I think it’s tempting, when interacting with teenagers, to draw back on our own experiences as teenagers…to remember what we thought and felt…in order to figure out what they’re after. Or, because they tend to look something like adults, we assume that their development is almost “done”, and that, save a few minor tweaks that have to do with “sowing of the wild oats” in these years, they pretty much think like we do.

I’m reading a fascinating manuscript by Jennifer Burek-Pierce (working title: Sex, Brains and Videogames) that basically will serve as the librarian’s guide to the teenager. She pulls together research from education, neuroscience, psychology, and other areas to provide a good look of today’s teenager. Along the way, she asks librarians to question their own assumptions about these sometimes moody, sometimes rambunctious, often unpredictable patrons they serve. And, some of the questions she asks will likely stir debate and healthy discussion among librarians for years to come.

The chapter on brain research is especially interesting. (It reminds me of the brain research done on babies that spawned the “early literacy” movement…I wonder if brain research on teenagers will lead to something similar). Brain development in teenage years is not like building a house, where you start with a foundation and progress until it’s done. Rather, it’s a process of “proliferation and pruning,” as Burek-Pierce points out. Fits and starts and development and redevelopment (no wonder they can be so moody with all those “storms” going on in their heads). Nowadays, researchers are saying that the brain reaches adult form at the age of 25 years of age (when I presented this project to my colleagues, I teased our young assistant with this fact). “Plasticity” of the brain refers to developing, then diminishing connections in the teen brain. Teen brains are constantly changing in their ability to process of convey information.

There are many many implications of this. But, one surprising result? They’re not always very good at reading facial expressions. Often, teens complain that librarians aren’t friendly or approachable. Could it be, Burek-Pierce asks, a function of their inability to interpret the expression on the librarian’s face? Could they be seeing hostility on a face that’s truly expressing concentration or, perhaps, even boredom? (Is this why my nieces and nephews can seem so sensitive when an adult in their life doesn’t appear to react the way they expect to bad or good news?)

This manuscript provides plenty to think about. Marketers think they know how to reach teens, but, after reading this, I’m convinced they’re way off base. And, I’m convinced that knowing more of this research will help librarians, who are better in tune with what makes their patrons tick anyway, to serve teens even more effectively.

I received a letter from Jennifer Bromann asking that we bring Storytimes for Two-Year-Olds back into print. She had used the book for her programming as well as in library school classes that she was teaching. The popular second edition had gone through a few reprints, but sales had slowed. We decided not to reprint in hopes that Judy Nichols could revise the book. A couple of our editors had contacted Judy to see if she would be willing, but we had not been able to get the project going. Jennifer’s letter inspired us to pick up the ball again. Judy updated the bibliographies of all the programs so that recommended books include newer publications as well as the best of the old favorites. A favorite feature of mine is the basic sign language instructions, which I think can enhance programs even for kids who aren’t hearing-impaired.

A team of reference bibliographers is deep in the task of selecting and annotating sources for ALA’s Guide to Reference, the online database. Working on the project, I can’t help but to have picked up a bit of the history of reference. ALA first published Guide to Reference Book in 1902. I found the 1911 edition in Google Book Search. Once the canon of reference, Guide to Reference Books may be revered more than used, to paraphrase one reference expert. Our challenge with this first online edition is to invigorate it with new functions for today’s reference librarians. Guide to Reference Books has been a behind-the-desk tool. When I read in the ACRL blog the summary of the debate between Steven Bell and Sarah Watstein on the Future of the Reference Desk, I asked myself if Guide to Reference would travel with the librarian on the move. I think it will. We’re building in tools that will help librarians do reference on the fly and create quality resource lists. Steven points out that the style of debate is to polarize the points. Reference librarians need to be in the library, but they need to be in classrooms and around campus too. We plan for the Guide to Reference can carry the “voice of the reference librarian” to support a researcher or a clerk in a library when the librarian is not around. When this classic is online, it’s out from behind the reference desk. Steven Hofmann and I will be previewing Guide to Reference at the ACRL Conference. General Editor Bob Kieft will be in the booth on Saturday.

So, Borders is closing up several of its shops (including some Superstores in Chicago, I hear), severing ties with Amazon, focusing on its own online retailing. Question is, can Borders survive by books and music alone? Or what else is in store for this megalostore?
Pretty amazing how Amazon has gone far beyond being the online bookstore it started out as. Today, someone sent me this link. If nothing else, it certainly displays the charm of the “citizen” reviewer (be sure to read some of the over 900 “consumer reviews”…a coworker said this site has turned into its own “performance art” piece). I laughed til the Tuscan milk came out my nose.

Haiku #1

I’d normally spare
You from my poetry but…
It’s poetry month.

I guess one, now painfully obvious, way to celebrate National Poetry Month is…to post poems on a blog! But here are a few more fun and creative ways to promote poetry to kids - or to the ‘child-at-hearts’ – all from Sylvia Vardell’s “Poetry Aloud Here!”

• Start each day with a poem read aloud by a different guest reader: thirty poems for thirty days.
• Set up a coffeehouse-style poetry reading in your classroom or library. (Do not forget the refreshments.)
• Contact local banks and businesses to ask them to consider displaying student poetry on their walls.
• Write poems on postcards or letters and mail them to friends and neighbors.
• Contact radio stations about hosting a live, on-air poetry reading at either the school, the library, or the radio station.
• Record a poem on your answering machine at home or school or as a cell phone message.
• Make a National Poetry Month time capsule. Students can submit favorite poems or their own original writing. Put the works in the time capsule and seal it ceremoniously, not to be opened until National Poetry Month next year.
• Send a poem to your state or local representative or other government official.
• Make National Poetry Month buttons. Inscribe them with haiku, short poems, or favorite lines of poetry. Wear the buttons the whole month of April.
• Become pen pals with another classroom or student group, locally or nationally, and pass favorite and original poems back and forth throughout the month. Make a book of your correspondence.
• Plan a poetry reading for a senior center, hospital, or local business.
• Experiment with developing a poetry blog where students can share favorite poems or respond to posted poems.

The next installment in the popular PLA Results Series is on its way through the production pipeline! This time experts Jeanne Goodrich and Paula Singer tackle HR in Human Resources for Results: The Right Person for the Right Job. The authors lay the groundwork with a macro view of how the library’s investment in its employees translates into the library’s larger purpose: providing services the library’s customers need and deserve. The following chapters offer a menu of projects to be sampled or consumed entirely, soup to nuts, as your library’s needs warrant. Topics include

• conducting gap analyses
• writing effective job descriptions
• recruiting, testing, screening, and selecting new employees
• developing and implementing a performance management system
• retaining a high-performing workforce

The book is filled with practical strategies for (what else?) getting results, including these Interviewing Dos and Don’ts:

• Prepare. Learn as much as you can about the job; read any materials (such as candidate applications and resumes) you’re given ahead of time.
• Establish rapport with the candidates. Be open and friendly and help them get through their initial nervousness.
• Ask the same questions of each candidate. You want to find out the same sorts of things. Using a structured set of questions and consistent types of follow up questions will insure that you do.
• Listen carefully to what they have to say. Ask follow up questions but fight the urge to talk extensively yourself.
• Watch for nonverbal cues or responses that might signal evasiveness.
• Take notes. If there are more than a few candidates, the interviews can easily run together. You want to be sure your impressions are based on information you’ve gleaned on past performance, not on your superficial impressions.
• Avoid stereotyping or jumping to conclusions. Base your impressions on what you hear and what the candidate can tell you about what she has done in past positions.
• Don’t make snap judgments. Adler believes that more hiring mistakes are made in the first thirty minutes of an interview than at any other time. Why? If our initial impression is favorable, we’ll begin selling the job, magnifying the positives we hear and minimizing any negatives that come up. Conversely, if our initial impression is negative, we dismiss the candidate before we’ve even heard much about his accomplishments in other jobs.
• Be wary of the halo/horn effect. This refers to our being influenced by the last positive or negative thing we heard or, in the case of a current employee, job activity. All information should be taken as a whole, with no one piece carrying a disproportionate weight.
• Avoid contrasting the candidate in front of you with ones you have seen previously. Take in information on each candidate and then make comparisons at the end of the interview day, after you’ve seen and heard them all.
• Avoid telegraphing answers to candidates, verbally or through your own body language. Be friendly and open but don’t coach or lead the interviewee.
• Tell the candidates what will happen next and within what timeframe. If it takes several days to conduct interviews or process results, they need to know.
• Be sure that there is follow up. Candidates deserve the courtesy of knowing where they are in the process. If they are ranked, eliminated, or selected to move to a next step, they need to know as soon as possible.

Back in January, one of the bloggers over at ACRLog, Marc Meola, wrote a post about flash fiction. I took particular notice because last year I connected with Jennie Inglis, who had been writing about her experiences as a librarian using a similar format. I’ve run across a lot of definitions of flash fiction (and its variants, such as microfiction and nanofiction), most having to do with restrictions on word count, though some including characteristics related to plot. Inglis held herself to just one rule: the content had to fit on the back of a business card.

Here’s one of my favorites for a Friday. I hope it gives you a little chuckle!

Life Drawing

She posed naked in front of the class, head down and to the left, right hand across her thigh, towel in one hand. “What does this have to do with distance services?” she wondered. Opening a branch campus required that faculty take on new duties, but modeling for a life drawing class? She decided that this might prove to be a significant addition to her resume.

When I asked Jennie to send in a bio that I could include with this post, she obliged in the same style:

She took her M.S. in library science from the University of Illinois. Children’s librarian for a branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia launched her 14-year career. Soon, it was adult subject reference and then supervisor for The Workplace, a job seekers resource center. Her entre to academic librarianship came at Piedmont College in her home state of Georgia. Assistant Director for Public Services evolved to Coordinator of Off-Campus Services. Flash fiction combines the professional and fantasy life of Jennie Inglis.

I’m happy to say that we’ll be posting a few more of Jennie’s pieces here on the Editions blog on upcoming Fridays. I hope that you’ll be inspired to use up some of your business cards in similar fashion. If you are, send your efforts my way (jfry [at] ala.org) with the subject line Friday Fiction.

We rarely change covers after a book is promoted. We did this time though. Judi Moreillon argued that we had missed the point when we designed a cover with a stock photo of a woman reading to children in a classroom. Why only one teacher? It’s all about the librarian being in a classroom with the classroom teacher. And she sent this picture. Well, I can’t say it won the day.

We don’t involve authors in our cover designs for a number of reasons. (Judi knows them.) I argued that she was being too literal, that the collaboration was “off-stage.” In the end, we went forward with a new cover with no photo. Judi believes teacher-librarians need to be true partners in reading instruction, in the classroom. This is what collaboration looks like. Collaborative Strategies for Teaching Reading Comprehension: Maximizing Your Impact is due to be published in a couple weeks.

Here in Chicago, front-page news today has been the story of the 250-lb. bar patron (who also happens to be a Chicago cop) beating up a 115-lb. bartender because she refused to serve him a drink. (If you don’t mind looking at the grisly video, you can watch it on YouTube…it’s pretty disturbing…you may want to just read the news story to get the gist.) (What I found as disturbing as the beating is seeing the other bar patrons doing nothing).

Anyway, it reminded me of what a tough job it must be facing the unknown, which is of course what anyone who deals with the public every day faces. Bartenders know it. And, so do librarians. I asked our author Mark Willis, who wrote Dealing with Difficult People in the Library if he had seen the video. He actually knew about the story, but had purposefully avoided watching it. “Seeing that kind on cruelty makes me ill.”

But, because I brought it up, he decided he would watch it and see if there may be some lessons in it for librarians who may not have to deal daily with “overserved” patrons as bartenders do, but who may find themselves in threatening situations. I felt badly bringing it up because I certainly didn’t want him to feel compelled to watch something he didn’t want to watch (and I gave him that out!). But, he did see some how the situation could remind librarians how to react when a situation with an angry or unstable patron turns ugly:

“I watched [the video] to think about how the situation is similar to what we may encounter in libraries and to think about any lessons this may have for us. I am not going to second guess the bar tender, she was doing her best under really difficult circumstances so I don’t want anything to be viewed as a criticism of her. No one knows what they will do until they are in the situation. That said, there are a few reminders we can take away from this horrible case:

“- Any time a patron exhibits signs of violent, aggressive behavior, we need to call the police. Don’t wait for something bad to happen. I think library staff sometimes hesitates, knowing that it often blows over. But things happen so quickly, waiting can have tragic consequences. If you call, the worst that will happen is that the police will show up and the people that started the problem have left or calmed down. What can happen when you don’t call is potentially much worse.

“Teamwork is so important, too. As soon as library staff hears raised voices, they need to drop everything and see what’s going on. That puts more people on the scene to calm things down, to look for solutions, to discourage violence and to call the police, if necessary. I don’t know if this bar tender had co-workers or not but you would hope that when someone is shouting and aggressive like this person was, that situation becomes everyone’s priority. Our library has panic buttons under the public service desks so staff can summon help without being noticed.

“Dealing with someone under the influence of drugs or alcohol is one of the hardest things to do. They can be so unpredictable. A goal with someone upset and under the influence is to do what you can to get them out of the building, even if it means breaking policy. Don’t expect much success in explaining policy to someone under the influence and upset. Let them take a book even if they have $30 in fines on their card, give change for a fifty, do what you can to help them move on. Then the director may follow up with a letter or phone call the next day but avoiding violence at the time is the immediate goal.

“We have to know as much as possible about causes of violence. A fairly new diagnosis for behavior such as road rage is intermittent explosive disorder (IED) “characterized by repeated episodes of aggressive, violent behavior that are grossly out of proportion to the situation. And, according to a June 2006 study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, intermittent explosive disorder is more common than once thought. Intermittent explosive disorder occurs most often in young men and may affect as many as 7.3 percent of adults in the United States. “ (from www.mayoclinic.com). With IED, the episode may be set off by what seems like minor tension or confrontation, the kind of thing that makes most of us grit our teeth. In a few people, that goes way beyond, to actual violence or destruction of property. Again, when someone starts showing signs of aggressiveness and the potential for violence, the goal has to be to prevent violence. Do what you can to facilitate the person leaving the library and call the police if needed. Don’t let following policy cause someone to get hurt.”

Again, while it’s not likely that a librarian will be placed in the situation the bartender was, it can never hurt to be prepared and to learn how to defuse a potentially dangerous situation.

One challenge I often hear from librarians…particularly those new to management… is discovering things “‘they’ didn’t teach us in library school.” For those who hold leadership positions in the 7,000+ small libraries in the country…where juggling multiple roles is the order of the day…that concern is amplified.

This week, I’ve been working on a manuscript, The Small Library Survival Guide: Creatively Doing More with Limited Resources, by Herb Landau, director of a tiny library in the heavily Amish community of Lancaster, Pa. After working in corporate America for some 30-years, Herb took a “retirement job” as the first full-time, certified director in the library’s 40-year history. Retirement, ha! The first year, when the library faced a 43% cut in state public library aid, battled a proposed 20% cut in county library aid and watched county voters reject a county tax referendum to provide only $24 per family each year to ensure public library survival, he realized he’s have to bring in the best of his corporate experience to keep the library afloat. In this book (look for it in the fall), he will bridge that gap between “the business skills you don’t always get in library school” with the on-the-ground job of daily librarianship. (In 2006, his library, Milanof-Schock Library, the was named the Best Small Library In America by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Library Journal.)

About 50% of his time, says Landau, is devoted to fund-raising. “When people ask what fund-raising tools we have tried, I answer, only half in jest, “everything except pay toilets and slot machines, so far,” he quips. Some of his innovative, if not unorthodox fund-raising tactics: providing a passport application service, working with an outside firm to recycle donated printer cartridges, cell phones and other computer parts for cash, offering an exam proctoring service. May sound like chump change, but the dollars can add up fast.

Of course, a library cannot live on Friends of the Library book sales alone. The book is full of funding ideas (as well as other “they-didn’t-teach-us-that-in-library-school ideas”…from surveying customers to strategic planning to marketing). Below is his advice on developing a fund-raising strategy:

As with all important library activities, fund raising should also have a structured strategic plan (see Chapter 4) to ensure it is done in an efficient and effective manner. As a minimum, you should establish annual fund raising objectives derived from your annual budget projections for needed income. It may prove desirable to develop a long-range fund raising plan and incorporate it into your strategic plan, linking fund raising objectives to the resource requirements and schedules for your various strategic objectives. As with any strategic plan, your fund raising plan should have clearly delineated goals, objectives, strategies and tactics as well as assignments of leadership and work responsibilities. It should present defined schedules, resources needed and expenditure budgets for fund raising tasks. Be prepared to invest both time and money in your library’s fund-raising efforts. If you need to hire paid consultants to advise and guide your fund-raising, then do it. My daddy’s advice that “you gotta spend some money to make some money” is most relevant here. Do not be afraid to consult with people who have fund raising experience and to co-opt them to serve on your volunteer fund-raising committees. I have found that people with both non-profit fund raising and industry marketing experience, particularly in direct sales, can give you much useful advice.