Blogger Elizabeth Serrano

The 2018 ALSC National Institute…it’s coming!

ALSC institute graphic

Wow, 2018 is here already! I remember when I first started my position with ALSC last year there was so much talk happening around the 2018 ALSC National Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. I’m thrilled that the time is almost here! We’ve made some major exciting announcements over the past few months. Did you miss any of them? Here they are: Award winning author, Grace Lin, will be presenting our Opening General Session! Check out the press release. Our Breakfast for Bill speakers will include authors and illustrators, Margarita Engle, Raúl Colón, and Mike Curato! Check out the press release. Brian Selznick and David Serlin will be presenting our Closing General Session! Check out the press release. All Aboard! Embracing Advocacy and Inclusion! The programs lined up for the institute have also been fun to look through. As a new employee, I’ve been learning so much through our webinars, community forums,…

Blogger Kathia Ibacache

Children & Teens: Cross Collaboration

Have you thought about the benefits of cross collaboration among libraries? Do you belong to a collective of libraries that meet to share library trends and new ideas for children and teen services? Simi Valley Public Library is part of the Meet & Greet group, which is a collective of seven public libraries from different library systems that meet every three months. What do we do? Share library trends for children and teen services that have worked for us. Share innovative program ideas. Share ideas for tween spaces. Discuss books that have impacted us. Discuss ideas to advertise our collections. How do we do it? We meet in different locations every time, depending on the hosting library. The idea is to end with a library tour focusing on the Teen and Kid’s space and learn from the hosting library. Our meetings are in the morning. The hosting library usually offers…

Blogger Renee Grassi

ALSC Community Forum: Inclusive Spaces and Services for Children of All Abilities

          ALSC Community Forum January 10, 2018 @ 3PM (Central) Topic: Inclusive Spaces and Services for Children of All Abilities Jason Driver, Renee Grassi, Eva Thaler-Sroussi, and ALSC President Nina Lindsay will be hosting an ALSC Community Forum live chat on the topic of Inclusive Spaces and Services for Children of All Abilities.  This forum will include a live text discussion with the opportunity to ask questions to our presenters. In the past 5 years alone, the topic of inclusion, accessibility, and youth librarianship has moved forward in positive and innovative ways. This discussion will focus on tangible practices for inclusion of children of all abilities in library spaces and services.  What can we do to make our youth departments, our branches, or our libraries more welcoming to children and their families?  What have we learned from our successes and our failures in programs and services?…

Blogger Nina Lindsay

Sharing Standards

Group of people talking and sharing feedback

YALSA and AASL have each recently recently released new professional competencies and standards, and together with ALSC’s Competencies for Librarians Serving Children in Public Libraries, present a strong framework for how librarians are and should be serving youth today. YALSA’s Teen Services Competencies for Library Staff respond to new research, the realities of current staffing models, and the recent paradigm shift to a hands-on co-learning model of service between library staff and teens. Supplementary materials that support the competencies include twitter chats and free webinars beginning March 2018, and professional tools organized by competency area. AASL’s National School Library Standards provide a robust framework for learners, school librarians, and school libraries, working in an integrated fashion and resting upon a set of common beliefs. The Standards website provides multiple entry points, such as the Materials page with helpful one-pagers for stakeholders, advocates, and library and school staff. I find a…

Blogger Jonathan Dolce

2018 And Life to Go: Resolutions Anyone?!

Not Another New Year’s Resolution Article I promise.  No eye candy.  No videos strung by html with care.  But it is Elf themed, which you need to watch if you haven’t already. You’ve got just six weeks and four days before the new year makes you keep writing 2017 for a few weeks.  Resolution lists anyone?  Please tell me you aren’t recycling last years, or even lamely “upcycling” them, just to sound trendy or get your friends off your back.  Let’s get real, and let’s apply it to our professional world.  Here we go… Mentoring For the love of candy canes, you have a story to tell, and believe it or not, you could totally help out an up and coming mentee.  No, really.  And it’s easy to get matched. For example, Florida Library Association has a mentoring program every year, that officially only runs one year at a time,…

Guest Blogger

The Library Services for Children Journal Club

Serving children in libraries is a busy job. With programming, weeding, answering reference questions, putting up displays, managing budgets, coordinating schedules, and working on special projects it can often feel like there is just no time for professional development. Carving out the time and finding the resources can easily get pushed to the side in favor of more time sensitive demands. That’s exactly why we created a new professional development resource for anyone serving children in libraries. The Library Service for Children Journal Club is a discussion group that meets bi-monthly to talk about current trends and research that affect our practice. Every two months we select an article that falls into one of the following themes: child development, STEAM, community engagement, inclusivity, library as place, and policy and practice. In November we focused on executive function in early childhood, and we’ve got an evaluating apps article selected for our…

Blogger Jonathan Dolce

Hispanic Heritage Month Year-Round

Integrating Hispanic Heritage I’d been conducting storytime and other children’s programming for 18 years.  I felt like a veteran, or some kind of master.  In just one hour, my wife Marianne – who was born and raised in Puerto Rico – made me feel like I was only just beginning. For years I would start with a theme, pick out the books, make the puppet shows. And yet, how often did I reach for my Hispanic picture books?  Twice a year?  El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day, commonly known as Día) and Hispanic Heritage Month?  My wife showed me how to take a picture book or a story and build a theme from it – to reverse the storytime building process, and thereby integrate diverse materials into storytime – Every. Single Week. Hispanic/Latino Contributions So, I made a video.  It was all about the contributions…

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Blogger Nina Lindsay

Doing it All: “Small”

I’ve always lived and worked in urban spaces. While nearly 81% of the US population live in urban areas according to the 2010 census, my visit to the Association for Rural and Small Libraries conference in St. George UT in September made it clear how myopic it is exclude rural perspectives “by default” from professional conversations. I’ve since been thinking about how ALSC might better serve colleagues in rural communities, and all of us, by centering aspects of our work from a “small library” perspective, keeping in mind particular challenges that many of us work with:
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