Not to be hyperbolic in any way, but this year’s National Institute might be the most important ALSC Conference in years. This is the first time that YALSA and ALSC members will be together since the reunification, and it is also the first conference post-reunification where panels and presentations will include both children’s services and teen services. This is a big deal!
Author: ALSC Membership Committee
Triaging Your Work Flow
For most people, having a massive to-do list can feel extremely overwhelming. As summer comes to a close and the hectic back to school season begins, our daily to-do lists must pivot while we switch gears. Changing routines, schedules, and tasks can impact our responsibilities, projects, and daily duties. Having a system to organize our busy to-do lists can help to improve work flow and efficiency, while also reducing stress and overwhelm.
Sensory Development in Babies (and Why It Matters to Libraries)
While I’m not an expert in this area (not a doctor!) I am very interested in how early childhood development knowledge can impact our work in libraries. This is only a tiny sliver of information about early childhood development focusing on how the five senses typically develop in babies. The five senses are touch, hearing, smell, taste, and sight. After explaining when they develop for most babies, some suggestions for incorporation into library programming will be listed.
Attending ALA Annual with Friends
In my 16 year career as a public children’s librarian, I have had the immense privilege to attend a handful of ALA and ALSC institute conferences. I consider myself an outgoing and confident person, but I still find traveling solo for a conference overwhelming. While these events are always informative, exciting, and rejuvenating, there always comes a time while socializing with my fellow librarians where a voice of doubt enters my mind. Do they really want to keep talking to me? Am I being annoying? A few years ago I stumbled upon a solution that allowed me to hang out with close friends and diminish my social anxiety during professional conferences.
Stress Relief in Time for Summer Reading
Whether you’re a school media specialist steeling yourself to fulfill continuing education coursework, or a public librarian hyping up for wall-to-wall reading programs, relaxation is likely NOT the first word that comes to mind when we youth services folks think about summer. It’s easy to feel overworked, overstimulated, and under-appreciated at any time in the library, but the heat tends to turn everything up to eleven. You can’t expect to be at your best for your patrons, students, colleagues, friends, family, and, most importantly, yourself if you don’t indulge in little breaks to depressurize throughout the day. Here are five one minute(ish) stress relievers that make an immediate difference without making you look too goofy in a shared office. Even better, they work for people of pretty much every age, shape, and capability! Starfish Breathing Choose a hand to be your “starfish.” Then use the pointer finger of the other…
Back to School Prep: School Help Spaces
Homework Help I know – summer hasn’t even begun yet! But if your library is anything like mine, while you are preparing for the incoming summer chaos, you are also looking ahead to events and services you’ll be offering this fall. Those marketing deadlines never stop coming. I work at a medium-sized, suburban public library in central Ohio. We’ve offered a Homework Help Center for over a decade, where students bring in homework assignments and library staff and volunteers help them work through the material. Meeting Student Needs In the last few years, we’ve been starting to see a change in student needs that has caused us to think about what services we offer and what we are truly experts in. Our local schools are assigning less and less homework. We are seeing families, especially families learning English, who are really looking for free tutoring. Our staff are great at…
The Storytime Speech: Setting Expectations for Adults
When it comes to storytime, who is your target audience? Oftentimes we focus so much on the children in front of us that we might forget to engage with the adults bringing them to our programs. Storytime is a performative experience for librarians in which we create a fun and exciting environment that encourages early literacy, but the greater overarching purpose is to teach caregivers by modeling behavior that they can practice at home with the children that they care for. Regardless of whether a caregiver is an immediate family member, a nanny, or some other relation, it’s important that they all leave storytime with thoughts reminiscent of, “Hey, I can do this with my child, too!” There are a few ALSC Blog posts that provide helpful tips for engaging adults in storytime, and there are some I’ve learned over the years as well. Here’s a list of some recommended…
My Journey Through ALSC: From Less-Than-Stellar to a Life-Changing Experience
I’ve been an ALSC member since I was a student in 2014 and when I first joined I wasn’t the most engaged member. Shortly after landing my first job as a Children’s Librarian, I got involved with the children’s book award committee in my state. I also wanted to get more involved on a national level–but how?