I have (much more successfully) done this at every other juncture in my life, including the (final) family move to Maryland, three colleges, and a dozen jobs. I took what I liked about myself and refined the details. As for the not-so-likable elements, I trashed them. I knew there was a better me just waiting to be born. With our new library opening in less than two months and my transfer to the new building coming next week, once again I’m in a time of transition and I’m redefining who I am as a teen librarian, a peer, a supervisor, an advocate, and a friend.

Many of the responsibilities I have at my current library are following me to the Gum Spring Library. My biggest responsibility is that of page supervisor. I took over that role in December 2011, when the person who’d been supervising the four pages had to take an emergency leave. My own supervisor helped me ajust to my new role, though many of the job’s nuances I learned as time progressed. To help out my successor, I’ve created a document that describes the duties (official and unofficial) of a page supervisor. I also used this opportunity to reflect upon what I’ve learned. In effect, I gave myself a performance assessment. I’ve already begun working on a new document on the training and supervision of the pages who will arrive in February.

Much of what I’ve learned while supervising pages transfers neatly into my role as a teen volunteer coordinator. My goal is to teach our young volunteers about the library, encourage them to work and play there, and give them a solid opportunity that builds both their character and their resume. I know I let some of our teen volunteers fall through the cracks in my old branch’s very busy volunteer program. Instead of giving each of them the personalized attention they deserved, I let a few simply sign in, do their tasks, and then leave. Even if that was the kind of experience they’d expected, it wasn’t what they deserved. Teen volunteers should be nurtured to view the library as a “third place”: a place to keep organized, fun, and safe, and mostly importantly, to be proud of. As I train my replacement and the new Gum Spring teen volunteers, I’ll be sure to keep the number of volunteers at a manageable level. That way, my peers and I in the Teen Center can create meaningful relationships with them, and instill a sense of responsibility and of place in them.

As I sit at my desk, contemplating which documents, folders, and ARCs to get rid of and which to take to my new library, I’m doing the same thing with my role as a teen librarian. We are rarely given an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, but when we are, we owe it to ourselves and to those we work with to take a moment to reflect on ways that we can improve.

Gum Spring opening day collection

Fresh Paint charts the development of teen services at a new public library in an underserved community. Gum Spring Library will be Loudoun County’s (VA) eighth branch and will serve more than 100,000 residents. It’s one of the county’s largest public-private partnerships.

The new Gum Spring Library in Loudon County, VA, will need volunteers to shelve materials, organize the book sale area, discard old materials, prepare crafts for the children’s department, help with the Summer Reading Program, and more. In addition to these daily volunteers, we will need Opening Day volunteers, with special training, to help direct patrons around the building and wear the mascot costumes, among a myriad of other tasks. It might seem tricky to collect names and contact prospective volunteers by February 23, 2013 when we don’t have an operational building yet, but, as it turns out, the volunteers have taken care of that problem, too.

Through our library Facebook page, Friends group (FROGS), library website, and school and outreach visits, we have a list of over 65 teens interested in volunteering at the Gum Spring Library. I have received emails and calls from teens interested in helping the library. I was even approached by a Girl Scout wanting the library to be the beneficiary of her Gold Award Project. A high school librarian I met at a meeting between local educators and public library staff recently contacted me regarding the Interact Club’s interest in helping with Opening Day activities, as did a middle school parent liaison who leads a group of student leaders. This outpouring of interest is more than helpful; it is imperative to our success as a functioning library. We are fortunate to have these individuals and groups as future volunteers. Now that we have an ever-growing list of volunteers, how and where do we train them so that they are ready on opening day?

Training volunteers can take as little as 30 minutes and should include a tour of the building, a review of the sign-in/out procedure, and a walk-through of tasks they may be asked to complete. In a perfect world, we would host volunteer orientations at the new branch in the weeks leading up to the opening. With the branch still incomplete, this isn’t possible. Instead, we could lean on our partnership with the local middle and high schools to host shelver orientations in their libraries. I could show my Introduction to Shelving PowerPoint, distribute handouts, and assign the teens “homework” of completing an online shelving test, or given enough time, give each teen a cart and test them on how accurately they ordered those materials.

The downside is that volunteers would not be learning to shelve in the building where they would be volunteering. Gum Spring Library’s 40,000 square-foot, two-story layout will take time to get used to. It has separate areas, spine labels, and rules for shelving in adults, teens, children, and media.Training in 400 square feet of school library space will not give any idea of the scope of the task. Furthermore, the school library might not use the Dewey Decimal System (DDS), leaving the teens without experience sorting by number, author’s last name, and title. Approximately 25 percent of the teens I train as shelvers do not ever return to volunteer, or, upon completing the online quiz or the slip test tell me they did not like the attention to detail and/or the monotony of sorting and shelving. If the volunteers were trained without hands-on practice of DDS, would they be turned-off or overwhelmed when they finally did experience it?

All this leaves me still solving the problem of how to orient this valuable volunteer force by Opening Day. I hope we can train them inside the new branch, but we may have to call on school libraries and/or other public library branches to lend us some space. If so, we’ll make the best of it, but the teens will need even more flexibility than we usually expect of them.

Fresh Paint traces the development of teen services for a new public library in an underserved community.

It was important for me to establish a calendar that set a standard, but left plenty of room to grow. I was inclined to host dozens of programs during the first few months in order to show the community everything we were capable of doing, but heeded the advice from the director who advised me to leave enough room in the schedule to add, but never to take away, programs. Adding programs as we get to know the community’s interests is a step forward; cancelling a program because of overbooking or realizing there’s no interest in it is a step backwards. While we may not have as many programs planned as other libraries, we have plenty of wiggle room in the schedule as well as preapproval for last-minute additions, if need be.

Although I was trying to keep the overall number of programs relatively low, there were just too many programming opportunities in March that I couldn’t pass up. So that month, we’ll be celebrating Teen Tech Week with a weeklong QR code scavenger hunt, and we’ll be hosting a mathematician who will talk about the role of women in mathematics to celebrate Women’s History Month. These nationally-celebrated themes allow librarians to be creative with programming and show patrons that libraries are for more than just books, which our patrons—many of whom are first-time library users—might not know.

With two full-time teen services librarians and two full-time assistants, we have plenty of time and talent to host “stock” programs, including a book club and teen advisory board. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel with these tried-and-true programs, just some tweaking to make them applicable to our patrons. Other branches host monthly anime and graphic novel clubs, Picturing America art clubs, and writing clubs. We’ve left our schedule open so we can offer these types of programs if our teens express interest in them (we hope they will!).

Taking into account holidays and special celebrations, but not wanting to stretch the staff thin, I scheduled a Saturday afternoon to make Mother’s Day cards and a Monopoly tournament during spring break. Setting up a craft or game and occasionally checking in to see how they’re going is all that’s required, though a librarian should be present during these activities. We can help make cards or even be the Monopoly banker! These opportunities are perfect for building relationships with teens, and we should take advantage every chance we get.

The library hosts annual county-wide programs for teens, including a summer reading program, an AnimeCon, and a film competition. When the Gum Springs library opens in February 2013 we’ll be in the middle of accepting entries for our third annual “It’s All Write” short story contest. The deadline to enter is early March, so beginning in January, we’ll have to publicize it as much as possible during outreach events at our local schools, as well as on our social media pages.

Planning programs is difficult enough, but now we need to tell people about them before we open, in just three months. Our talking points just went from informing teens of our existence to informing them of the specific programs and events we have planned. We’re now passing out program flyers printed with program names, dates, and times. We’ll use what we have scheduled as a jumping-off point, and make additions and adjustments as we get to know our patrons interests, likes, dislikes, and desires.

Right now, if you live in Gum Spring, the nearest public library is nine miles away. To reach it, you have to drive on construction-laced, heavily trafficked roads into a neighboring county, and that’s why many adults don’t use the public library and aren’t familiar with its resources. At one of the back-to-school nights, parents of middle school and high school students were shocked to learn that we’ll be offering free ebooks, as well as computers, printers, scanners, and a 3,000-square-foot teen center that will be right in their own backyard (or, no more than a five-minute drive). When she heard the news, one parent sighed and said, “Why didn’t I know about this before now? I would have saved so much money!”

Unlike some of their parents, most teens are thrilled that they’ll finally have “something to do” when we open. Currently, there are no teen-friendly hangouts nearby, and our teen center will be a welcome addition for them. Unfortunately, some community members have already expressed concern about teens loitering around the new building. “Will the teens be loud and disruptive?” they’ve asked. “Will they compromise the safety of the library?” To which I’ve proudly responded, “No.” Not only does the library have rules regarding appropriate behavior, but teens, though sometimes loud, aren’t a pack of hooligans looking to cause trouble. In fact, teenagers are the perfect library users, checking out materials they need for assignments, browsing the collection for fun stuff (including DVDs, games, and good books), forming groups and working collaboratively, using technology, and keeping librarians aware of emerging tech trends. Sure, some kids may loiter, but that’s what we want them to do! We want them to take advantage of our free resources, talk to us, and form their own community. We want them to learn, teach, and grow, both with us and because of us.

Some adults fear teens because they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be one. Teens are works in progress, trying to figure out who they are and where they belong. Libraries encourage individual growth by recommending books, hosting age-appropriate programs, and providing resources and opportunities for kids to develop. The library can also bridge the gap between the generations by creating opportunities for adults and teens to interact on a level other than parent to child, or teacher to student. Teens, being naturally adept at all things technology, can assist reference librarians in running computer and technology programs for adults. Mom-and-daughter book clubs, intergenerational gaming nights, and even volunteering side-by-side in the library are just a few ways that adults and teens can foster mature relationships inside the library. To use this decade’s buzzword, these are genuine “teachable moments.”

Although the new library will soon be the new kid on the block that every teen wants to get to know, some adults are bound to feel uncomfortable with that. But if we can properly educate them on how to use the new library and help them see that the teen center is a safe, supportive space for kids, then our library will become a true community center.

Friends of the Library
So far, the most inspiring group we’ve worked with is the Friends of the Library, which has been an established group for nearly 10 years. It lobbied county administrators and residents urging them to support a new library. Once the bond was passed, it hosted silent auctions, book sales, and family fun walks to raise funds for resources and scholarships. Partnering with them is critical to our success, because they’ve helped us learn about the local community’s interests and issues, including such topics as new schools and future construction projects.

Being a teen librarian, one of my main needs from the Friends is financial support for teen programs. Our large-scale programs, such as the annual AnimeCon and summer reading, are paid for by budgets set at the administration level, but small (though significant!) programs such as the book club and teen advisory board, as well as prizes for gaming tournaments and materials for craft programs, rely on the Friends for financial support. The Friends are supportive of teen services, but I still need to make a case for why the teen services department deserves their hard-earned funds. When the time comes to request funds, I plan to tell them about the conversations I’ve had with educators, parents, and mostly importantly, teens themselves, who have told me what they need and want from their new library.

Schools
One of our Friends is a volunteer in the public school system and used that relationship to set up a meeting for us with local school librarians. Though not all schools in our jurisdiction were represented, the topics we discussed at the meeting resonated with all of them; we talked about sharing materials, providing space for student-to-student tutoring, in-school visits by librarians, field trips to the library, and getting library cards into the hands of students.

One teen-specific topic we discussed was the last-minute rush to complete the school’s summer reading assignment, when we inevitably run out of assigned books. I advised the librarians to work with teachers to get the list to us as soon as it’s finalized, so come August, we’ll have the books that their kids need. We also discussed an idea to reduce the physical stress on students: lending textbooks to the library to shelve in our reference collection or in our teen center so that kids won’t have to lug those heavy tomes home every night. Sadly, this argument is an age-old one, and it’s usually rejected because of the likelihood that very expensive textbooks may be stolen. Even some colleges and universities refuse to lend textbooks to their students, for fear of never seeing the books again. But the conversation is one worth having, especially if the outcome will benefit teens.

Of course, these partnerships and conversations won’t end when we open our library. Educators have unique perspectives on teens’ needs, and we need to stay in touch with them to understand and respond to those needs.

I am fortunate to work for a county that sees libraries for what they are: critical to the growth and development of a community and the individuals that reside within it. Come Spring 2013 there will be an eighth library branch in Loudoun County, Virginia, the Gum Spring Library. Over 40,000 square feet of space will deliver materials, programs, education, and entertainment to an area of the county that has never had a library. In fact, that is the charm of building a library in that area; we will introduce thousands of residents to something that they have never had access to.

In this “new normal” where budgets are malleable and futures uncertain, it is exciting and hopeful to see a brand new library built, its walls painted, and shelves stocked. But it is only after the building is up that the excitement really begins; community outreach, programming, and building partnerships and relationships with area organizations, schools, and groups are what really give breath to a library. Finding what works for the new set of users is a fun challenge to meet head-on. Over the next few months I will give you an insider’s look at what goes in to opening a new library. I may not influence the collection (we have a strong Collection Development Division dedicated to that), or the furniture (I requested something comfy), but what I do participate in, you will read about. You can also track the physical construction of the building from the library’s Flickr account and Facebook account.