I have to admit I have young adults on the brain. Having just recently (last week in fact) been given the opportunity to take charge of Y.A. programming at my branch, I am feeling excited and motivated. My first order of business has been the summer reading program. Unfortunately, I am also feeling lost and unsure. It's not my lack of knowledge of young adult titles that's leaving me confused. I see which titles go out frequently, and I can always refer to book lists for help. This class gives me a great excuse to read titles I otherwise might not have gotten around to.
What's stressing me out is how I will get teens in to my branch, where we have never had a young adult presence. Last week I went to four area schools and the children's hospital at Bellevue, dropping off materials for summer reading. At all of these places I met with enthusiastic administrators and teachers, encouraging them to arrange class visits with me to check out books and get prizes. Although I have not yest heard back from any of them, I hope that I will before long. And I have managed to get a dozen teens to sign up at the branch, most of them were lured in by the grand prize of an iPod Nano. Whether or not they will keep coming back to the branch I don't know. My goal is to improve Y.A. services, but what if I never get any teens in the branch to see what I do?
I just want to prove that we can have a teen presence, even is I had to constantly ask them to be quiet. I'm envious of those of you in the class who are having to ask teens to leave or be annoyed by whatever the sword trading game is that came up in Monday's class. At least they're coming in noticeable numbers. My hope is that through this class I can get some ideas and make a whole lot of progress.
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Hey I think you can totally work on changing YA services at your branch. It's not a question of teens being around, it's more a question of the library not offering services for them in most cases. In your case, there has been some summer reading programming happening in the past few years, so you won't necessarily be running on empty.
ReplyDeleteBut, as is the case with teen services, you either have too many teens to know what to do with them or you have none at all. Either is really tough to deal with because it involves rethinking the scope of the work. For you, I would recommend continuing the outreach you've been doing already to schools, youth serving orgs, etc in the community. Do plan programs, and do get those program flyers out in the community. Also talk to your pages--maybe they can bring friends to programs?
Outreach is much easier when school starts, so the time to begin planning how you're going to reach out to schools in the fall should start sooner rather than later. You can call nearby colleagues for help on getting started or for teaming up to tackle larger high schools. Hopefully once teens in the community know that you're there for them, they'll start coming into the library to see you.
Keep in mind that these are all very broad strokes, and there are lots of intricacies in between that will either make the process much easier or much more difficult.
We can talk more offline about this if you want too.