keeping library staff abreast with the new and wonderful. There was a time when the Best Books for Young Adults list (now re-envisioned as the more narrowly focused Best Fiction for Young Adults) delivered many new book choices for library staff to add to the young adult collection.

That was then. Now it’s not unusual for library staff working for and with teens to discover books before they are even published, via web sites like NetGalley, Edelweiss, or by direct publisher contact. There are many networking opportunities, including the yalsa-bk listserv, that crackle with vitality, producing on-the-spot book recommendations and compiled lists.  The YALSA Hub has hundreds of lists on current topics. In addition, there are fabulous blogs about young adult literature, some by library workers, and some by teens. Surely YALSA’s carefully chosen book selections should be somewhere in this swell of activity. Unfortunately, they don’t generate the buzz of online exploration and discovery.

We can do better. It’s time for transformation!

8792688521_2f7538d895_mrHere’s an example. In 1988, YALSA (then YASD) compiled five annual genre lists, covering  Horror, Mystery, Romance, Sports, and Science Fiction. Eventually, Fantasy, Humor, and Historical Fiction were also included. In 1996, these lists were replaced by the Popular Paperbacks selection committee.

The Popular Paperbacks list continues the process of compiling  topical lists. The committee chooses topics that might be of ongoing interest to teens, such as the genres above. The books must be available in paperback, to keep them within easy purchasing range. It allowed libraries to stay on top of teen reading fads without breaking the budget.

It was a fabulous idea – twenty years ago.

But the appeal of paperbacks has changed over the past two decades. They used to look cool stuffed in the back pocket of blue jeans. Tucked inside a textbook, they allowed teens to read Judy Blume instead of history. Those paperback spinners that once housed countless volumes of Babysitter’s Club and Fear Street serials now are storage headaches. Current paperbacks are often too large to fit in the spinners. Add in the growing popularity of e-books, and Popular Paperbacks just doesn’t sound very hip.

girl readingBut dynamic lists on fascinating topics? Always in demand.

I certainly don’t mean to pick on the Popular Paperbacks committee. It’s dear to my heart because I served on that committee for three years; I met a lot of great library folk and learned much from them. And the 2016 chair, Katie Salo, led her committee in developing some awesome lists. Thank you, and all of those who worked so hard on this year’s impressive selection lists.

The YALSA Board is currently involved in organizational planning, driven by the call to action in YALSA’s Futures Report. In taking a step back, we can really focus on how best to build YALSA so that it is aligned with the vision of teen services as outlined in the report. With that momentum, we are well-positioned to support members as we all strive to build a futures-focused teen program at our libraries.  The Board is working with an expert on organizational planning who has encouraged us to embrace an “everything is on the table” approach that allows us to think about  the kinds of support members need most, including collection development and content curation, and how we best provide that.

This topic and its relation to selected lists like PPYA is actually just one example of what the board will be considering once a new plan is in place and the work of aligning existing programs, services, initiatives and resources begins.  The goal is to have a draft plan put together by early Feb., work throughout the month to refine it and have a final, new plan in place by March 1.  The aligning work will take place after that and lead to the development of proposals for the board’s consideration, most likely at their meeting in June.

To keep up to date on the organizational planning process, check the YALSAblog for regular updates. And join YALSA president Candice Mack for her Member Town Halls on Twitter via the #yalsachat hashtag. The next one will be Friday, Feb. 5, noon to 1:00 pm (Eastern).

It’s a good time to look ahead.

YALSA Board @ Annual 2013: Board Transparency and Accessibility

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At the 2013 ALA Annual Conference, the YALSA board discussed possible methods to increase accessibility between members and the board, as well as improve transparency of the work of the board. The topic surfaced after the board received positive feedback when I “live-tweeted” the 2013 Midwinter board meetings. You can read the full board document that supported the discussion here.   The board agreed to adopt the suggestions made and to evaluate the progress in 2014.

Some of the ideas have already begun to happen:

As the board continues to explore ways to be accessible and share information about board work, we encourage YALSA members to keep the flow of communication going both ways. Let board members know if you have an idea or a concern about something. Be sure to continue your involvement by volunteering for a task force or committee, or even run for board!

YALSA Podcast Episode #94: Interviews with Molly Krichten and Gail Tobin

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This week’s episode concludes the podcast’s coverage of the YALSA 2011 election. This week’s guest are Molly Krichten and Gail Tobin, who are both running this year for spots on the YALSA Board of Directors.

Interviews with Molly Krichten and Gail Tobin

If you prefer, you may download the podcast at the’ YALSA Podcast site and transfer the file to the mp3 player of your choice.

Voting this year will open up on March 16. You can prepare your votes ahead of time by checking out the’ sample ballot and some of the’ previous coverage on the YALSA blog and YALSA Podcast.

 

YALSA Board Work – Check it Out

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Earlier today I posted about various ways people can get involved in, and learn about, YALSA during Annual Conference. In that post I linked to the documents that support the work of the Board during the upcoming Conference, and highlighted that anyone is welcome to attend Board meetings. There’s one more thing you can do to interact with the YALSA Board, that is to visit the YALSA wiki and comment on topics that will be covered by the Board during their Annual Conference meetings.

Visit the YALSA wiki conference page, and you’ll find a link to the YALSA Members Only section where you can download the Board documents. You’ll also find a link to a wiki page on which you can comment on those documents.