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Bringing Teens on Board – literally!
In 2005 Princeton Public Library expanded the roster of its Board of Trustees by appointing two Teen Liaisons to serve a 2 year term. Although they are not voting members of the board, they attend meetings and are given a voice. Their input is sought and their opinions valued.
I recently spoke with Susan Conlon, our Teen Services Librarian at Princeton Public Library, about the impetus to add Teen Liaisons to the Board of Trustees. As Susan recounts:
We’ve had a very active Teen Advisory Board (TAB) at PPL for about 9 years. When we were still in the construction phase of our new building, I organized several tours of the not-yet-opened library for members of TAB to get a preview of the new building. These tours were just like the ones that were being offered to the trustees, staff and other interested adults.
Alex White was one of the teens on a tour and he became the first of two teens appointed to the board a few years later. Our assistant director at that time was leading the “hard-hat tour” and answering questions from the teens, and I remember it was Alex who asked about who made all of the decisions about building the new library and how to get the money to pay for it. We told him it was the Board of Trustees, and he then asked how someone got to be on it as he was interested.
The connection was definitely made that day between teen’s current participation on the TAB and maybe, one day, their being a representative on the library board of trustees. As it turned out, this initial conversation evolved into why not make a space on the board for teens now. Thanks to Alex’s suggestion ( and his reminders over the next year or so about his interest in serving as a teen representative) and to Leslie’s and the board’s desire to take it forward, we now have two teens (both named Alex!) on the Board of Trustees.
I recently conducted an email interview with Alex White about his experience as Teen Liaison to the board. Both our teen liaisons accompanied the PPL delegation to New Orleans for Leslie’s Inauguration as ALA President where they presented a gift to Leslie on behalf of the board. They helped with the “Libraries Build Communities” volunteer day too — they are the young faces in the front row of the group photo of the PPL staff, friends, and board members who traveled to New Orleans in June and spent a day at the Children’s Resource Center moving books (as evidenced in the other photo, where one Alex is passing books to the other).
JanieH: Where do you attend school and what grade are you in?
AlexW: I attend Princeton High School and am a senior this year.
JanieH: How long have you been involved at the Princeton Public Library?
AlexW: I have been coming to the library since I moved to Princeton in first grade. I first joined the Teen Advisory Board in fifth grade.
JanieH: What made you decide to accept the position of being Teen Liaison to the Board of Trustees?
AlexW: I accepted the position because I felt that it was a unique opportunity to influence the library and how it is run. I was interested in offering a teen’s perspective on what goes on in the library. Being able to represent the youth age group is important; it gives us a voice in the operation of the library that might not otherwise be heard.
JanieH: What did you hope to accomplish during your term on the Board?
AlexW: I basically hoped that I would be able to ensure that the library continues its success in the teen department, as well as making any suggestions that I or other teens feel could help to make the library even better.
JanieH: What did you learn as a result of this unique experience?
AlexW: This experience showed me how a professional board is run, and gave me the opportunity to see what goes into the operation of a major organization.
JanieH: What is the one thing that surprised you most while attending the meetings of the library board?
AlexW: I was just a little surprised by some of the things the board discussed, which I would not have expected to factor into how the library is operated.
JanieH: What is your most memorable moment from your time as teen liaison?
AlexW: I really enjoyed the New Orleans trip, getting to see the city, and being able to volunteer and be part of a team that accomplished something so significant.
JanieH: Do you think you will continue to serve on other boards or continue with volunteer work? If so, what do you have planned or hope to do?
AlexW: Although I’m not sure where, I do expect that at some point in my future, I will serve on another board. As for volunteer work, I definitely plan to pursue it, but am unsure in what ways.
JanieH: What are your plans for the future?
AlexW: Well, I’m not sure exactly what my plans are, but I definitely plan on going to college, and after that, hopefully getting a job in the sports industry or being a businessman.
JanieH: Who is your favorite author or what is your favorite book?
AlexW: I have many books that I enjoy so it’s difficult to pick a favorite, but for now I would have to say The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
JanieH: Would you share with us a favorite quotation?
AlexW: “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” –The Great Gatsby
JanieH:Is there anything else you would like to share about you?
AlexW: I am a huge sports fan and also I hope someday to come back and see the library even better than it currently is.
I would like to thank Alex White for taking the time to answer my questions. Both Alex’s have been terrific assets to the Board and very dedicated to attending meetings and other functions. I am sure they will have much success in all their future endeavours.
The library is currently formalizing the method by which two new teen liaisons will be selected once the Alex’s are finished their term. We have also recently appointed two teen representatives to serve on the Friends Council and be active with our Friends of the Library. Getting teens “on board” makes sense in so many ways and is a great way to train future leaders who will have experience serving on volunteer boards and contributing their time to the community. I hope that other libraries will consider getting their teens “on board” too.
Using Library Thing for Reader’s Advisory!
John Klima, the Teen/Systems Librarian at the Franklin Township Public Library in Somerset NJ, recently blogged about his podcast on SLJ.com that details how he is using Library Thing as an RA tool for teens. What a great idea — simple to set up, relatively easy to maintain, and (best of all) free. Thanks for sharing John. I am going to file this under great ideas to steal.
On a side note, last year at this time John was working for me as a library intern during his last semester at SCILS, Rutgers University . I could tell from his short stint with us at PPL that he was going to make things happen when he graduated. He taught several successful sesssions in our Tech Center on RSS while he was still a student and his tech skills were valued by both staff and library customers alike. In less than a year John has started to make his mark in the library world and I look forward to seeing where John will go next. Keep your eyes on Library Angst for future developments.
Naughty Librarian for Halloween?
If anyone doubted that the stereotype of the librarian is alive and well, check out this costume being offered this Halloween for $56 (ouch!) from costumesinc.com. This item was brought to my attention by a student posting to a listserv at Rutgers SCILS. I don’t know if you can make it out, but the costume features a button that says “Naughty Librarian.” That is, I guess, what you pay the 56 bucks for since the rest is just a short skirt and phony glasses, low-cut top and push-up bra which most women could scrounge up cheap (or indeed may already have in their closets).
When we get done laughing at the ridiculousness of the get-up, marveling at the idea that numerous women will pay 56 dollars for the outfit, or grinding our teeth at yet another portrayal of the (harmless) librarian stereotype, I invite all of us to think again.
As one who has deeply studied the librarian stereotype I have come to view these media representations as far from harmless, with serious, anti-intellectual, and anti-feminist messages. Gary Radford and I wrote an article in The Library Quarterly that used Foucauldian and feminist thought to analyze the stereotype. Our analysis led us to ask a number of fundamental questions such as:
“Who is speaking through the stereotype of the female librarian, and to what ends? What interests does the stereotype serve (certainly not those of women)? How can the image of subservience and powerlessness that it affords to women be challenged and changed? It is not enough to cry out that the stereotype is ‘wrong,’ ‘inaccurate,’ or ‘unfair.’ Such responses are expected, common and futile. It is time to dig deeper, to describe the conditions from which the stereotype is made possible, and to analyze the systems of power/knowledge that go to the very heart of what it means to be male and female, powerful and marginalized, valued and devalued” ( p. 263).
The stereotype of the male librarian, although less prominent, is also unflattering to the profession. Usually portrayed as prissy with the ubiquitous horn rimmed glasses and bow tie, he is distinctly feminine and also therefore is accorded the low status of the female librarian.
So, the “Naughty Librarian” costume we may see at Halloween parties this year. Harmless? Humorous? What do you think?
Cited reference: Radford, M. L. & Radford, G. P. (July, 1997). Power, knowledge, and fear: Feminism, Foucault and the stereotype of the female librarian. The Library Quarterly, 67(3), 250-266.
Merchandising: Attractiveness as a form of access
At the Mount Laurel Library, we’ve been working in a “merchandised environment” for over 2 years now.
As the Trading Spaces: Reinventing the Library Environment project demonstration site we had the opportunity to get retail fixtures such as book gondolas, CD browsers and slat wall. We’ve also had training on how to keep our library collections both accessible and attractive to customers.
It’s worked! Our circulation leapt by 39% the first year and it’s been rising ever since.
Well, learning how to merchandise is one thing.
Our staff training uses handouts, slide shows, tip sheets plus hands-on experience to show how to better merchandise our collection.
Our merchandising goal for all staff is to spend on average 5 minutes each hour keeping the displays looking full (that’s about 30+ minutes a day for our full-time staff).
Keeping it all looking good, all the time, is another matter!
Have you ever been in a store that looks “picked over”? Well, it’s the same in a library if you don’t keep up on merchandising the collection.
Success means more circulation and that means we’re constantly filling in gondolas, flipping books cover out, and adding onto slat wall displays. In practice though, it’s hard to keep everyone focused on why it’s important and incorporate it into our daily routine.
To keep our eyes looking at the library from a customer point-of-view, we’ve just started is a twice weekly Walk-About. It’s a way for staff, individually or in a small groupers, to walk through the library and note:
- what looks good (to celebrate success)
- what area needs immediate attention (today, let’s do it now–together)
- what area needs work next
All of our staff share this task through a weekly rotation among our departments. We’ve also created Walk-About sheets to help staff keep track and make it easier to report back at our morning briefings (a quick heads-up meeting before the library opens).
One of the side benefits (besides improving the look of the library displays) is that it encourages everyone to get out and really see the entire library — even those areas they don’t usually work in.
The result — a better looking library and and better informed staff.
Free Collaborative Online Tools (Trust Not Included)
Author: Michelle Kowalsky
It’s tough to use a collaborative tool with folks you don’t know well. . .or don’t trust. Whether you’re creating a PBWiki or writing on a Writely document or trying to post data on a Google spreadsheet document or on iRows, the process is the same. You post your info. Someone else posts their info. You effectively sway to the music in time.
But then, you correct a typo on their part of the info; they delete a word of yours. Soon you’re both waving the proverbial sickle in a wheatfield. . .chopping off dead chaff with wide sweeps high and low. Soon the document is no longer the one either of you intended. What may be the result of a series of many compromises (or poor online interpersonal skills!) may not in actuality be a document of any usefulness at all.
This is where the features of reputation management like those on Wikipedia or eBay come in. . .many, many people post their info and the truth tends to surface naturally. When only a small group of people keep changing the figures on the business report, it can just as often be a power struggle. Collaborative online tools still work best for me when they have, ironically, a face-to-face component.
MMORPGs/Online Gaming as Social Networks
Sure, Myspace is fun in the fact that anyone can make a thousand friends. You can even add music, videos, customize the backgrounds and, did I mention, make a thousand friends. Eventually, it all becomes a little static. Ultimately, it is a personality profile… a really cool one at that, but all communication is done through typing and emails.
But actual Cyberworlds, now that is where the fun is to be had!
Massively-Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game-sites (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft or Runescape (a free version of WoW) are not as much a collection of social introverts as people think. It’s not about sitting in their chosen room of darkness and defeating dragons of varying levels of difficulty… well, not completely.
The success of these games has little to do with storylines. There are challenges offered in order to advance a character’s levels and abilities but there really isn’t a true definitive end, just harder and harder challenges. The worlds are more about the social encounters, creating clans, rivalries, and alliances. It’s social cliques along with the action; real-world interactions within fantasy settings.
But it is more than that. Business deals have been made and sealed within the realm of WoW, marriages have been acted out here and then taken place in real life, virtual funerals have been held for teammates who died in real life but were too far away to pay respects. In fact, some of my friends from high school are held a reunion in WoW a week ago.
So, its not just about challenges, it is community as well. People’s personlity plays a big part in whether or not they are part of one clan or another, connections build a large part of success. Social networking is as integral as it is fun for players in these games, in obth the cyberworld and realworld (remember the business deal?).
Is it time to start changing our premonitions of gamers as social introverts?
Teens in the Library
“Why don’t we just turn the library into an arcade!?”
I tend to get this response from the more, umm, veteran professionals when I bring up gaming programs in the library. Truth is, I’ve gotten similar cynicism for other non-traditional teen programs as well (and I know I am not alone). I’m not completely sure what the issue is but it seems an odd reaction. Why hate programs that bring people into the library?
Or is the issue that these programs bring teens in the library?
Teens are not always seen as an asset in the library community and, sometimes, they are viewed as an outright nuisance among our co-workers. At my previous job, also as a YA Librarian, I had several co-workers flat out state “they do not work with teens.” In fact, a great crux in my job is battling for our teens’ rights to be wherever they please in a library.
I hear many of my cohorts express the same difficulties.
But why teens? Why teen programs? Why the feeling that teens have no place in the library?
When I asked my coworkers why they had issues with teens, I heard a lot of the same answers. When I asked them what their greatest frustrations were with patrons in general, I heard pretty much the same answers as before.
The following is a list of general complaints I have heard. As you read them, ask how many of these are exclusively teen issues and how many actually apply to the general patron population:
They are loud
They are rude
They use bad language
They only come here to use computers
They only come here to rent videos
They look at inappropriate sites
They steal books
They only read magazines
They sleep in the library
They disrupt other patrons
They smell
Feel free to add your own list, but ask yourself… are any of these really just teen issues?
“The Future of the Internet II” New Pew Internet Survey Released
As I am sure many of you have heard, on Sept. 25th, 2006 Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University released their latest survey “The Future of the Internet II.” If you would like to see a pdf of the full report click here. Results, including quotes and biosketches from the 750 tech savvy respondents can be found on the Imagining the Internet Web site.
According to the press release, themes in the predictions made for the year 2020 include:
- “Continued serious erosion of individual privacy
- Improvement of virtual reality and problems associated with ever-more-compelling synthetic worlds
- Greater economic opportunities for those in developing nations
- Changes in languages and the rise of autonomous machines that operate beyond human control.”
My favorite quote from the experts:
“It is better to be actively, thoughtfully and humanly adapting technology than to be creating inertia to resist it.”Scariest quote:
“Losses from internet-related crime and terror will exceed losses from all natural disasters.”Most hopeful quote:
“Enhanced communications and access to information are on the evolutionary path to freedom.”Click here to view more select quotes.
Expand Your Home Library with a Lifetime of Reading!
“It’s like having over 500,000 books in your living room”
“Enough for several lifetime’s worth of reading”
“500,000+…single file PDF ebooks by original authors”
“Fully searchable, quotable text”
Any of the quotes above spark an interest in you? If so, you will very much like the fact that The World eBook Fair site opened the International Book Fair Month of October earlier today with an offer that you probably cannot refuse–at least that’s how I feel about it! That’s right–1/2 million ebooks await you for your personal reading pleasure (most free) this month!
The World eBook Fair, a very large showcase for ebook authors and publishers, beginning today and continuing throughout October, will allow us to download our selections from their collection of 500,000 ebooks. I actually think this is only fitting, since according to the Fair site, we are now celebrating the centennial birthday of the public library system, which probably enabled many of us and our parents and grandparents to read their first free book and continue to do so today.
Anyway, I blogged late last month about the Google Book Search-WorldCat link-up, providing us with an improved way to find the book we want within the libraries near us, which I find very useful. I also very recently published a short article in MultiMedia & Internet at Schools (a great magazine/guide to K-12 technology and education resources), where I listed some of my favorite places to go on and via the Web to get free full text books, articles, and more, but due to the limited scope and length of the article, I could not mention more there. And although I have updated my original Wow!–Full Text and Free?! hotlist site with more “places” to explore, especially Open Access directories and sites, this World eBook Fair site can lead you to a much more organized listing of free ebooks.
This World eBook Fair site is truly one you must visit. For instance, while browsing it, I visited the Classic Literature Collection there and, being a sci-fi fan, immediately downloaded one of my favorites highlighted on the first page as one of the most popular selections–The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. I then downloaded an MP3 of a favorite by Poe–The Telltale Heart. I also really liked browsing the Online Educational Resource Collection, especially since I am library liaison to faculty and administrators in the School of Education at Rider University–I knew that many there would be interested in the full text of the Innovative Pathways to School Leadership report, by U.S. Department of Education and the Office of Innovations and Improvement, listed on the “favorites” page.
I am very impressed with this entire World eBook Fair Consortia site and, of course, for the free offer to search or browse and download or read online. By the way, although I liked browsing the 112 collections, and Michael Hart with Project Gutenburg recommends this, too, you can also find the title you want by using their full text search option. Note that Michael Hart’s Project Gutenburg is partnering with, among others, The World eBook Library, Digital Pulp Publishing, and the Internet Archive (my favorite digital library “place” to frequently visit for free full text) to bring us today’s World eBook Fair.
I also found that the World eBook Library site lists some other interesting tidbits that I wanted to share, including the following:
“Each year, the World eBook Library nearly doubles its entire digital holdings. Boasting over 500,000+ eBooks and eDocuments, making the World eBook Library Consortium the world’s largest eBook site. More than one 15 million Internet patrons have visited our library, making us one of the most visited libraries in the world. Since our initial launch time our webservers have had a 99.98% up time 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and in all of that time our programs and files have been free and open to the public.”
Time to get back to my family, but I must say that I was so happy to be able to search, browse, and now blog about this site today. I highly recommend starting your browsing or searching experience immediately as this is such a tremendous collection! I hope you like it as much as I do–enjoy and share it with others!
Technorati Tags: digital library, book search, ebooks, World eBook Fair
CNET News and the Importance of Librarians
Posted today on CNET’s news.com.com is a great article entitled Most reliable search tool could be your librarian written by Elinor Mills. The title is catchy (it certainly caught my eye) although not quite right in my estimation as I would like it to state boldly “is your librarian” instead of the wimpier “could be your librarian”, but the tag line is perfect:
Web search engines may hustle up quick results, but librarians dig up online information you can trust, say experts.
The article starts with the now infamous example of the white supremacist site about MLK Jr. which consistently ranks in the top 3 results of many search engines when looking for information on Martin Luther King Jr. To the untrained eye this site appears to be a good source of information. [note: I won’t link to the site as I do not want to improve their page rank] In any event, this is one of my favorite examples to use when teaching the importance of evaluating search results and I know many other librarians use this example as well. Hopefully the word will spread about this site, people will stop linking to it and the page rank can be altered. But I have digressed…
Despite my minor semantic quibble over the title, I am very happy to see a well-known techie site publish such an article promoting and validating librarians. What makes this article even better is that they found the perfect people to interview and quote — the biblioblogosphere and librarian search guru crew are well-represented. Here are a few highlights:
“There’s a problem with information illiteracy among people. People find information online and don’t question whether it’s valid or not,” said Chris Sherman, executive editor of industry blog site SearchEngineWatch.com. “I think that’s where librarians are extremely important. They are trained to evaluate the quality of the information.”
“For some people, if the answer isn’t in the first few results it might as well not be there,” said Gary Price, founder and editor of the ResourceShelf blog and director of online resources at Ask.com. “No matter how smart and helpful search engines get, they’re never going to replace librarians.”
“The idea of the 1950s librarian, that’s outdated,” said Sarah Houghton-Jan, information Web services manager at the San Mateo County Library in Northern California. “You find people who are expert at searching the Web and using online tools; high-level information experts instead of someone who just stamps books at the checkout desk.”
And librarian created resources get a good plug as do subscription databases thanks to Gary Price:
A lot of people don’t know that they can get access to much of the walled-off information in specialized databases for free if they have a public library card, said Price, of Ask.com and ResourceShelf.
Other helpful sites are the Librarians Internet Index, which offers quick lists of carefully vetted, reliable Web sites, the Internet Public Library and Infomine, a collection of scholarly resources on the Internet, according to Price.
Consider posting this article your library intranet, staff blog, or bulletin board to remind your staff that although our roles may be changing our skills and abilities are still valued and very much needed (and that sometimes the media get its right).
Library Garden 