Excellence in Library Services to Young Adults

This morning I attend YALSA's Excellence in Library Service to Young Adults. It was a great showcase of 4 different library's projects in serving unique populations of teens. There were posters from about 10 library systems all together, but only 4 presented. All were larger systems, although some of them did not have prior teen programing or services in place. Many of these projects were gateways into further serving teens, even if the programs themselves did not last.

The first library, which I missed the name of, held a 2 day teen summit where they invited teens to come and hear speakers on different hot topics. To entice teens to the summit, they emphasized big name speakers and provided a box lunch. One cool idea I came away with was to have a sign in "sheet". When their sponsor wanted to keep track of who attended with a paper sign in, the librarian came up with the idea of putting a regular flat sheet over the tables and provided sharpies for teens to "sign the sheet". This allowed tracking for numbers and names, and ended up being a piece of artwork when teens added their tags to the sheet as well.

Brazos Price from Austin Public Library was the second presenter. He spoke about their Second Chance program which formed a library branch inside both the short and long term juvenile facilities in their city. The teen spaces were very neat and clean, with a lot of tables and space, and had an impressive number of books. They started out with donated ARC's and second hand books, but have impressed their admin so much that they now have their own budget for new materials and have surpassed a couple of their branch libraries in circulation numbers.

Hennepin County Library/Brooksdale Branch started an International Teen Club at their library. The program is really inspirational in its scope. Most of the members are Hmong, but they are open to any nationality. They have developed their own programs, volunteer to help the library, designed their own logo which they use on marketing and t-shirts, made a dvd to teach new immigrants how to use the library, started a peer tutoring group and give workshops to other clubs that want to start one and have cultural workshops to help keep their culture alive here in the US.

The New Scotland Branch of the Albany Library System created a Skate Club to help bring a population of skaters into the library. The skaters had previously used the library only for internet, bathrooms and water while they spent the day skating on the expanse of concrete in front of the library. The branch librarian was smart enough to recruit a library school student who also happened to be a pro skater to come facilitate the club and they partnered with a local for profit indoor skate facility. He brought video of his own skating and encouraged the teens to do so as well. The club grew into an advisory type of group and gave feedback as to how the teen area in the new branch should look and feel, as well as helped develop their new teen employment program. The Skate Club will not be back this year since Albany is going through a lot of closures and reopenings with remodels and new libraries being built, but the group's input will live on and many of the teens that were involved with the club are now involved in other ways.

The final presentation was really short. The Alameda County Library recruited teens to teach seniors how to use computers and navigate the internet. It sounds like it was a very positive experience.

One thing I took away from this session was the power of giving teens a voice. Making them feel that the library is their place, instead of just a place they visit. One way that I saw this in many of the sessions was allowing the teens to come up with their own logo/graphic that represented who they are. At some point, I would like to facilitate an art contest with that in mind.