Are you looking for a creative way
to engage your teens with the library and books? Does your YA collection need a
boost to get it off the shelves and into the hands of readers? Do you need some
ideas for how to put your CYC intern to work this summer? If you answered “yes”
to any of these questions, read on to hear about BookMatch Teen, a session from
this year’s ALA Annual Conference.
During this session, two librarians from
Brooklyn Public Library talked about the teen internship they started about two
years ago that centers around training teens in readers’ advisory. Teens had to
apply for the internship, go through an interview process, and then commit to
completing the 9-week internship. During those 9 weeks, interns were trained in
readers’ advisory (librarians showed them how to use the OPAC, Goodreads,
Novelist, etc and taught them how to do a reference interview), met authors and
other professionals from the publishing world, learned about marketing
techniques like #bookstagram, went behind-the-scenes of the collection
development department, learned how to write book reviews, and made book lists
as a final project. The teens also made a “Match Box” where people could submit
readers’ advisory requests and the teens would make a personalized list for
them.
This internship had some really great results
for both the teens and the library. Teens got to experience the interview
process and were exposed to careers not only in librarianship but also in
publishing and marketing. They learned valuable customer service skills as they
tackled the reference interview process, and also realized that everyone,
including teens, deserve great customer service. They became confident,
comfortable library users and had great success getting teens to check out
books. My favorite result was that many teens mentioned the program helped them
improve their social skills, and many made new and lasting friendships with
other interns.
BookMatch Teen was obviously a large-scale
program. The coordinators advised offering a stipend or another incentive like
volunteers hours since it was a big commitment and teens’ time is valuable. It
would be great if we could incorporate something like this into our CYC program
here at Pratt, but I think there are ways to do aspects of this on a smaller
scale, too. You could start a “Readers’ Advisory Club” with teens you notice
already have an interest in reading and introduce them to basic library skills.
You could show your CYC intern how to use Goodreads or other RA tools and ask
them to make booklists around specific themes. Maybe you could set up a table
for them in the teen section so kids could go to them for recommendations once
you’ve given them some training. You could even make this into passive
programming by creating a “Match Box” and recruiting a few enthusiastic readers
to answer the requests. The possibilities are endless! For more information on
the BookMatch Teen program, visit their website: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/incubator-submissions/bookmatch-teen .
Meaghan McKeron
Collection
Management
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