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Last week, we talked about evaluating your library’s policies and determining whether they were appropriate and reasonable for teens. If you concluded that some changes are needed, it’s time to think about how to make those changes.

•  You will want to proceed carefully and thoughtfully. Policies are not written in a vacuum, and there will have been reasons behind every policy or procedure. If possible, find out what those reasons are. Find out the background of the policies—is this a new policy, or a time-honored one?
• Learn your library’s process for changing policies and procedures. Who can propose a change and who can approve a change? If your change involves the strategic plan or the library’s core values, it may require approval by the Board of Trustees or City Council. If it is a simple procedure change, it may be able to be approved by the library’s administration.
• Whoever the decision-makers are, give them sufficient and appropriate background information. Some examples:
• Why the change should be made: how will this change affect the library’s service to teens and the relationship to the community?
• What impact the change will have on staffing: for example, show that after-school supervision will require fewer staff members if they don’t have to spend time policing the “no-furniture-moving” rule.
• What impact the change will have on procedures: for example, school id cards will be added to the list of acceptable identification for getting a library card
• What impact the change will have on the budget: for example, will there be costs associated with changing signs or informational handouts?
• When the change will take effect: will it require a roll-out or pilot period, or can a date be set to make the change? Would it make sense to change the policy at the beginning of a fiscal year, calendar year, or school year?
• Get teen input on the proposed changes, and present that with your proposal. If you can show you have teen buy-in, it may go a long way toward making your point, especially if what you are advocating appears to be more lenient than what currently exists.
• Get your supervisor’s buy-in before you take it any higher. Your supervisor can help advocate at the higher levels, but her or she needs to understand fully the proposal.

Has anyone had success with changing policies that didn’t include teens or didn’t treat them equitably?

This is a collaborative blog post written by a protege and mentor in YALSA’s mentoring program. Jennifer is the protege and Linda is the mentor. We’ve been working together over the past several months talking about how to effectively gain support for teen services and how to work with administration to let them know all about the great activities and work being done by teen librarians. As our conversations developed we realized that what we were talking about made for a great blog post, or series of blog posts. Our first post is on how to gain support from administration for teen projects.

Jennifer Gets Things Started
When I get a chance to request support (professional development funding, support in expanding programming across the system, etc.), I know I need to make my case clearly and concisely. Often, I find the best way of doing that is connecting my goals with the ‘big picture’ goals on which administration focuses their work.

Highlighting community collaborations is one tactic that works for me. Sure, admin might be impressed that your Teen Art Club is well-attended. But they’ll be even more impressed if your Teen Art Club is connecting with the teens at the neighborhood recreation center, gaining support from a local gallery or museum, and being promoted by educators. Demonstrating that YA services help connect the library with other community organizations gets straight to the big picture that admin works toward on a daily basis.

Another reason for administration to get excited about teen services: library advocacy.

If you’re collaborating with other community agencies and organizations, making connections and networking with educators, you’re also establishing the library as a cornerstone of the community and demonstrating its relevance and value. Getting the public excited about your organization’s teen services is a fantastic way to advocate for your library, and for libraries in general. If you can prove to your administrative team that selling quality teen services to the community highlights the library as a neighborhood destination, and drives the organization toward its larger vision (as a cultural center, a learning hotspot, whatever the goal may be), everyone wins—teen services, admin, and the public.

Finally, it all comes down to serving teens and instilling a love of information and learning into their lives, which is something everyone in the library should care about. Working with administration to sell great teen services isn’t difficult as long as everyone’s goals are being met and you know how to speak to your administrative team’s needs. The bottom line is that bringing teens into the library, and engaging them with great services, makes the library a better organization—and administration will happily support that.

Linda Adds
I love Jennifer’s approach for gaining administrative support for library teen services. I think this goes a long way to gaining the support needed. One thing that I see teen librarians struggle with is working with administration when there is a problem that needs to be solved. For example, maybe a teen services staff member notices that other staff members are not providing high quality service to teens. I’ve seen that in some instances teen services staff approach administrators with that problem, bad customer service to teens by some staff members, but nothing more. A teen libraria

The election seems like old news at this point and yet we are still over a month away from inauguration day.  Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, looks at this lag in historical perspective. Ritchie, who has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades, explains why a President-elect may need this time prepare to take over.

Many Americans, and the rest of the world, wonder why so much time elapses between the U.S. presidential election in November and the inauguration on January 20. Why not reform the system and reduce the interval? The answer is we did reform it–the interregnum used to last twice as long.

Under the original Constitutional scheme, the new president took office on March 4, four months after the November elections. The new Congress would not convene until the first Monday in December, thirteen months after the election. This made sense to the framers in the eighteenth century, when transportation was slow and treacherous. The incoming president would call the Senate into special session for a week in March to confirm his cabinet, and then have the rest of the year to get his administration underway free from congressional interference.

By the twentieth century, the old system had grown obsolete. The second session of every Congress did not meet until after the next election had taken place, meaning that senators and representatives who had been defeated or retired came back as lame ducks. They proved especially susceptible to lobbyists, and since the short session had to end at midnight on March 3, they could easily filibuster to block needed legislation. George Norris, a progressive Republican from Nebraska who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, led the effort to amend the Constitution and move the presidential inauguration from March 4 to January 20, and the opening of Congress from December up to January 3. By staggering the closing dates of the terms of the president and Congress, the amendment also eliminated the need for outgoing presidents to spend their last night on Capitol Hill signing and vetoing last-minute legislation.

Beyond getting rid of most lame duck sessions, Norris’ amendment halved the transition between presidential administrations, from four months down to two. Transitions had grown increasingly awkward. During peaceful and prosperous times, the incoming president had to keep out of the way of his predecessor. Herbert Hoover, for instance, sailed off to South America after the 1928 election to avoid upstaging Calvin Coolidge’s final months in office. During periods of conflict and crisis, however, the interregnum cost the nation needed leadership. Outgoing presidents tried to coerce their successors into continuing their policies, as James Buchanan attempted with Abraham Lincoln in 1861, and Herbert Hoover did with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Lincoln and Roosevelt wisely avoided committing themselves to failed ideas, but these impasses did nothing to resolve the crises they faced, which grew worse by the time they took office.

The transition between Hoover and Roosevelt took place against a dramatic collapse of the American financial system, with the nation’s banking system shutting down, credit drying up, and unemployment soaring. Congress had passed the Twentieth Amendment in March 1932 and sent it to the states, but the necessary three quarters of the states did not ratify it until January 23, 1933, three days after the new date for inaugurations, making it too late for that year. The first inauguration on January 20 took place in 1937.

That last long interregnum convinced everyone that a shorter transition was preferable, but is the current system still too long? In a parliamentary system such as Great Britain’s, the new prime minister can move into 10 Downing Street the day after the election and the new cabinet can show up ready for work. The American system of separation of powers, however, makes no provision for a shadow cabinet in waiting. The president-elect needs time to select cabinet members and a host of other executive branch nominees who will be confirmed by the Senate. It may not do the new president any favor to shorten the interregnum further, although when times are tough the inauguration still looks awfully far away.