The new young adult books

Language changes. It always has, and probably it always will, but that won’t stop those of us who enjoy language from railing against awful usage and mistakes that become common practice. Who doesn’t enjoy a good argument about the Oxford comma or a rant against verbing? (Most people you say? Oh. But anyway, for some of us, expressing disgust with new/wrong word choices is a sport.) Language changes.

So when Time Magazine listed its 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time, I immediately braced myself because I now know that the mainstream press has begun to use “young adult” to mean “children’s book”. Many children read Charlotte’s Web in second or third grade, and there aren’t a lot of 7-year-olds who qualify as “young adult” in my book. But I had this shock of understanding when I looked at the list that those of us who know the difference have lost this battle–Time Magazine will get dozens more readers than this blog post. Or millions more. Realistically.

There are a few of us who care about this, and we will continue to point out how absurd it is in a related article titled 17 Famous Writers on Their Favorite Young Adult Books that Martin Amis says Goodnight Moon. Clearly he was asked for his favorite children’s book. Maybe that error is so absurd that the editorial staff at Time will be more careful…but I doubt it. Over at CNN they have the list of Young Adult Books That Changed Our Lives with the Narnia books on it, along with several other solidly fourth/fifth grade books. Publishers and bookstores have an interest in pushing the boundaries of the enormously popular YA category down to get more readers. There is also a perception that children don’t like to be called children.

My other theory is that young adult books have become so similar in their themes and structure that writers throw on children’s books for the sake of variety. A list made up mostly of dystopian books and romances becomes dull very quickly. But that’s not fair to the many excellent YA writers like Maggie Stiefvater and E. Lockhart, who write uniquely voiced and richly imagined stories for teens. No, it is probably not thought out at all–it is probably an editor who doesn’t know much about the topic deciding quickly that “young adult” is trendy while “children’s literature” is not, and going with the trendier term.

I’m going to try not to let it get on my nerves. I can’t afford to be cranky about everything.

 

Digitizing Our Treasures

Many in the library world will by now have read The Aspen Institute’s Report, Rising to the Challenge: Re-envisioning Public Libraries, and if you haven’t, you should.  It is thoughtfully prepared and presented, and it makes an important point about the key role that the public library is geared up to play in the new world of technology and community. I completely support the idea that public libraries have to be putting their attention on preparing for the future. I don’t agree with the line in it about public libraries in the past being an amenity instead of a necessity–that’s never been true–but overall I think it makes many meaningful and useful points.

For me personally, it’s funny that it came along right as I have again been getting concerned about losing our past. Friends of mine who work for a prestigious university told a chilling story at dinner about going to the reference room of their prestigious university library and finding it empty except for some cheap furniture. The reference books, it seems, have been moved into random locations where they cannot be easily accessed, and the collection as a whole has been broken up.

Nobody in the public library world would find it surprising that a reference collection is being downsized. That’s what’s currently happening, as answers to questions are increasingly available online. But in the academic world, where sources must be meticulously cited so the next scholar can come along and use those same sources…those libraries are getting rid of their books, too?  What is the point to a footnote that leads to a book that no longer exists? Do we as a society no longer value scholarship at all? It is the nature of architects to find books things that interfere with the good use of space, but should the librarians be acting like we agree?

So that’s disturbing. Then I participated in a group where the leader took a creation story written by Virginia Hamilton and turned it into readers’ theater.  And I went back to my library, and of course we no longer own that book, though I know we once did. There are still 16 copies in our library consortium, though, so no need to panic, right? Right, except that in the great weeding frenzy that is taking place in libraries these days, I can’t find anyone out there who is making sure that we aren’t losing our last copies of things.

I have said before that I believe our patrons/taxpayers think that we are the curators of our collections. Someone recently expressed surprise that while museum staff think of libraries and museums being interconnected, librarians do not, and I think that is true. And it’s partly because we don’t want to be held responsible for our collections in the way that a museum feels responsible. “My library is not an archival library,” we say. “These things are available online,” we say. “If people were interested, they would have checked them out sometime in the last ten/five/three/two years,” we say.

As a children’s literature fan, I am particularly concerned about those books, and the fact that no one is taking responsibility for making sure they don’t disappear altogether. We can feel somewhat assured that a good percentage of adult materials are being digitized. Who is digitizing the children’s material? Who is making sure that Virginia Hamilton’s glorious collection of creation stories from ancient cultures–the stories that tell us about how the people who lived thousands of years ago thought and felt and how they connect with each other–who is preserving those?

It’s not a rhetorical question. I want there to be an answer to it. We are not just weeding our books from the 70s/80s with cheesy covers. We aren’t just weeding our old series paperbacks with yellow pages. We are beginning to take bites out of our collections that represent some of the best writing and scholarship that we have. It’s a little like in Ally Condie’s Matched–will only the 100 designated poems remain in the end? We’re not there yet, but we’re not fighting hard enough, either.

What management doesn’t get about Youth Services

CC BY-SA 3.0

Cutting edge libraries these days are changing up the way they do things. Management teams look at the traditional ways that libraries are set up, with an Adult Services Department and a Youth Services Department and a Technical Services Department and a Circulation Department and they get frustrated with what they like to call “silos”. The idea of a silo is that people in each area stay unto themselves. It impedes collaboration and innovation when the people in your library don’t spend time together working for the overall good of the library and stay in their silos.

So some public libraries are trying to break down the silos by organizing the functions of the library in different ways. They may put all of their programming specialists together in one department. They may pull the materials selection out of the departments and into the Technical Services Department which is often then called Materials Handling. They may have a Customer Service Department that has responsibilities at all of the library desks so there is a uniform level of service offered. They may combine their adult, teen and children’s desks into one big desk where all questions are answered. They may be eliminating the desks altogether and going with “roaming” librarians armed with an iPad and a headset. These are all things that are currently happening at libraries in the Chicago area where I work.

For the people working with adults, I think any of these things can work very well. But too many children’s managers get stuck in the extremely unpleasant position of trying to defend the status quo and thus being perceived as being balky, or stodgy, or unwilling to change. I’m sure in some cases that is true, and yet I think most of the time their concerns are rightly with their particular patrons. Child development means that a six-month-old is a very different creature from a two-year-old who is very unlike a six-year-old who again differs in many ways from an 11-year-old. On the other hand, a 25-year-old is not that different from a 65-year-old. They have some different interests, sometimes, and as patrons age they have some new needs for different formats, perhaps, but by and large they are a lot the same.

Children’s librarians must deal with the needs of all of their different patrons (including the parents and grandparents and teachers and caregivers) all of the time. As a very smart children’s manager mentioned to me recently, they know that you can’t get rid of your children’s desk and just use roaming librarians, because kids aren’t supposed to approach friendly-looking strangers who are standing around. They need to go to the official desk, where they learn through experience that those are the children’s librarians and they are helpful and nice. Children’s managers know that programming for the age groups is widely varied, and because they work with the children in the department, they get a feel for what will work, what won’t, what will be thrilling (Minecraft!) and what might flop (Online Homework Help). They know what is developmentally appropriate and what time of day children of those ages are likely to come to the library in a way that someone off in a programming department with little-to-no desk time cannot know.

So because children’s has always been about hands-on experiences, and interactivity and proactive offers of help and instruction to patrons, it can be frustrating to be told that management has discovered those things and they now feel they know more about them than the children’s staff. In the worst-case situations, the children’s supervisors are marginalized and their authority and control is gradually eroded.

As someone who has been in upper management for the past five years, I hear some of my colleagues at other libraries talking with exasperation and sometimes even rolling their eyes at the pig-headed youth services people. And to me, it seems like the breaking down of silos is resulting in a new set of silos, especially if we aren’t doing a good job of listening to each other. Change is not a bad thing, but when it is handled with top-down authority without paying attention to the people who have first-person knowledge, it is going to end up being changed back, something that has happened in several libraries in my area.

Find other ways to break down the silos. Put together teams to work on projects or areas. Do cross-training so staff can get first-hand experience at working with other patrons. Work with sub-groups of staff to plan for the future. Get people talking. And respect the knowledge and experience of your children’s managers. They know what they are talking about.

 

Hospitality

International symbol of hospitality
“pineapple” by giniger on Flickr
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There are people I have worked with over the years who seemed to me to be the definition of hospitable. They will bake dozens of batches of Christmas cookies to give away. They will organize a potluck and make sure everyone–the vegetarians, the gluten-free, the diabetics, etc–has something they will enjoy. They invite people to their homes, and when you get there the homes are immaculate and beautiful and comfortable and welcoming. They make you feel at home.

Hospitality comes hard to me. When I take on the responsibility for, say, providing breakfast for a visiting group to the library, none of the decisions come easily. Just picking out the kind of orange juice takes me ten minutes–pulp? no pulp? calcium? which brand is better? Is only juice enough? Maybe we need some cranberry juice, too. But maybe not. What if it spills? Is it too sugary? By the time I am done I will either have over-purchased or under-purchased, and I will be frayed and tired and sad in the knowledge that whatever I have picked is wrong. And I don’t normally fuss over things! It is hospitality that is my stumbling block.

It is so not-my-thing that I am startled to find that I want to talk about hospitality and libraries. We talk a great deal about customer service. We talk about promoting things in the library–collections, programs, services. We try to make things efficient, and we move increasingly toward having people take care of themselves through self-checks, and picking up their holds instead of asking for them. But I think we don’t talk nearly enough about hospitality.

I started down this road with a piece by Art Petty (thanks, kongtemplation@twitter.com!) that talks eloquently about how a mundane-to-unpleasant business flight became memorable through a flight attendant’s announcement of a passenger’s retirement. A great sermon this morning also spoke about hospitality, and made it clear that the essence of hospitality is not if you have picked the correct juice but is all about recognizing someone as a person.

Customer service is a fine thing, but there’s something fundamentally different about hospitality. Service emphasizes servant, and of course we are the servants of the taxpayers and shouldn’t forget that. But hospitality emphasizes welcome and making people feel at home. It might be a better way for public service staff to think of their work–that they are hosts in a way, and it’s their job to make patrons feel comfortable and that we recognize them as individuals, not cogs in a system.

However, Episcopal priest Jane Schaefer makes the good point that “True hospitality is sensitive to the needs of the person receiving it.” Not every patron wants to be greeted as they enter or wants the offer of help. You have to read body language and be sensitive to the signals a patron is sending out, so you aren’t interfering with someone’s privacy. But taking that moment to look and see how you can help, what a person might need (assistance checking out, say, or help finding where they are going) and taking that moment to chat may seem unprofessional, but might be the very thing that makes them feel that their time at your library was well-spent.

So, I guess I will have to revise my notions about hospitality. I will probably never be good at food-related hospitality since the decisions there worry me too much. But the true essence of hospitality has much more to do with being observant and kind, and I would like to see my library turn its attention toward creating a culture of hospitality. We can all use a little more kindness and attention, don’t you think?

 

To support the common good

Like a great many other people this past week, I threw a little money in on a Kickstarter project to bring back Reading Rainbow. It has now far surpassed its $1,000,000 goal and is up to over $3,000,000 with some 89,000 supporters, after a mere three days. It’s not just nostalgia that is working to bring LeVar Burton’s project back–there are plenty of DVDs out there of the original Reading Rainbow, and they remain delightful. Anyone wanting to revisit the past can do so easily. No, it’s that people found that program to be a great way to get kids excited about what they will find in books–that the work of learning to read will be worth it if they get good books to read. So I am delighted to be part of a crowdsourced project that will get kids reading new books by new authors.

I mention this because I ran across a very disturbing article from the Huffington Post about libraries under attack by the Tea Party. It sums up a situation in Kentucky where the Tea Party is fighting public libraries in court to try to cut off their funding. It quotes one of the Tea Partiers as saying, “Our country was founded upon those taking action against tyrannic government.”

And here’s what’s funny. As one website puts it, Benjamin Franklin was “the original crowdsourcer.” He put together 50 people willing to pay 40 shillings each to buy books to share, thus creating the original public library. Their motto was  “Communiter Bona Profundere Deum Est” or, “To support the common good is divine.” That would be the Benjamin Franklin who is one of the Founding Fathers so beloved by the Tea Party and other super-conservative people. The common good was once considered a moral imperative, not an evil concept to be fought at every turn.

Public libraries make it possible for people, regardless of income and circumstance, to share in the same knowledge as people with rich resources. Libraries have always been about access to information, and that is just as true now as it ever was. That information is now delivered in a wide variety of ways, not just books. Libraries have been around literally thousands of years in some form, as a way to preserve history and thought. They still support the common good, whether that is realized through kids who can come to the library and find the books featured on Reading Rainbow or through adults who come to the library to fill out a work application or who find the book that helps them plan their new business, or the program that brings them together with other people who share the same interest.

There are libraries in my own area that seem like they are being attacked from within by the super-conservatives, whether they call themselves Tea Partiers or not. It feels like we are living in dangerous times. What we need, clearly, are people who believe in libraries to stand up and speak out and run for library boards. When I say “believe in libraries” I don’t mean are willing to throw money thoughtlessly at whatever people want, but I do mean people who are willing to make good choices with taxpayer dollars to bring information and knowledge to their own communities. Because Communiter Bona Profundere Deum Est: To Support the Common Good Is Divine.

Context and understanding

Almost every day, our dog Mac gets taken for a walk in the park, and aside from someone knocking at the door, it is pretty much the most exciting thing in his life. While on his journey, squirrels are of the utmost interest to Mac–you could offer him the tastiest treat ever and he would ignore it if a squirrel was nearby. Kentucky dog Mac knows about squirrels, and can spot them 12 feet overhead completely disguised by foliage.

He knows about other dogs–he knows they smell interesting but are potentially dangerous. He keeps a good eye on them, and if one of them barks as he is walking by, he will defiantly water a shrub to show that HE is not at ALL worried. Cats are riveting to Mac. They are terrifying and delicious-smelling. We do not let Mac get too close to cats usually. Kids are a little worrisome to Mac, and he has been known to hide under a table when they are around.

The geese at the park ought to be terrifying to Mac, especially this time of year when they might have a nest nearby that they are protecting. They make scary noises, and they have flappy wings, and sometimes they are only a few feet away, and yet Mac appears to barely even see them. I mean he literally seems not to perceive that they are there, unless they move, and even then, there is no defiant watering of trees or barking or hiding. He doesn’t respond. Same with ducks. What ducks?

I think kids are the same way. It’s hard for them to even perceive stuff that is completely outside of their experience.  It doesn’t click.  I remember so vividly as a child hearing people talk about things that made absolutely no sense to me. For instance, in Girl Scouts the scout leader would start talking about what we were doing and I had no idea what she was talking about or even what the word was that she was saying. She would be two minutes into her explanation of what we were supposed to do with some pieces of plastic to turn them into a lanyard, and I would be utterly baffled because I had no idea what a lanyard was. It was not a word I had ever heard before, it had no context in the church basement where we were meeting, and I didn’t take in any of the directions because I stopped listening. Spoiler alert: I never did make a lanyard.

Context means everything. I get the impression that Mac just doesn’t even know where to file those big birds away in his brain, so he just chooses to ignore them. If I didn’t know what a lanyard was, what it looked like, or why I might need it, I had nowhere to attach the subsequent instructions about how to make it. That is a recurring story from my childhood, where people were talking over my head and didn’t stop and explain so I could make sense of it all. Frustrating!

So I make a point when working with kids to make sure that whatever I’m talking about with them makes enough sense that they will bother listening. You can lose a group of kids on a very short book if you never got them interested in it in the first place, and you can use a long, old-fashioned or complicated book with them and have a fully engaged group so long as you take the step of explaining things to them that they might need to know for it to make sense. Nothing is more boring than grownups yacking about stuff you don’t understand, and once you’ve checked out, you have pretty much lost the chance to understand later.

If people would just spend a little more time giving kids the context they need to understand what you’re talking about, everyone would be happier. It’s what Mister Rogers was so good at–making sense of the world to kids who are so young that most adults don’t bother to try. And by the way, it is also a great idea with adults to make sure they have a context for what you’re trying to talk about, too. It’s really easy to lose people with jargon or failing to explain first why you’re talking about whatever it is you’re talking about.

As for Mac, it is probably just as well that he is oblivious to the ducks and geese at the park. It would probably not go well for him if he tried to get close enough to smell them anyway.

These ducks were very near. Did Mac notice? No.

Can you spot the squirrel? Mac can!

Mission first

To me, the best thing about working in a public library is that the work matters. It changes lives. It sparks interests that will lead both children and adults in new and wonderful directions. It makes it possible for people who aren’t as wealthy as others to work with a 3D printer or use the Internet or check out an e-book. It helps parents lay down the foundations for their child’s future in school and life with programs like 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten (1KBK). It helps seniors stay connected. The work matters.

So, when your library is going through a hard time, or you are going through a hard time in your library, the mission is what keeps you going. I have always said that no one is a children’s librarian for money, because they couldn’t pay you enough to do it. They do it for love. What I have discovered in Administration, working with other people in the library, is that they do it for love, too. I have found that the people in Technical Services who work on acquiring, cataloging and processing materials are very much in tune with the person who paid for the book (the taxpayer) and will be using it. The people working in IT know that keeping the computer network and patron computers running makes a very real difference in people’s lives. Although the adult services librarians don’t have to deal with screaming toddlers or riled-up middle schoolers, they have their own quirky patron personalities to deal with, and they do not get paid enough for that. They do it for love, too.

Sometimes people try hard to equate library work with retail work, especially when they talk about customer service. It’s true that you can get good ideas from retail training, because sometimes stores and businesses have done a better job than we do at explaining the finer points of good service to their staff. There are some things that are comparable, but there’s a really big difference between being nice to people for a paycheck, and being nice to people because you believe that the public library should be a warm and welcoming place even for people who are being annoying. I see kindness on display every hour of every day at my library.

Library boards can sometimes get so caught up in protecting the taxpayers’ tax dollars that they begin to see the staff as takers instead of people who are dedicating their lives to serving their communities. It’s unfortunate, and I’m not sure what the solution to that is, except for the taxpayers themselves who love the library to remind the board that they value the library and the people it takes to run it.

In the meantime, as my colleague sometimes reminds me, Breathe. Eat your vegetables. Get some sleep. And I will remind you and myself, focus on the mission. Your work changes lives.