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• In my current job I’ve become somewhat fascinated with what could easily be considered the key tool in a librarian’s toolbelt: Reader’s Advisory.  Patron asks you to recommend a book based on a set of preferences and you knock it out of the park.  That’s our job and we do it well.  Booksellers do it too, don’t get me wrong, but we have the advantage of an extensive backlist of out-of-print titles at our fingertips.  It’s taken a little while, but recently I noticed that a LOT of folks are getting in on the Reader’s Advisory game.  Companies like Bookish, Zoobean, SelectReads, certainly, and now?  An actual publishing company itself.  The Penguin Hotline is pretty much what it sounds like: A publishing house doing RA.  Says their site, “Tell us as much as you’d like about the reader you’re buying for this holiday season and our expert staffers will find you just the right books. You’ll get personalized recommendations from real Penguins! Every request is handled individually by one of our in-house editors, marketers, designers, salespeople, publicists, and more.”  And they actually do.  What all this says to me is that libraries need to double down on their RA skills.  Take some tips from Multnomah County’s My Librarian site for starters.  That idea is crazy good.  We could all learn a thing or two from it.

• Monday, January 11th.  It’s almost a month away.  The happiest day of the year.  The day when they announce the Youth Media Awards, better known to the rest of the world as Newbery/Caldecott Day (and by “rest of the world” I mean “my brain”).  In preparation, I was pleased to see Monica Edinger’s thoughtful appraisal of the Newbery itself in the piece Thoughts on Newbery: The Nature of Distinguished.  In it, Monica talks quite a bit about Laura Amy Schlitz’s The Hired Girl, a book which (coincidentally) also showed up on Marjorie Ingall’s fantabulous Best Jewish Books 2015.  Seriously, if you need Hanukkah gifts for any kid of any age, your prayers have been answers.  For the rest of you, her voice is just so good.  Downright sublime, some might say.  Miss it and you’re missing out. (She also has stellar taste)

• I’m not the first, second, third, or forty-fifth children’s literature enthusiast to link to this, but nonetheless I think the Atlas Obscura article C.S. Lewis’ Greatest Fiction: Convincing American Kids That They Would Like Turkish Delight is dead on.  I grew up thinking it would be akin to sugar powdered squares of chocolatey confectionary delight.  Then I went to London for foreign study and I and each of my classmates individually had to make the discovery that the stuff ain’t worth betraying much of anyone, let alone your blood kin.  Edmund should have held out for fudge.  Thanks to mom for the link.

• Love and adore this.  From 100 Scope Notes: Everything You Need to Know About Reading Levels in One Image.  Nuff said.

• Bookish (mentioned earlier) had a rather delightful encapsulation of fantastic literary-themed Christmas tree ornaments, just in case you’re scrambling to get something for that reader in your life.  My personal favorite (aside from the library lion a.k.a. Patience which I MUST have):

• In other news, Yahoo News recently announced that a Tintin expert was just named as an official “professor of graphic fiction and comic art.”  Wouldn’t mind having one of these stateside as well.  Perhaps an expert in Pogo.  A gal can dream.

• The resident 4-year-old is on a picture book biography kick right now, so on Saturday we went to the library’s bio section to find some new fare.  We ended up in the Lincoln section and lo and behold her eyes alit on that old d’Aulaire’s Caldecott Award version of the life of Abraham Lincoln.  I steered her clear, knowing its contents very well indeed.  I never thought of it as the d’Aulaires’ best work, and we took home the Judith St. George/Matt Faulkner Stand Tall, Abe Lincoln instead.  The d’Aulaire version had already been on my mind because of a recent PW announcement that a small publisher is bring the book back to the world.  Mind you, “they made minor modifications to the original art and text to reflect contemporary views about race politics and to reflect historical accuracy.”  Guess I’ll have to reserve judgement until I see it for myself.

• Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Now with more indelible images that will haunt your nightmares until doomsday!  Don’t try to unsee it.  Don’t even bother.

• Daily Image: 

This week in our popular series Children’s Books from 1907, we take a look at a little number that just makes me inordinately happy.

I think you get the gist.  You may read the book in its entirety here.  Thanks to Mara Rockliff for the link.

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Sometimes, when we think of promoting or handselling books to kids in our reader's advisory work, we concentrate overwhelmingly on our fiction collections. But it's worth giving some attention to non-fiction as well as we help kids. It not only increases circulation in that collection area but also is eye-opening and interest-opening for kids.

There has been so much attractive non-fiction published over the past ten-twenty years, it's easy to put kids and information books together. Just looking at the bright, attractive wealth of independent non-fiction titles, there's alot to promote.

[[True confession: I am seriously addicted to non-fiction. It has long been my favorite collection development area as well as the type of reading I am most passionate about.]]

We have had success highlighting non-fiction over the years that has tempted kids into trying -and liking - these dewey-ed books. Here are just a few ways:

NF Book Bundles - 3 or 4 non-fiction books on a subject that includes a bright label (Big Teeth; Strong People: Heroes; Science; Let's Build) let's us mix and match attractive NF from different subject categories together. These mini-bundles are fun to create and popular with kids.

Booktalks - when we booktalk to groups or at schools we always mix nonfiction and fiction titles together, often looking for a common subject theme. It's a great spot to include poetry and biographies as well!

Face-out Displays - Lots of it! As staffers work their way through non-fiction, I always encourage them to bypass the formulaic, series non-fiction and instead look for interesting subjects; eye-candy covers and titles that might pique the interest of kids. The more we replace a book in empty spaces, the better it is - it means kids are grabbing the good stuff!

Class or Day Care Collection Packs - putting non-fiction with fiction selections in packs that go out to daycares or classrooms is a great way to promote information books. I always look for short books with easily digested info-bits to tempt readers to pick up a non-fiction.

Stealth/Passive Initiatives - we make sure non-fiction gets a space in these. Whether it's pick-a-stick, gnomes on both fiction AND non-fiction collections, or NF included in Mystery Read bags, we make sure we don't stay fiction-centric in our support of great books.

Reader's Advisory - when kids are looking for books, we also check with them on subjects they are interested in and head over to non-fiction as well as fiction. Kids who love fantasy books often gravitate to medieval history books; steampunkers see how inventions are linked to their genre love; etc. And when fiction and graphic novels can't satisfy a reluctant reader, delving into a non-fiction subject area of interest often does the trick to spark some reading enthusiasm.

What has worked for you to highlight your non-fiction? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

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From Liz Burns re the #ReadAdv Twitter chat for librarians and interested parties:

Our next chat takes place on Thursday, December 5 at 8 P.M. EST.

Sophie and Kelly and I were tossing around possible topics for our next chat, and homeschooling came up. Seems like librarians are always asking about and wondering about working with homeschoolers. What can they do? What should they do? What works?

So I said, oh, we should have guests. And I had a short dream list of possibilities: the two people who, in talking about homeschooling, makes me want to have kids just so I can homeschool them.

They are, of course, Melissa Wiley and Quinn Cummings. And both these terrific women said YES. So Melissa Wiley (@melissawiley on Twitter) and Quinn Cummings (@quinncy) will be joining us on December 5.

Got anything you’d like me to share with librarians who are wondering how best to serve  homeschoolers? Wish lists, etc? Send me your questions and I’ll share them this evening, 8pm EST, 5pm here on the West Coast. Follow #ReadAdv to see the discussion unfold.

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I contribute to a statewide youth services blog and in the process of sharing a link recently and tagging the blog post, I used the label "reference". To my surprise, even after 578 posts on that blog, this was the first time that term had been used. I checked my own blog of 418 posts. Same thing.

It really stopped me short. And it made me think about whether and why- with all our discussion, posts, sharing and chat on programming and children's literature in the youth librarianship blogosphere - as practitioners we don't give props to youth reference, a less glamorous but very vital part of our work.

We are not alone in this.

When I first came to my present job, I know staff around the library didn't really respect the skills our youth services team had in the youth reference area.  I consciously began to look at what we did at our stand-alone youth services desk and compare it to our stand-alone adult information services (we have a separate circulation department).  What I discovered was...disconcerting.

Our Youth Services desk staff were expected to do many circulation functions (renew books; pursue missing pieces; decide on lost book and large fine forgiveness issues; hire and oversee shelvers of our collections). Adult Information services were not expected to do any of this.  Their desk time involved reference, reader's advisory, research - so did ours. But on top of that were layered functions that took time away from our programming, collection development, planning and RA and ref.

I began to ask at management meetings why there was this tremendous discrepancy in job duties between the adult and youth reference desks. It surprised my management colleagues. Those were questions that hadn't been asked before. The more I probed and brought up the subject, the clearer it became to my colleagues that there was a fundamental inequity in the perception of youth service librarians' skills and work expectations for the service desks. "Do you do this at the adult reference desk?" became a question that was answered by realigning job duties to create parity between the two reference desks and returning circ functions to the circ department.

During this process, I also had to ask myself if a lack of respect among our own YS team for our professional skills and perhaps our acceptance of the "you work with kids, you are therefore a child and less powerful" paradigm, fed into expectations of our reference work being perceived as less valued. Certainly the team loved and adored programming and collection development work. But did we love the dig-into-the guts reference work we did with kids, teens and caregivers as much?

The YS team has worked on this over the years and I have seen a definite but subtle shift away from seeing themselves as a adjunct Circ point and more as the MLIS librarians and reference/reader's advisory superheroes that they are. But again it strikes me that we are not alone in struggling with this part of our professional lives in youth services.

What value do we - and our colleagues serving adults in the rest of the library - place on our reference and research skills in youth services? What do you think?

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Spring is a great time to highlight the Best of the Best, and ALA Midwinter brought forth the lists of award-winning titles and authors for 2012. If you haven’t already seen the winners for this year, visit the YALSA Booklists or check your copy of Young Adult Library Services for a complete listing. Of course, knowing which titles win doesn’t always mean you know what to do with the information. The following are some ways you can do more with these highlighted titles:

• Watch for yourself! Visit the streaming video feeds for the Youth Media Award Announcements or check out the Best Fiction for Young Adults Feedback Session that was covered live during ALA’s 2012 Midwinter conference. It’s like reliving the YA Oscars for yourself.
• Visit YALSA’s blog The Hub to learn of current YA literature trends and what libraries are doing to highlight authors and titles.
• Make special reusable bookmarks for award winning titles, like the ones I show here on the YALSA blog. It’s a fun and easy way to highlight titles that win various awards throughout the year. The template and instructions can also be easily changed and altered to incorporate other images.
• Consider having a virtual author visit through Skype. Authors love to connect with their readers, and technology has made this even easier.  Sarah Thompson shares her Skype success on the YALSA blog. One useful list of authors is found at this Skype an Author website.

And don’t forget that it’s members like YOU that help determine what is chosen and how people know about it. It’s a great way to get involved, so

• Get your teens involved in choosing the YALSA “Teens’ Choice” award with the Teens’ Top Ten where teens from across the country nominate and then decide which books are tops for young adult readers for the year!
• Apply to be on a YALSA Task Force like the Awards and Booklist Marketing Task Force whose mission is to help YALSA raise awareness of its lists and awards, and to coordinate the implementation of a sustained, year-round effort by proting the lists to the library communtiy, create and disseminate resources for librarians and educators, and encourage teen interes in the lists through contests, promotions and collaborations.  For more information on this and other Task Forces visit http://www.ala.org/yalsa/workingwithyalsa/tf
• Consider joining an Awards Selection Committee! As the YALSA website states, “Selection committee appointments are made in October each year by the YALSA president-elect … Selection committees are the most work-intensive type of committee in YALSA.  Before you agree to volunteer, please be sure you know what will be required of you if you are appointed.  Visit http://tinyurl.com/YALSAgetinvolved for more information.”

For more details on award winners and how to use YALSA resources to support your library’s work with these titles, visit current and past Spring issues of YALS. We love to talk about books in the spring!

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There’s a profusion of pollen and awards in the air. It must be springtime. ‘Tis the season that YALSA rolls out the award announcements for the Printz, the Morris, the Edwards, the Odyssey, and more; the Spring issue of YALS is devoted to awards, the winners, and the speeches. But even so, in the flurry of awards that get announced in the late winter and early spring, it can still be easy to overlook a few.  But don’t forget Alex!

The Alex Awards are named in honor of Margaret A. Edwards (who was known as Alex to her friends, hence the name). She’s probably best known for her book The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts: The Library and the Young Adult, a classic in the field of young adult/teen library services. (The chances are good that if you take a YA literature or youth services course while getting your library degree that you will hear mention of it—and rightly so.)

Each year, the Alex Awards committee chooses ten books written for adults that are judged to have particular appeal to young adults between the ages of 12 and 18. These books are fiction and non-fiction, well-known and not. They encompass pretty much every genre and also include literary fiction, and the tone can range from dark to side-clutchingly funny. The non-fiction titles have tended to skew towards adventure, history, and modern society.

Some books may be familiar to you, such as this year’s winner The Night Circus, and some may not be, such as another 2012 winner, Salvage the Bones. Here’s a link to the complete list of this year’s Alex Awards. And while you’re there, take some time to go back through the older Alex lists. You’ll find a mixture of now-classic crossovers such as Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, Dianne Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, and Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. (A small piece of trivia: Neil Gaiman is the only author—-so far-—to make the list twice: in 2000 for Stardust and in 2006 for Anansi Boys.)

So how can you use the Alex Awards?

1. For some of your more advanced, curious, or sophisticated teen readers, who may be more challenging to do readers’ advisory for, these awards are a boon. The Alex titles are a rich source of interesting and more complex reading material, which is also still emotionally appealing and accessible to teen readers.

2. Don’t forget to add them to your teen booklists (print or digital). I usually include a section of related or crossover adult titles at the end of my teen booklists and the Alex lists are an excellent place to start.

3. Familiarize yourself with them in the name of readers’ advisory and collection development. I always make a point of taking a look at all of the Alex Award winners and also checking to see if my system owns copies (and if so, how many). The winning writers may have other titles that would make good recommendations or read-alikes that would have teen appeal as well. Crossing teen and adult readers over into each other’s sections is always fun regardless of the direction. (And don’t forget that these still make excellent suggestions for adult readers, too.)

4. Add some more books to your own towering stack of books to be read. I try to read several of the Alex winners every year and have been introduced to titles and authors I might not have come across otherwise. And I’ve read many books that I’ve loved and still recommend to friends, family, and patrons whenever the opportunity presents itself. (Soulless, Persepolis, The Eyre Affair, Gil’s All-Fright Diner, The Spellman Files, and The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, to name a just a few.)

Several of this year’s winners are on my personal summer reading list. So if you’re not sure where to begin in adult fiction these days or you’ve simply enjoyed as man

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Though teen services are usually defined as serving patrons in the 12-18 age range, in practice, teen librarians serve a broader range of patrons than merely 12-18 year olds—from 10 year olds with mature tastes and reading abilities, to college students uninterested in transitioning to adult fiction, to grandparents pulled to teen books by the young adults in their lives and the quality of the materials.

In serving this broad age range with teen materials, I find that I need to have different cultural glasses at the ready during readers’ advisory.  After all, the patron whose adolescent experience is being molded right now, page by page, is different from the patron who fondly recollects reading a particular book the summer when she first fell in love.

Here is some information we teen librarians can use during readers’ advisory to guide adults to new teen titles similar to those they loved in their adolescence.

Graduated 2000—Born 1982—Today 30 years old
Cultural milestones^*:

• A “45″ is a gun, not a record with a large hole in the center.
• The year they were born, AIDS was found to have killed 164 people; finding a cure for the new disease was designated a “top priority” for government-sponsored research.
• They have never referred to Russia and China as “the Reds.”
• There has always been a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.
• They feel more danger from having sex and being in school, than from possible nuclear war.

Technological milestones:

• They have always bought telephones, rather than rent them from AT&T.
• There have always been ATM machines.
• The year they were born, the New York Times announced that the “boom in video games,” a fad, had come to an end.
• They have never used a bottle of “White Out.”
• “Spam” and “cookies” are not necessarily foods.

Popular YA books in 2000^†:  Little separates the books on the children’s bestseller list from the books on the youth bestseller lists.  All of the books on both of the lists fall into either the sci-fi or fantasy genres, and the Harry Potter phenomenon is at full steam.  When romance is a part of these titles, it is not a primary selling point.

Suggestions for YA books today: For fantastic world-creation and mild or secondary romantic content, I would recommend Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series, Michael Grant’s Gone series, the books of Scott Westerfeld, and “The Scorpio Races” by Maggie Stiefvater.

Graduated 2005—Born 1987—Today 25 years old
Cultural milestones:

• Heart-lung transplants have always been possible.
• Pixar has always existed.
• Aretha Franklin has always been in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
• “Baby M” may be a classmate, and contracts with surrogate mothers have always been legal.
• Snowboarding has always been a popular winter pastime.

Technological Milestones:

• They learned to count with Lotus 1-2-3.
• Car stereos have always rivaled home component systems.
• Voice mail has always been available.
• They may have fallen asleep playing with their Gameboys in the crib.
• They have always been challenged to distinguish between news and entertainment on cable TV.

Popular YA books

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For this post I thought I would share my personal top 10 favorite YA websites.  Of course, the YALSA Blog would be on this list, as I check it at least once a week.  It is a great resource for YA librarians and for people who work with youth in general.  But, since you’re on the blog, reading this post, I’m going to assume you’re already aware of the awesomeness of the blog:)  The sites are listed in no particular order, with the exception of number 1, which deserves to be there. Please feel free to share your favorite sites in the comments section!

Number 1 http://socialtimes.com/ Social Times

I discovered this website over the summer and it has become my all time favorite website.  It has all kinds of different information that is pertinent to our field.  It gives quality info about all things digital. It has information about new technology that is coming out, new websites, old websites, any current news going on in the world of technolgy. This website helps me to stay on top of many different areas of my  job and gives me the knowledge to competently speak on current issues in our field.

In edition to all of this useful information, it also has a very cool web video section.  Every week the editor puts together viral youtube clips on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Whenever I am stuck trying to find something to post on my library system’s teen Facebook page, I just go to this section and find a funny video to post – total lifesaver!

Number 2- www.teenreads.com Teen Reads

This is a great source for checking out new (and old) YA titles.  This site offers reviews of newly released or soon to be released YA books.  It has booklists and resources for starting a teen book club. It has author interviews- some are podcasts, some are written.  I’ve also seen video book reviews on this site.  You can sign up for their monthly newsletter so you don’t have to remember to check it all the time. There’s also fun stuff- like polls and all kinds of different giveaways ( I enter every month and haven’t won anything yet.  I still keep trying- it’s gotta be my turn sooner or later, right?).

Number 3- www.etsy.com Etsy

I’m going to assume most childrens and YA people know about Etsy.  It’s a website where people sell handmade crafts and crafting supplies.  Don’t judge it yet- there are REALLY nice things on Etsy. If you’ve heard of it and have been meaning to check it out, today is the day.  When I’m totally stuck on what to do for a teen program, I check out Etsy. There are all kinds of different craft categories and I just start browsing through for inspiration. Some of the things they sell are really cheap. ( I also just found out about www.regretsy.com  – crazy stuff found on etsy and similar sites- funny stuff:)

Number 4- http://www.the4yablog.com/ 4YA

I decided to just go ahead and keep with the craft theme and mention the 4YA blog here. One of my co-workers had this site up one day when I came to take my turn at the desk. HELLO- it’s awesome!  It has all kinds of great ideas for YA librarians to use from program ideas and crafts,plus useful information about things like new gaming systems and video game reviews.  It has a focus on outreach oppurtunities.

Number 5- http://www.webjunction.org/1 Webjunction

Do you need to brush up on your reader’s advisory?  Want some tips on how to deal with unhappy patrons?  Tyring to figure out what ereader is the best for your library system?  Have no fear, webjunction is here.  The website has fantastic FREE webinars for library workers.  I have listened to three or four dif

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For episode #98 we are joined by critics Francisca Goldsmith, Candice Mack and Eva Volin to discuss the fine art of book reviewing and how it relates to the world of libraries.

Book Reviewing

If  you prefer, you may go to the YALSA Podcast Site, download the Mp3 file and listen to it on the Mp3 player of your choice. To avoid missing future episodes, add the feed to Itunes or any other rss feed tracker.

After listening to the episode, come back to the post and let us know what you think about the book review sources out there, how you use them and even things about them that frustrate you.