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.

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.

“This is very meaningful work,” says Rachel Garbow Monroe, president of the Weinberg Foundation. “It’s going to be extraordinary.”

Three school libraries—Thomson Johnson Elementary/Middle School, Moravia Park Elementary, and Southwest Baltimore Charter—are set to open their doors September 12, with nine others scheduled to roll out over the next few years. The Weinberg Foundation has plans to  announce the second round of school libraries planned to open in 2013.

With school libraries across the nation suffering deep budget cuts, foundations, and even private businesses are coming to their rescue. Retailer Target and grants from the Laura Bush Foundation have been helping schools restock book collections and even supply new computers.

Weinberg had originally promised $1 million in December 2011, but that grew to $5 million this month after the foundation’s trustees decided to increase their support of the Baltimore Library Project. Each library will cost approximately $3 million to build, says Monroe. Additional funds and in-kind promises also will come from outside partners, including the Baltimore Sun, which will donate free newspapers to the school libraries indefinitely, and the Maryland Food Bank, which will build a food bank at each school site.

Each new school library will receive thousands of new books, 100 pre-loaded Nooks and technology that could include laptops to Macs, depending on what the schools determine will best benefit their students. Schools will also receive a matching $100,000 grant over four years and hire a part-time paraprofessional to free up more time for librarians to work with students.

Monroe says the requirements for winning a new library or library upgrade included having a full-time librarian on staff, as well as a principal and librarian excited and willing to participate. All applicants also had to receive federal Qualified Zone Academy Bonds, which are non-interest-bearing bonds given to school districts. Those schools with existing libraries will be renovated, while those without any formal space will have one built.

The Weinberg Foundation targets high schools, particularly those in the K-8 grades, to ensure they provide kids with physical books to increase their literacy skills as they mature as students.

“There’s a feeling that high school libraries will become over time like college libraries, more Internet focused and online,” says Monroe, who says the foundation sought advice from local experts. “The anecdotal feedback was that elementary schools are going to continue to have books for children to touch, and practice reading, which is so important for them in order to have strong reading skills. And we thought we could have a stronger impact on the lives of elementary and middle school children.”

NYPL’s 42 Street Children’s Center.

New York Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Council Member Peter F. Vallone Jr. of Queens have asked the New York state legislature to pass a law barring sex offenders from children’s reading rooms in libraries.

In addition to proposing a City Council resolution, de Blasio and Valone sent a letter to Sheldon Silver, speaker of the Assembly, and Dean G. Skelos, majority leader of the Senate.

The two are targeting children’s rooms specifically because complete bans on sex offenders in libraries have been held unconstitutional, as LJ reported. “We suspect a law along these lines recently passed in the State Senate will face similar legal challenges,” the two said, referring to S3744-2011, which passed the Senate but died in the Assembly.

However another bill that focuses only on children’s areas of libraries already exists: called S7823-2011 and sponsored by Senator John L. Sampson, it was referred to the Senate rules committee on July 11.

Read the full story on Library Journal.

The Back of the Yards branch of the Chicago Public Library plans to open its doors in the fall of 2013, serving both the new Back of the Yards High School and the local community. The 8,000 square foot building, which will sit next to the high school and have a separate entrance for the public, is taking its cue from the success of YOUmedia, an innovative 21st century teen learning space housed in the Chicago Public Library that focuses on promoting digital media skills, says Ruth Lednicer, the library’s director of marketing.

The system has turned school classrooms into public library space in the past, as was done at South Side’s Carver Elementary, However, this will be the first “purpose-built public library” that will exist as part of the structure of a school, explains Lednicer.

The pilot project between the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Public Library is expected to save the city about $15 million, or the cost of building a new public library, says Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office.

“The Back of the Yards high school will become a community anchor for both students and residents in the community, who have been without a library for a year,” said Emanuel when he announced the partnership earlier this week. “This innovative approach will provide residents and students with the library they deserve.”

Given its name because of its proximity to the former Union Stock Yards, Back of the Yards is an economically-disadvantaged neighborhood populated mainly by Hispanic families. The community hasn’t had a library for a year, since constant flooding forced the closing of a store front library located in a strip mall across the street from where the new high school and library is currently under construction. Currently, the neighborhood’s closest public library is McKinley Park Branch, about two miles away.

“Co-locating the public library with the new school will increase the resources available to students, but also provide residents with a new full-service library, open six days a week, that will offer the full complement of early-childhood reading programs that are instrumental to student success,” says Brian Bannon, the new commissioner of the Chicago Public Library. “Students will have the benefit of teacher librarians and public librarians to support academic and personal interests, and the opportunity to mentor younger children and gain community service hours within their school building.”

Although many details such as collection size, hours of operation, and specific programs still need hammering out, the library will have a media specialist (Chicago mandates high school librarians), a children’s librarian, an adult librarian, and Chicago’s first teen branch librarian. Previously, the central library had the city’s only young adult librarian, explains Lednicer.

“It’ll be a teen-focused collection with digital resources that will use the best practices of YOUmedia,” she says, adding that the library will have a strong early literacy program for toddlers.

Although Back of the Yards has K-8 schools (Chicago doesn’t have middle schools), the neighborhood is without a high school, forcing area teens to travel to 20 different magnet and charter schools throughout the city, Lednicer says. Back of the Yards high school, located on the grounds of a former auto salvage and metal fabricating business, will serve 1,200 students—and the library will be stocked with a brand new opening day collection.

As an International Baccalaureate (IB) school, Back of the Yards will have a more challenging curriculum-and the library’s collection will cater to those needs. A full-time media specialist, who will be involved in resource selection and ensure the library collection meets the needs of an IB curriculum, will work alongside public librarians during school hours. Students also will have access to the public library’s system-wide collections. Chicago Public Library will operate the library as one of its 79 branches.

“We are delighted that more students will have the opportunity to explore the vast resources available through the Chicago Public Library, turning this neighborhood school into a year-round learning center,” said Chicago Public School’s CEO Jean-Claude Brizard.

The nearly $64 million school will have a public reading garden and a Silver rating under the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Schools Rating System.

The town delivered, with 10,000 K-fifth graders in more than 500 public and private schools reading over 1.8 million books—and the grand prize going to Wadewitz Elementary School for completing 424,067 titles.

“Our numbers were so large that people came to see us because they were thought we were cooking the books,” says Wadewitz Elementary Principal Chad Chapin, who had just launched a literacy push to help the 70 percent of his students who were reading below grade level. “We found our kids weren’t reading independently, so we increased our classroom libraries, bought Fountas and Pinnell, leveled all the kids, and encouraged them to choose books at their levels, and books they were interested in reading.”

When “Racine Reads: Dream Big“—a program sponsored by local company SC Johnson, a maker of household cleaning products—came along, Chapin knew it fit perfectly with his endeavor. Launched October 1, 2011, the challenge kicked off with a 10,000 book giveaway, including titles from “Max and Ruby” author Rosemary Wells, who also visited the town during the reading challenge.

Residents kept track by watching numbers updated on the public library’s bookmobile, and politicians, including Mayor John Dickert, visited schools to read books to children, says Jessica MacPhail, Racine Public Library’s director. As incentives, kids who read 25 books won pizza parties for their classes, and the first 50 classes where students read 50 books won a roller-skating party, she adds.

While children were encouraged to read independently, older grades read to younger grades—and teachers also read often to students. As a result, bookmobile checkouts soared 30 percent since January, with circulation up 25 percent at the main library in the first quarter, adds MacPhail.

“I can’t tell you how many kids told me they were going to read one million books by themselves,” she says. You can’t buy that spirit—and you can’t teach it.”

Wadewitz Elementary students read nearly half a million books all on their own—totaling 637 titles for each child—and landed them a library makeover.

Chapin already has big plans for his new media center. He plans to give students a 21st century library to replace the 50-year-old space, where the carpet is held together by duct tape. At the top of his list? A computer lab and ebooks to give his school librarian and media technology specialist Kathleen Kis more tools to work effectively with students.

SC Johnson spent approximately $250,000 on the challenge, says a spokesperson, who adds it’s uncertain whether Racine Reads will become an annual event.

But educators already see its lasting impact on children.

“When we started, we had students reading five minutes on their own, then 10 minutes the next week, then 15,” says Chapin. “Now the kids can read independently. From K-5, they can read up to 30 minutes a day. And they’ve naturally just developed an interest in reading.”