Tag: teen services
We’re halfway through November (already?!), which means we’re also halfway through National Novel Writing Month. My library’s never done any NaNoWriMo programs before (we do have a memoir writing group, though), so when one of my teen patrons asked this year if we were doing anything, I decided we’d give it a try!
Our NaNoWriMo support has been a collaboration between me and the adult services department and I’m happy with how things have gone so far. We have a pretty cool Municipal Liaison who’s willing to work with us, so on the first Saturday of the month, we hosted a meet-up for participants and the head of reference and I talked about library resources one might use to research a novel and resources for teen writers specifically. Exactly half of the people at the meet-in were teens, and it went well!
This Saturday we’re hosting a write-in (five hours of NaNoWriMo participants cranking out words), which is mostly just going to be us providing space. We’ve also created book displays about writing that’ll be up for the entire month. If you want to read a bit more about our NaNoWriMo support, I’ve written a post about it for the YALSAblog.
How is your library supporting NaNoWriMo this year?
November 14, 2011
The YALSA blog is currently running another theme month, so every day in September, you can find another “how to” guide. I contributed by discussing how you can be an advocate for teens in your library, in your community, and in their lives.
Do you have any great advocacy stories or ideas?
September 20, 2011
I wrote about my visit to Chicopee Public Library when I went last month, but this month for the YALSA blog, Erin and I reflected on both of our visits and talked about the importance (especially as YA librarians) of having a professional network and of finding inspiration for new ideas.
August 16, 2011
Logo designed by and stolen from the Indie Librarian
I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life Project (now in its seventh round) this week. To quote the project wiki, “the Library Day in the Life Project is a semi-annual event coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates.”
Today was another scattered day. It’s hard to really sit down and work on a big project when you’re only there for a couple of hours at a time and have eighty things to do. This week was also strange: I only worked thirteen hours (plus my Chicopee visit), so a lot of what I normally do in a week got left out. (more…)
July 29, 2011
Logo designed by and stolen from the Indie Librarian
I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life Project (now in its seventh round) this week. To quote the project wiki, “the Library Day in the Life Project is a semi-annual event coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates.”
Instead of going to work today, I went on a field trip to the Chicopee Public Library in Massachusetts (about two hours from my library) to visit Erin, their YA librarian, whom I know from Twitter, and to observe a meeting of their anime club and steal as many ideas as possible. (more…)
July 29, 2011
Logo designed by and stolen from the Indie Librarian
I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life Project (now in its seventh round) this week. To quote the project wiki, “the Library Day in the Life Project is a semi-annual event coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates.”
Today was a slightly scattered day at work. I also remain baffled by huge swings in turnout for my programs this summer. But I get to hang out with enthusiastic teen readers! (more…)
July 27, 2011
Logo designed by and stolen from the Indie Librarian
I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life Project (now in its seventh round) this week. To quote the project wiki, “the Library Day in the Life Project is a semi-annual event coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates.”
Today I did some non-work library stuff and then had my first day back at work after two days off. I also got some really good news today! (more…)
July 26, 2011
Logo designed by and stolen from the Indie Librarian
I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life Project (now in its seventh round) this week. To quote the project wiki, “the Library Day in the Life Project is a semi-annual event coordinated by Bobbi Newman of Librarian by Day. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates.”
Since I worked on Saturday, I had today off, so I’m going to talk about what I did on Saturday and the librarian-ish things I did today. (more…)
July 25, 2011
Last weekend my library hosted a Minecraft competition that has been my most successful program to date. I don’t think there are a lot of other public libraries out there who have done much Minecraft-related programming, so I thought I’d write about what we did, how we did it, and how it worked.
For the uninitiated: Minecraft is a “sandbox game,” which means it’s an open-ended environment in which the player comes up with his or her own objectives and then sets out to achieve them. In Minecraft, the world is made up of cubes of different materials and the player can harvest those materials and combine them in different configuration to build tools, other building materials, furniture, food, and different kinds of mechanisms. The focus of the game is exploration and creativity and people have done some really awesome stuff with it. (more…)
June 16, 2011
Last week was spring break at my library and there were zero teens in the library. That totally destroyed my program attendance rates–I wanted to make sure we had activities at the library for kids who were stuck in town so I planned two programs for last week–and it also left me feeling stressed out and bummed, which surprised me.
But what I realized over last week (especially upon reflecting on the same thing happening during winter break in February) is that I get bummed out when there are no teens in the library because as much as I love YA lit and what libraries do and the values of our profession, what really matters to me is the teens themselves, and what the library and I can do to make their lives more awesome. Being able to do readers’ advisory and talk about what they’re interested in and joke around with them is what makes the paperwork, the planning, the emails, the stressing out about getting everything done totally worth it.
I considered this in more detail in a post for the YALSA Blog.
Do you see more or fewer teens in your library during breaks? And what makes you love what you do?
April 26, 2011
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