Pursuing excellence for library service to children and teens
A teen volunteer arrives for a scheduled shift, but the planned assignment cannot begin. Supplies may still be in another office, the work may already be finished, or the intended supervisor may be helping a patron or leading a program. Staff want to use the teen’s time well without inventing work under pressure.
A child can be celebrated at home and still lose confidence in a school hallway. Billy Porter’s ALA Annual Main Stage appearance featured Songbird in the Light, written by Porter with Chris Clarkson and illustrated by Charly Palmer. The picture book follows a child whose voice is loved at home, mocked at school, and strengthened through the encouragement of a choir teacher. The conference program described the book as a story about learning to love yourself.
In public libraries, technology support sometimes moves through a relay. Parents sometimes ask on behalf of children. Adult children may ask for parents. Caregivers may carry steps home for later, while staff members may prepare colleagues for the next patron. When the question involves accessibility, access depends on a setting someone can use and an explanation someone can repeat.
Dr. Jill Biden’s ALA Annual conversation offered a youth-services reminder. A young person may need the library before feeling ready to enter.
The 2026 Michael L. Printz Awards Celebration honored books, authors, committee work, publishers, families, and literary communities. As a teen services librarian, I listened for the readers behind the speeches.
Digital confidence grows through repeated practice. During the “PLA Update: DigitalLearn Reborn!” session, Michelle Frisque, ALA Broadband Consultant, introduced the relaunched DigitalLearn.org. DigitalLearn is PLA’s free digital literacy resource for learners and trainers in English and Spanish.
Young people often come to libraries with partial answers already in hand. Search results, social feeds, and conversational AI systems may have shaped the answers they bring. Private discovery asks how much a young person must reveal before reaching help. Amanda Gray Perry of the University of Notre Dame moderated Core’s Top Tech Trends panel. Speakers working in public libraries, academic libraries, and library technology examined AI, metadata infrastructure, discovery tools, and media access. In my presentation, “Private Discovery by Design: AI Infrastructure in Teen Services,” I posed the question directly: When does a teen’s inquiry become data? Values Before Tools Nicole Steeves, Director of Library Technology at Chicago Public Library, set out a values-based approach to AI. She argued for AI investment when a proposed use improves patron service, protects privacy, preserves staff expertise, and includes human review. She drew clear limits around reference search, readers’ advisory, and traditional…
A child’s question about history can sound simple. What happened? The harder question follows immediately. How do we know? At the ALA Annual 2026 Opening Session, Rachel Maddow returned to the second question. In a conversation that moved between information access and historical research, she connected democratic participation with reliable information about the present. She described her own work as dependent on librarians and archivists who preserve records and keep them available for later discovery.