Jill Jarrell's blog

This month I had the opportunity to present the WebJunction webinar, Serving the Young Adult Population: It's Not Just About Video Games with Maurice Coleman (T is for Training). In the webinar we discuss marketing to teens outside of the library with booktalks in your schools and programs at teen-centric businesses; creating a teen-friendly atmosphere in your library; programming ideas; developing empathy within your staff for your teen patrons; and creating a teen patron code of conduct policy.

Ms. Cashore,

Thank you for writing Fire. That is all.

Sincerely,
Jill Jarrell

Sorry I've been silent of late but we have been in the throes of relocating from Colorado Springs, CO to Clarksville, TN. Mark has taken a new position in the IT Department with Austin Peay State University. We've been in Clarksville now for about a month and we are slowly settling in. In addition to relocating, I'm currently co-writing a new book for teen librarians and teachers with Tara Cannon (previously of the Pikes Peak Library District). We are so very excited about this book as it focuses on a topic very near and dear to our hearts--teen nonfiction.

This past Tuesday evening 80 teens participated in our Library Skate Night at Skate City! Skate City sponsored the teen summer reading program by giving us a private party with free tickets to 4 hours of skating with skate rentals included! Skate City even provided a bus to pick up 17 teens from the Fountain Library, our southern most branch. The Skate City staff were very friendly and accommodating and went out of their way to make sure that library staff and teens had a great time.

So, here's my addition to the Day in the Life of a Librarian meme :)

7:20AM awake and doing all the normal getting ready for work type activities.

9:00AM arrive at work, parking in the overflow parking lot. And lug the huge backpack full of brochures, library card applications and other booth paraphernalia to my desk (My next post will be all about the library skate night at Skate City so stay tuned!).

This summer PPLD has the wonderful opportunity to participate in the Summer Work Experience Program through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This program was developed to give young adults ages 16-24 valuable work experience in high-demand fields. For many of the young adults participating in this program, this is their first job and their first opportunity to gain work experience.

The booktalking season is almost over. I have one more session scheduled but otherwise we're done until the fall semester! This spring, PPLD has booktalked to over 2,000 middle school and high school students. Here are my Spring 2009 highlights.

Favorite quotes of the semester:

Booktalker: "Would you rather lose all of your teeth, or all of your hair?" Student: "Mah hair. I'd look goooooood."

There's a rampant philosophy of sorts running around libraries these days concerning teens. Plan programming that's just for fun and once they're in the door they'll pick up some books and be back. The East Teen Center has been open for about a year and a half and I was afraid that the ETC was proving this mantra to be false. For the most part I see teens who come to the teen center to read and to study and then I see teens who come in to play video games. I don't often see the two cross these invisible lines. In fact, I was rather disheartened to see comments from the last ETC survey like, "get the geeks out of here" when asked how we could make the ETC better. I'm also not sure if that comment was calling the readers and studiers "geeks" or vice-versa :)

Spoiler Alert

Please note, this blog is most definitely full of spoilers so if you haven't read these books yet, please do so before continuing with this post.

My teen services team is currently developing a new strategic plan to direct the next several years of service. In an attempt to keep our strategic plan feasible we've decided on four seemingly simple goals. When I first started this position 5 years ago, we created the first ever teen services strategic plan for this district and unfortunately were mandated by the higher-ups to design our plan as a mirror to the library's plan. The plan became a behemoth that was quickly set aside and referred to only in reports and presentations.