2 More Great Workshops-Josie

Teens in Your Branch, From Trauma to Triumph?
I attended two great workshops that I wanted to share with everyone. The first was on "Teens in Your Branch Library: From Trauma to Triumph?"There were librarians on the panel from Queens, Oregon and Cleveland. They all started various programs like a teen advisory board and they used their computer labs and meeting rooms as a teen space in the afternoons, but the thing all three librarians stressed was the training the staff received. The library in Queens opted to use their security funding on training instead of a security guard and their incident reports have been dramatically reduced. All three library systems said that all their staff members from the custodians to the City Librarian attended a workshop called Everyone Serves Youth, this training has really helped all staff members deal with youth and other librarian patrons effectively. They also suggested that libraries buy yearbooks from the local high schools. This really helped the librarians get to know the teens and effectively identify teens who were misbehaving. All in all, the thing that they stressed was training, training, training! The Cleveland library uses their incident reports to identify what kind of training that needs to be developed and which branches need refersher trainings.

Beyond White Privilege 101: Continuing the Discussion
This workshop was a discussion about how our libraries are effected by white privilege. The speaker was George Lipstitz who wrote, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. The main ideas in his speech were:

1. "Whiteness" or "People of Color" issues are not really about color, but a structure that has been put in place. We need to change the structure.
2. The issues that exist today cannot be repaired with a 1960's skills set. Our job is to create a new skill set to deal w/2008 racism issues.

Afterwards we had a discussion about how white privilege impacts our institutions. During this discussion and many of the other presentations I attended at ALA, I was really impressed with the Seattle Public Library System. There were a handful of libraries that were doing things better, but for the most part we are ahead of the curve in most areas. The issues that my table came up with that were effected by white privilege were:

1. Librarians in low income areas may need additional or different resources to provide equal services to their patrons. We may need to look at how we allocate resources in a different way. An example of this was security. One librarians at my table was from a low income area and she felt that she not able to be a librarian because so much of her time was spent on security issues and so her patrons were loosing out valuable reference services. She felt the library needed additional staff because they had additional security issues.
2. Acknowledge subtle racism. Everyone at our table had experience with this we felt this is a 2008 racism issue and we need training on how to deal with subtle racism with our patrons and other library staff in an effective way.
3. When ever there is a problem that concerns race, it is viewed as a problem that people of color must deal with. A librarian from an academic library brought this issue up and he said anytime issues of racism come up it seems like a coalition of people of color are gathered to deal with the problem. Where as, white people should be expected to take part in the discussion.
4. What supports can we build into our human resources department that will help us grow new leaders from our support staff? What kind of additional training can we provide to support Library Associates and Pages in becoming librarians and eventually managers.