The blaze, which was 50 percent contained Monday night, has forced more than 1,000 people to leave their homes, with many seeking refuge at a wireless-equipped Red Cross evacuation center in Loveland, CO, 10 miles south of Fort Collins.

The library’s ten staff members immediately leapt into action to distribute eight laptops and a projector to the shelter’s briefing room (left), where residents can receive updates on the fire and view maps showing its progress. Library staffers are also on hand to provide story times and show movies to kids as a way to divert their attention from the wildfires that have so far devoured about 58,000 acres of land, and as of Sunday night, destroyed 189 homes.

Cobbling together programs for kids and adults is totally “on the fly,” says Holly Carroll, the library’s executive director. In an effort headed up by Irene Romsa, the library’s outreach manager, library staff, aided by librarians from nearby Windsor, CO, set up a children’s area for story time, movie-viewing, and play time. They also worked with a collection of about 300 donated and library-owned books.

“There’s no written procedure” for crafting kids or adult programming during a disaster, says Romsa. “The rules that apply in a library don’t apply.” That being said, library personnel, who’ve been rotating through the evacuation center, “have been tweaking the strategy several times a day.”

At first, librarians tried setting up a separate room for kids and teens at the evacuation center. But that didn’t work, says Romsa. “The kids were scared and didn’t want to be away from their parents.” So staffers carved out a nook that let family members see each other easily.

There’s storytime, but instead of the traditional group setting, Romsa says staffers read single books to kidslike picture book Pete the Cat (Merrymakers, 2010) by James Dean—as individual kids trickle in and out of the space. They library is also outfitting children with backpacks so those who’ve relocated temporarily to hotels and friends and relatives’ homes will have books to read.

The library’s three branches are located in Fort Collins, population 143,986, perched in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, 65 miles north of Denver, but they serve all of surrounding Larimer County, a vast swath of largely rural territory that stretches northward to the Wyoming border. The Poudre River Library boasts a circulation of 3.2 million books and serves 138,000 users.

At outlying communities where the library conducts kids programs, poor air quality has forced staffers to decide daily whether to cancel outdoor programs, says Carroll.

At the time the fires broke out, Romsa was working at a local quilt festival. Library staff soon contacted the local Red Cross chapter to ask whether the library could assist in the recovery effort. The Red Cross took them up on the offer and is heaping praise on the library as “first responders,” as some have dubbed the Poudre River crew.

“I’ve been completely impressed with what they’re doing,” says Erin Mounsey, executive director of the Northern Colorado Red Cross chapter. “They’ve been a great resource.” Specifically, residents use Poudre County Library laptops to sign up for a special Red Cross evacuation alert, which sends messages to cell phones and emails so people know when it’s safe to return home.

Key to the swift response was the fact that the library had already forged positive relationships with other community organizations.

“Establishing these partnerships ahead of time is useful,” says Carroll. “We’ve had these laptops and had taken them to communities so they’re already familiar with us.”

At some point, the library will move its operations to a recovery center located at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

But one way or the other, it’s going to be a long, hot summer for the library and for the Fort Collins community at large.

“It’s a real fire, says Monsey. “It’s not over.”

Photo:Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System

Starting June 1, each of Atlanta’s 34 library branches will receive two visits from Zoo Atlanta’s ZooMobile. During a 45-minute program, helmed by a zoo educator and a local librarian, pre-K through elementary school-age kids accompanied by their parents, will hear presentations about Georgia’s wildlife and their habitats, participate in activities like collage making, and meet and greet a bevy of wild creatures who hail from Georgia’s wetlands, forests, and mountain areas.

One key goal for the program: planting the seeds for the next generation of professional animal preservationists.

With the effort, “we hope we’re inspiring the next group of environmentalists, zookeepers and conservationists,” says Jason Taylor, Zoo Atlanta’s school and family programs manager.

Atlanta Library’s Youth Services Manager Michelle Bennett agrees. “We want to get kids more engaged with science and math type careers as part of their futures.”

Funded as part of a two-year grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Zoo Atlanta and Atlanta-Fulton Public Library are striving to foster greater understanding of and appreciation for creatures who inhabit the wild, explains Bennett.

Focusing on Georgia’s wildlife, the educators want to highlight fascinating animals, not just in distant lands, but right in kids’ own backyards-in their home state’s forests and fields.

Each branch in Atlanta’s sprawling library system will receive a visit from a total of three critters. While Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill, a fantastical creature in Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoon (Random, 1950), won’t be dropping by, others like opossums, snakes and box turtles, not to mention uber-urban critters like rats and roaches-will make stops at libraries citywide.

In addition, explains Bennett, each 45-minute science program will kick off with a 15-minute story time, with books that reinforce the wildlife theme such as Rebecca Elliot’s Zoo Girl (Lion UK, 2012), about a young girl adopted by zookeepers, and Sonya Hartnett’s Midnight Zoo by (Candlewick, 2011), about two boys during World War II come upon a zoo.

Hands-on activities are a key part of the program, too. Kids assemble animal puzzles out of construction paper, create animal collages from magazine photos, and “if the group’s not too rambunctious and crazy, they’ll get to touch” them, too, says Taylor.

What’s more, as part of the summer program, the zoo will donate a total of 40 animal and nature books to the Atlanta library. Two already have arrived on the shelves: Elephants of Africa by Gail Gibbons ( Live Oak Media, 2011) and Animal Tails (EarlyLight Books 2010) by Beth Fielding.

Bennett also hopes kids will “be able to recognize those animals that are on the verge of extinction.”

But the zoo’s Taylor wants to steer away from anything “too doomy and gloomy.” Rather, he wants to enhance kids’ appreciation of the natural wonders, many of them right at their doorstep.

“There are amazing animals with a rich and amazing ecosystem” closer at hand than many kids think.

The report analyzed the prevalence of cursing in 40 YA books that appeared on The New York Times Best Sellers List for Children’s Books on two separate weeks in 2008. Coyne found that most books, or 88 percent, had at least one incident of offensive language, and on average, teen novels contained 38 instances of cursing, which translated to almost seven instances of profanity per hour spent reading. In fact, bestselling YA novels contain twice the rate of cursing of most video games, the report adds.

The “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” series have fairly tame language, compared to Sara Shepard’s Pretty Little Liars (HarperTeen), which has an above-average amount of profanity, with 80 curse words in the 298-page book. A few, like Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks on Gardam Street (Knopf, 2008), contained none, while Cecily von Ziegesar‘s Gossip Girls, The Carlyles #1 (Little, Brown, 2008) serves up 175 instances of swearing. The YA book with the most profanity? Nic Sheff’s Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamine (Athenaeum, 2008), a disturbing memoir about the author’s personal struggle with drugs and alcohol.

Coyne was most concerned that characters with the most offensive potty mouths were often portrayed in a superior light. “We tend to imitate behavior done by characters with desirable characteristics,” Coyne said in an interview. “The characters that swore were rich, popular, and beautiful.”

Coyne decided to conduct the study, “A Helluva Read’: Profanity in Adolescent Literature,” because of the abundant research on video game and movie content but not on her favorite form of media—books.

While there’s no denying that profanity exists in YA novels, many authors says it’s an integral part today’s teen culture and to exclude it would offer young readers a sanitized version of the real world that many couldn’t relate to.

“It’s the way kids talk,” says Beth Ann Bauman, the author of two YA coming-of-age novels, Jersey Angel (2012) and Rosie and Skate (2009, both Random), whose characters use some swear words.

“What I did include, I needed to accurately reflect the characters,” says Bauman, who adds that critics of using curse words in teen books makes her “cranky” because “if you’re trying to get kids to read, the reason it’s there is it’s actually the way kids are. You have to reflect kids’ world in the truest way you can.”

A Mormon and mother of three children between the ages of one and seven, Coyne acknowledges that “kids definitely swear” and says an author has the prerogative to include curse words “if she wants.” Mormons are advised against using profanity and try to avoid movies, music, and reading material that contain swearing.

While Coyne doesn’t advocate rating books aimed at teens, she does favor a “content warning” so parents can feel empowered by knowing what’s in the novel. Coyne denies that these type of warnings are a form of censorship and contends that parents today are left adrift when it comes to assessing appropriate books for their older kids.

Others disagree, like Beth Yoke, executive director of the Young Adult Library Services Association, who explains that these warnings pose a danger to first amendment rights. Coyne’s suggestion that book have labels, like video games and movies, is a “short-sighted approach to connecting young people and books, and is always a cause for concern among the many individuals and organizations that value and defend first amendment rights,” Yoke says.

It’s not just profanity in YA books that’s stirring up controversy. Blogger Kate Hart recently conducted her own informal survey of 624 teen book covers and found that 90 percent feature a white character, while only 1.2 percent features African Americans.

As for the role of librarians to guide adolescents to the appropriate book content, Coyne says she’s more concerned about bookstores. “I trust my school librarian,” says Coyne, who adds there’s a lack of information being offered at bookstores “when it comes to teen books and cursing.”

Yoke wonders whether librarians need to get the word out that they play a very important advisory role. “Everyone needs to know that librarians are there to help find the right book for the right teen, and they won’t know unless we tell them.”