YALSA blog - 31 days of dollars and sense

If you haven't had a chance to check out YALSA's blog of 31 days of dollars and sense, now is your opportunity. The blog has some fantastic ideas concerning technology, advocacy, summer reading ideas and more.

New YART Chair-Elect

Congratulations to Sarah VanRaden who is the new chair-elect for YART! Sarah is the young adult librarian at the Saddlebrook Branch of the Omaha Public Library. We are thrilled to have her as a board member for YART.

Looking for some great books for young adults?

Recently I was lucky enough to attend a talk given by James Patterson, a well known young adult author. He is very passionate about young adults finding books which will inspire them to be life long readers. He firmly believes that it is the job of all us who have contact with young adults to encourage reading. Now you might be thinking he is an author who just wants to sell his books and of course he is going to encourage reading and in particular his books. As I listened to Mr. Patterson, I was struck by his depth of emotion as he described the importance of reading. Of course, it does not hurt that he has a sixth grade son who really was not a reader until he was given a few books which were just right for him. We all know that there is that so called "perfect book" out there for everyone, but the hard part is sometimes finding it. Mr. Patterson is helping us to find those books for our young adults through his web site readkiddoread which provides a wide selection of recommendations based on age. There is a multitude of great information and book recommendations to be found on the site, take a look and see what you think.

What Do Teens Want?

What do teens want in terms of library services or books to read? Publisher's Weekly just published a survey generated from the membership of teenreads.com which tries to answer that very question. Although the survey was open to the entire membership of teenreads.com, the overwhelming majority of responders were female and the results are reflective of that fact. Over 53% of the respondents indicated that they have changed their book buying habits due to the economy and are now utilizing their libraries more. So what are they looking for in the library? Well, it seems that they are reading romance and fantasy books and 48% indicated they wanted more help from "experts" in selecting their reading materials. This is an opportunity where we as the "experts" can help teens find books they like by posting peer reviews of books. Over 83% of the respondents indicated peer recommendations as the reason they read a book so peer reviews could be a very powerful marketing tool in our libraries. Take a look at the survey and see what you find interesting or intriguing and let's start a discussion in this space on how this information might help us to serve our teens better.

Publisher's Weekly
The Sassy Librarian (reflections on the survey)

iPod Winner!

Congratulations to Cherie Curtis of Millard Public Schools. She won the drawing for the iPod Shuffle during the NLA/NEMA Conference!