Thursday, May 31, 2018

Bookmark This: Summer Reading Hype Videos!

Okay everyone, I did a ridiculous thing and accidentally deleted my original SRP Hype Video content! Whoops... Good thing I never delete any email I ever receive so I could find them all again!

I decided to just put them all together into one post, a one-stop shop for your Summer Reading calm down/check-in needs. These are all the video from 2016 and 2017.

If you weren't around a few years ago, here's the context:
I started this position in the middle of Summer Reading. When the start of SRP came around again, I knew I wanted to do something to support our member library youth services staff. I thought back to what helped me, and I remembered how comforted I felt when I read (and read again and again) posts like Ingrid at The Magpie Librarian's "I Got 99 Problems and They're All Related to Summer Reading." I laughed, I cried, I felt comforted. Like we were all in this together.

So I reached out to some folks and got enough responses to send one video per week from June to August to our member library staff. The next summer I put out an all-call on the blog (since it was no longer a surprise) and I got fewer responses, but still got some. I wonder what changed between 2016 and 2017? It's a mystery.

Anyway, here is a sloth in a teacup followed by some amazing library Youth Services staff from all around the Internet ready to talk self-care, sing pump-you-up songs, and make you laugh. Forever. Because they're recorded.

It will all be okay. You're doing great.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

A Fresh Take on Book Brackets: An Outreach Event Series!

This post was written by Jennifer Johnson, my 2018 blog intern. You can read more programming posts by her here.

One of my favorite things about my job is that I am fortunate enough to do not only public programs, but outreach programs as well. This month, I want to share an opportunity that I had to do a program with an outreach group that worked better in their setting than it ever would have as an in-house library program.

For years, I’d wanted to do a Battle of the Books at our library, but we had very spotty participation with the public, and anything we tried along those lines just sort of fizzled out. From August to December 2017, I had conducted a weekly book club with an after-school group at one of our local schools. They were the first to invite me to do this and I was very excited about the possibilities. For that first semester, we read one middle grade novel, going through it in small chunks each week. But for this spring, starting in January and ending a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to try a Battle of the Books with them. I was excited to do this because not only would it be fun, it would also expose the kids to several books that they might not otherwise pick up. I also viewed it as a chance for them to begin building a summer reading list with title suggestions from our brackets. The kids involved in this program were second through fourth graders. The Battle was a hit from start to finish and here’s how we did it.