Community Builder Christy Aguirre, supervisor of the Southgate branch of the Sacramento Public Library (CA), is a noteworthy neighborhood networker, whose literacy outreach efforts have helped triple the branch’s summer reading program to more than 2,000 participants. Aguirre talks about her inspirations and passions, the ways she collaborates with her community, and her thoughts on the future of public library youth services.

Innovator Susan Anderson-Newham, early learning supervising librarian at the Pierce County Library System in Tacoma, WA, talks about the importance of collaboration and a good sense of humor to her work with children, why hands-on play is key to kid’s learning, and her all-time top picks for early learning picture books.

Advocates Margaux DelGuidice and Rose Luna, who share duties at the Freeport Memorial Library in Long Island, NY, also hold full-time teacher librarian positions at two area high schools, and have devoted countless hours to professional advocacy. These two powerhouses share their inspirations and passions, their best practices for constructive collaboration, and their goals for the future of libraries.

For the full roundup, visit our Youth Services LJ Movers and Shakers page, which will be updated periodically.

Photo credit: Robert Karatsu and Sean Guerrero.

In this 11th of a dozen planned follow-up interviews with librarians named as Library Journal Movers & Shakers this year, Perera shares with us her inspirations and passions for the profession, and some of the secrets behind Rancho Cucamonga’s recent success.

How did you get your start in library science?
While I was in college, getting my degree in English Literature, I got a part time job at my local public library. My first day was one of trial and error because my supervisor had called in sick, so I was told to work at the reference desk. It was quite the experience—I didn’t know where anything was, I didn’t know the types of questions I would get, and didn’t know how to use the computers or phone. But luck was on my side, and not only did I persevere, but I realized that this is what I wanted to do with my life. I loved working with the community and loved doing reference.

Were you a library fan as a child?
Alas, I was always that kid that was talking to her friends and eating in the library. In the 80s, that was not allowed.  So, my experience, especially during high school, was getting kicked out of the library almost daily for talking and eating candy.  Obviously, it didn’t deter me, but that is probably one reason our libraries are more like community centers than the “sssh” libraries of the 80s.

Children’s librarian Angelica Trummell hypes the audience for one of Rancho Cucamonga Library’s summer reading program kickoff performances.

What was programming like at Rancho Cucamonga before you were appointed assistant director? What were some of your early goals?
I have been at the Rancho Cucamonga Library since we opened in 1994. We have always had a wonderful slate of children’s programs which expanded when we opened our second location in 2006. We currently offer 18 weekly storytimes plus lots of special events. When we opened the Victoria Gardens location—which is part of a multi-use facility that houses a library, 536-seat performing arts theater and events space and all centrally located in a large shopping district—I wanted to develop a series of cultural programs. We offer quarterly cultural arts nights (Hispanic Heritage Night, Black History Night, Asian & Pacific Islander night, Chinese New Year, Local History Night, etc.) that bring in anywhere from 300 to 900 people. It really has become a family night out, with something for everyone—music, art, dance, crafts, games, storytelling, and more.

It has always been important to me that we offer different kinds of programs, ones that are experiential, educational, and interactive. Some of our signature events, besides the cultural arts nights, are Cookies & Carols (complete with a 150-child choir serenading the participants during the program), Star Wars Day (with about 1500 fans attending), Robot Day (where kids learn about making robots), Superhero Day (with a wide variety of superheroes in attendance), and Hello Kitty Day (to celebrate Hello Kitty’s birthday.  In all these programs, we try and create a fun, immersive experience.

Darth Vader Storytime during Rancho Cucamonga Library’s annual Star Wars Day.

What are you most proud of at Rancho Cucamonga?
There are so many things—an amazing programming lineup (which we publish in an annual calendar), the partnerships and relationships we have created over the years, a supportive community, the staff development program we have created (the Staff Innovation Fund™), and our talented and dedicated staff.  But, what I am most proud of is our National Medal award we won this year. It truly is a testament to everything I have just mentioned—programming, partnerships, and our staff.  Our library winning this award (and receiving it at the White House, from Mrs. Obama) was and is an amazing achievement.

Who do you collaborate the most with there?
Mostly, our fellow city personnel (the city manager’s office on citywide projects, the fire district and planning department on a local history program, the community services department on programming and cultural arts, the animal center on programming.  In addition, I collaborate a lot with other libraries—recently eight libraries across California who are going through our Staff Innovation Fund™ program as well as a myriad of libraries and library personnel through the California Library Association.

Families enjoy potting plants during Rancho Cucamonga Library’s annual Earth Day festival, a partnership between the library and the city’s engineering department.

Can you tell us more about the Play and Learn Islands™?
Our islands arose out of a needs assessment to determine the best use for 14,000 square feet of empty space in one of our libraries. Whereas we didn’t have the money to develop that space due to the downturn in the economy, I wanted to use the needs assessment data (significant interest in interactive exhibits) in both of our libraries. From that, the project was born.

I wanted to create interactive, multi-modal, developmentally age-appropriate exhibits for young children and their families, and pulled our children’s team together to make it happen. When we designed and built the island, it was always our intention to make them available (through a loan process) to other libraries in California, and we received grant funding to do it.

In the last two years, over 35 libraries have borrowed our island and we have orders from 30 libraries who are purchasing an island of their own. We knew that if they would be popular in our libraries, they would probably be popular in many.

Which is the most popular Island? Which is your favorite?
The popularity depends on the day and sometimes the program we are offering. Big Build is always popular with boys because they love to build anything. Discovery Dig is always popular at our outdoor events because kids can dig for fossils or sea life or Terra Cotta Warriors or buried treasure, depending on the event. I think the Healthy island is the most popular because it is a mini farmers market stand that conveys the concept of “from the field to the market to the table.” [It] is super popular right now for the Reading is So Delicious Summer Reading Club. We just finished a new island in partnership with the Rancho Cucamonga Municipal Utility: Renewable Energy. Through colored LED lights, a solar panel, inviting graphics, and toys, it teaches children about the different types of renewable energy. In the future we hope to re-create our IlluminArt island into something more mobile, where light meets art.

Children check out Rancho Cucamonga Library’s IlluminArt Play and Learn Island.

Why did you see the need for these types of interactive activities?
That is what our community really seemed to respond to when offered…we did an extensive needs assessment on interactive learning and activities four years ago and there was an overwhelming response for this. I [and my staff have] studied the value of playing and learning in a child’s life. We have tailored staff days to this topic, visited children’s museums, attended children’s museum conferences, and done quite a bit of research on the topic.

What is next for you and why?
I need to figure out how to leverage successes like the Mover & Shaker award and the National Medal to build out that second floor of the library!  The time is right for our library to expand and as the assistant library director, I need to help figure out how to make that happen.

What do you think are the big issues and challenges in children’s services right now?
I think the state of children’s services right now is promising. There are lots of challenges, of course, like providing programming and services to a changing clientele—balancing high tech and no tech opportunities, staying relevant in a constantly changing environment, competing with a wide array of private opportunities children have, developing mutually lucrative partnerships, etc.  But the children’s librarians I know are motivated and creative, and dedicated to providing quality programming and services. So I am confident we are moving in the right direction.

What do you think children’s services should look like going forward?
Based on my experience here in Rancho Cucamonga, I think children’s services should morph more into family services, providing something for the whole family and encouraging multi-generational use, programming, and services. There seems to be a disconnect sometimes between the parent and child during library programs, so having programs that appeal to the whole family encourages that ever-so-important interaction.

Children enjoy a zumba class among the stacks at Rancho Cucamonga Library during its annual Hispanic Heritage Cultural Arts Night.

What are the best professional development experiences that you have ever had?
I have been fortunate that there have been a few: developing the Staff Innovation Fund™ for my staff and now for several libraries across California (first part is training in grants, project management, marketing and branding, talking to power, and then a dedicated innovation fund to use for special projects); being the program chair for the 2011 California Library Association Conference (it really got me involved with a great organization); and having the Play and Learn Islands™ be so successful and have so many libraries wanting to buy them.

What’s on your career wish list? What would you love to do that you haven’t done yet?
My long-term career goal has always been to make a positive change in my profession, and hopefully through projects like the Play and Learn Islands™ and Staff Innovation Fund™, through teaching for several years at San Jose State’s MLIS program, and through my work with the California Library Association, I hope I am making steps towards that.

In this seventh of a dozen planned interviews with the youth services librarians named as Movers & Shakers this year, Depper talks to School Library Journal about her inspirations and passion for the profession, her favorite read-aloud titles, the importance of collaboration and community, and why the library is critical to giving every child a good start in life.

When/how did you know library science was the right choice for you?
Right after college I worked for a few years at the amazing Tattered Cover Book Store here in Denver, where I spent a lot of time in the children’s area. At first I gravitated to that section because I had been such a reader as a kid that I still knew a lot of the books, and I loved reading the new ones. Then I discovered how much fun it was to talk with the kids about what they were reading and how satisfying it was to help adults find just the right book for the children in their lives.

One of my bosses at the time was Louise Brueggemann (who is now a librarian too) and she started to give me little inventory projects, which got me intrigued with the process of managing and organizing a collection to suit a particular community. I decided that working with children, families, books, and information was what I wanted to do. Libraries had been a big part of my growing up: we used the library all the time; my mom, Rhonie Zymboly, was head of circulation for many years at our local library; and I paged there in high school. I realized that, while I had gotten a great start professionally in bookstores, I wanted to move forward in libraries.

Why children and families as a specialty?
At first, it was the books that brought me to youth services, but now it’s about the relationships. Being a parent is hard work; being in a family is hard work. It does take a village to raise a child, and many of us just don’t have that big of a village to work with anymore, for a number of reasons. For the library to be able to step in and provide help and support and a friendly face and a welcoming place and the answers to questions—that’s huge. I’m very happy to be a part of that.

Can you tell us more about your feelings toward early literacy?
Oh my goodness, you know I have lots of feelings about early literacy! When I was in library school in the early 1990s, early literacy wasn’t even on the radar. Baby storytimes weren’t even on the radar! We knew reading was important and vital to children’s success, but we didn’t know yet how to unpack all that, let alone how to share it with our families. I have two girls, and having a front-row seat as they learned how to talk and to read and to write just fascinated me—and then I learned about early literacy through Every Child Ready to Read and that was that.

There are so many challenges in this world, and so many people struggle, and solutions to our collective problems seem so impossible. And everybody wants the best for their children, but not everybody knows that they can be a critical part of giving them the best, no matter what their background or upbringing or language skills. We know a good start makes a difference; we need to make sure everybody else knows it too. And that good start—reading and talking and engaging with children—is accessible, and affordable, and practical, and measurable, for everybody, anywhere.

I’m not saying literacy is the one answer to everything, but the more we read to our babies, the better our world is going to be.

What books are on your all-time top lists for read-alouds?
I could probably read Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock (Holiday House, 1988) out loud every day for the rest of my life. Older titles I love to share in storytime include The Baby Goes Beep (Roaring Brook, 2013) by Rebecca O’Connell, The Big Fat Worm (Knopf, 1987) by Nancy Van Laan, and Trashy Town (HarperCollins, 1999) by Andrea Zimmerman. Newer favorites are Oh No! (Random, 2012) by Candace Fleming, Tiny Little Fly (candlewick, 2010) by Michael Rosen, and Brontorina (Candlewick, 2010) by James Howe. And I sing Over in the Meadow (Viking, 1999) to my babies every chance I get.

What are you reading right now for yourself?
It’s been a crazy winter, so I’ve been re-reading my Gillian Bradshaw historical fiction: Island of Ghosts: A Novel of Roman Britain (Forge, 1998), Beacon at Alexandria (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), The Sand-Reckoner. (Forge, 2000). They are all awesome. I am a big non-fiction reader for fun, and right now it’s Consider the For: A History of How We Cook and Eat (Basic Books, 2012) by Bee Wilson. I have an enormous stack of professional reading to get to. I’m just starting So Much More than the ABCs by Judith Schickedanz and Molly Collins, which I can heartily recommend even though I’m only two chapters in; I can’t wait to get to the rest of it. I’m also starting to ramp up my picture book reading for the year–I set my goal at 500 picture books for 2013 and am way behind already!

Can you tell us more about what you aim to achieve with your blog?
I started Mel’s Desk in 2009. I was learning so much from the librarians I followed on Twitter that I wanted to make sure I was contributing back. So at first, my blog was a place to put storytime plans and share a few program ideas. My main goal now is to keep talking about how to do storytime, and why to do storytime; to help us all keep improving our storytime skills, and be better advocates for storytime as a core service to our communities.

Did you have programming goals in mind when you started at your library?
Not too long after I came to the Arapahoe Library District in 2003, I went to my supervisor at the time, Virginia Brace, and said that I really wanted to offer some programs for parents in addition to our storytimes and programs for kids. My own girls were in preschool, and I thought one of their master teachers was outstanding, and I wanted to bring her in to present about reading to children.

I owe so much to Virginia, because while she told me they hadn’t had much luck with parent programs in the past, she said, ‘Go ahead and give it a try!’ Shortly after I learned about Every Child Ready to Read, and started to offer those workshops very successfully. Interest in those particular sessions tapered off after a few years, but we are still committed to this idea and now I can’t imagine our library without parent and caregiver programming. My colleague Betsy Brainerd is spearheading our project to become a Family Place library, which…involves great play-based programming for parents and their children together. My colleague Pam Grover does a great job with “Literacy Make and Take” and “Stories & More,” two hands-on early literacy based programs for caregivers and families of young children, funded through our partnership with the Arapahoe County Early Childhood Council. My colleague Laurie Anne Armstrong just started a new outreach project, bringing storytimes to high-need preschools in our area, but her main goal is to teach the teachers about early literacy along the way.

What are you most proud of at your library?
We have been so fortunate to have management and directors that recognize that early literacy is a core service for public libraries. We have been able to put into place a robust storytime training sequence that covers initial and ongoing continuing education and support for our storytime providers—as well as training for their supervisors and early literacy awareness efforts directed to the entire staff. My supervisor Lori Romero and I were able to share out some of the results of our work in the form of storytime competencies and observation forms at the ALSC Institute this past September.

Who do you collaborate the most with?
I have had so many opportunities to collaborate and learn. I work very closely with the members of my team. We are all responsible for our own projects, but we come together all the time to think about the big picture and to set goals and brainstorm and support each other. I have had the incredible experience of helping to found the advocacy group Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy (CLEL); now I personally know so many librarians and what they are working on in their own libraries. When I have a question I have a large network of people I can call, and when someone has a particular need, I love that I can help connect them with someone else who might be able to help.

In the last couple of years, I’ve also started to work more with colleagues outside of Colorado, people I’ve met on Twitter or through Flannel Friday. It’s been fun to work with Flannel Friday leaders to be thoughtful about expanding and overseeing that online community. I’ve also been a part of a few proposals to our national conferences with librarians I feel very close to personally and professionally, but still haven’t met face to face! This type of non-local collaboration is a possibility that didn’t really exist at the beginning of my career and I don’t think it will ever stop feeling exciting and cool.

I think a good collaboration takes real effort. The best projects are the result of a number of passionate minds who all see the main goal from slightly different perspectives. To incorporate all those perspectives takes a lot of synthesis, talking, and thinking, and making mistakes, all of which is hard work. I love it though. I love being made to be smarter and sharper and think more deeply because of the people around me, and I know the finished projects are more powerful when that happens.

What is next for you and why?
I’m working on translating some of our face to face storytime training to online modules for our staff. Our district is wide-spread and off-desk time is precious, so making some of our training be more flexible and adaptive is a major goal. We’re going to be offering our first tech programs for preschoolers and their families later this year—tablets and apps and wiggles and tips—so I’m starting to dive in to the literature and reading more about digital literacies, child development, selection criteria for apps, all of that. Working with ALSC’s Children and Technology Committee has helped me out in this tremendously. And I have a new project with CLEL that we’ll be able to announce later this year, about picture books and early literacy, so that’s been a good challenge to organize. I’m going to ALA for the first time this June, and will be presenting a poster session about early literacy messages in storytime.

What was your reaction to being named a Mover & Shaker?
When I saw the first email about it in my inbox, my hands actually started to shake. To know that my boss, my team, and my colleagues wanted to acknowledge me in this way was both humbling and exciting. It also totally re-motivated me for the next 15 years. There’s a lot to do yet.

You were pegged as an “Advocate.” Is that how you view yourself, too?
Yes.  And I love that this is what I get to do every day. To promote awareness of early literacy, to speak up for the children and families in our communities, to work to provide staff what they need in order to do their jobs well—it’s a privilege.

What do you think are the big issues and challenges for children’s services right now?
I think our biggest challenge is to keep getting out of the library and into the community, and to get the community into us—not just into our physical spaces, but into the mindset that we are there for them. Money is so tight, resources are so limited, habits are so set, we have to be proactive about looking for new ways to do our job and new places to do it and new people to do it with. Our director, Nicolle Davies, says her vision for our library is that we be not just a benefit to our community, but essential to it. Youth services librarians need to be part of the movement that convinces our business and political and education leaders that investing in early childhood is essential to our success.

What’s on your career wish list? What would you love to do that you haven’t done yet?
Develop even more training for our storytime providers—presenting storytime demands a complex skill set and I would love to keep drilling down and offering more and more thoughtful support. Create art, music, and STEM programs for preschoolers. Do more speaking locally about early literacy to community groups. Present at ALA and PLA. Write a book about storytime. Hold a Flannel Friday Storytime Conference. Help CLEL provide free webinars and training materials. Maybe consult and help libraries find their storytime groove. Found a publishing house with the sole purpose of reprinting board books as big books for baby and toddler storytimes.

What have been the best professional development experiences you have ever had?
Being introduced to Every Child Ready to Read and the greater world of early literacy and early learning, has been the pivotal experience of my career. [That] gave me a focus, a ladder, a boat, a tribe—all of the metaphors! I wanted to learn more, so I read, went to workshops, worked with mentors. I wanted to do more, so I proposed programs and services, teamed up with others, and learned about grants, committee work, and advocacy. I wanted to share more, so I started a blog, joined Twitter, and worked to become a better presenter and teacher.

And I’m still learning how to do all of those things and learning new tools to do them with. The best professional growth comes not because you think you should achieve this thing or that thing to be successful, but because you have a cause you believe in utterly that powers you on.