Serving Full T.I.L.T. (Teens in Libraries Today)

Some time recently Eden Grey, Rebecca Denham, Heather Booth and I got into a conversation on Twitter, as one does. How, we began discussing, do you convince your library administrators that you need to do teen services – and do them well? That online conversation soon became an epic planning session as we decided that it was a question we wanted to answer and answer well, which is how the upcoming series we named Serving Full T.I.L.T. came to be. To serve teens today in libraries, we wanted to put together a good package that we can use off the cuff to talk with our fellow staff members, our local communities, and even the press. So over an 8 week series that’s what we’ll be doing, working together to put together that basic info and share it with you so that we all have what we need to answer the question: why should libraries serve teens?

The series will look like this:

January 14 By the Numbers, making the case for teen services using basic demographic information (Karen Jensen)

January 21 Sarcasm, Spice and Everything Awesome: The Developing Teen (Rebecca Denham)

January 28 Brain Science 101 (Heather Booth)

February 4 Asset Building 101, How using the 40 Developmental Assets can help us plan and evaluate teen programming (Karen Jensen)

February 11 Diverse teens, diverse needs (Eden Grey)

February 18 Sharing stories, how knowing and sharing the stories of our teens can help make the case (Heather Booth)

February 25 Empathy, remembering what it means to be a teen and how it makes us better teen services librarians (Heather Booth)

March 4 A Teen Services 101 Infographic (Rebecca Denham and Karen Jensen)

March 11 Talking Up Teens: Discussing Teen Services with Library Administration (Eden Grey)

Heather Booth is the Teen Services Librarian at Thomas Ford Memorial Library in suburban Chicagoland. She has worked in libraries since 2001 and is the author of Serving Teens Through Reader’s Advisory (ALA Editions, 2007) and the editor of The Whole Library Handbook: Teen Servcies along with Karen Jensen. She has been reviewing Books for Youth and Audiobooks for Booklist Magazine since 2006.  She can be reached at teenreadersadvisor (at) gmail.com or @boothheather on Twitter.

Rebecca Denham is a Young Adult Librarian at heart who masquerades as an Assistant Branch Manager by day at a very busy library somewhere in the metropolitan wilds of Texas.  When not distracted by management duties Rebecca is reading, reviewing YA literature and coming up with fun, innovative programming with diverse teen appeal. When not writing and reviewing for her blog Rebecca volunteers her time for the following committees: Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers (YALSA), 2015-2016, Best Fiction for Young Adults (YALSA), 2013-2014, 2014-2015,Youth Engagement (YALSA), 2013-2014,Spirit of Texas Reading Program HS (YART), 2011-2015, Teen Book Con Planning Committee, 2011 to present, Book Reviewer for VOYA, December 2011 to present,A4YA Reviewer for SLJ, Febraury 2014 to present.

Eden Grey: Eden is a Teen Librarian, a YA Lit reviewer, otaku, herder of cats, Michigan-native, traveler, and proud pet of a 3 year-old dachshund. She lives in Northern Kentucky, where she reads, writes, sews, and blogs. You can find her on Twitter: @edyngrey Her blog address is www.edynjean.wordpress.com.

Karen Jensen is the creator and administrator of Teen Librarian Toolbox and a YA librarian for 21+ years. You can see her complete bio and resume at the About TLT page.

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