BPL Teen Services News and Resources

In the days leading up to my vacation, I was busy working with our fearless leader, Kathy, to hire the first ever Teen Services employees for the BPL.  We had 2, 13 hour a week, paraprofessional positions open.  Basically, the plan was for them to cover the after school until closing hours M-Th (2 days each) and to work 5 hour, overlapping shifts on Saturdays.

I am happy to report that this week they began. Tara and Morgan will be the newest members of the BPL dream team.  Tara, is a young woman who has worked as a preschool teacher for many years, but is making the transition to libraries.  She is also a metal artist. Morgan, is a young man who recently finished his library degree but had been working as a track coach for a large Chicago high school.

While the rest of the BPL RA Dream Team will continue to assist with Teen Services and some of us, myself included, will keep all of the collection development responsibilities, I am so excited for the library and our teen patrons that we now have dedicated staff members to focus on them.

I am expecting great things for our Teens in 2014.  I will keep you posted and maybe even get Tara and Morgan to be involved here too.

But this post just isn't about what I'm doing, I also wanted to point you all to the newly released September 2013 issue of NoveList RA News.  The theme this month is on serving Teens entitled, "Transitions."

Specially, I really enjoyed the article on realistic fiction for teens by Jennifer Brannen. One thing I have found by working the teen desk regularly this summer is that we have many readers who are not interested in the dystopian craze and are actively seeking out stories of real teens with real problems.

It's funny.  As Duncan Smith notes in the intro to the newsletter, being a teen is a transitional time of life, and here we are at the BPL going through a teen transition of our own.  I think this shared feeling will give us and our patrons a unique bond.

Please remember that I keep a permanent link to past issues of RA News in the right gutter of the blog.