Welcome back to Season Five of Linking Our Libraries!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. Our members are libraries of all sorts. This season we are working through some skills that people in any kind of library will need to be successful in their work.

In this episode we will talk about the service most people think of first when they think about cool things libraries do: Children’s Services. While it’s not the only thing we do, it’s important

This week we have returning Guest Host Kelly Groth, from the Great River Regional Library System to help us get some ideas!

The Basics:

We are big fans of the idea that kids are important parts of any library – public, school, even special library organizations. So we support the idea that service to kids is not just handing them a moldy, torn book from the 80s, or doing the same story time, or having no posters on the walls. It’s not actively working to shush them over anything else, or to ensure they are on their best behavior in the library.

Instead our job is to do just what we do with every patron: actively work to connect the patron to the information resources we provide. That might be books, or computers, or programming. We are filled with so many great things – let’s be sure they are shared with kids!

The International Federation of Library Associations advocates for good service to children in libraries. “A quality children’s library equips children with lifelong learning and literacy skills, enabling them to participate and contribute to the community. It should constantly respond to the increasing changes in the society and meet the information, cultural and entertainment needs of all children. Every child should be familiar and comfortable with the local library and possess the skills to find their way around libraries in general.”

It’s probably good to think of kids as potential  life-long library users. Sure, today you are working with one in your elementary school library, and despairing because she – once again – dropped a flower pot filled with dirt on the carpet. Take a deep breath and remember the long view. In just a few years, she’s going to be taking the Intro to the Library class at her college, then using the hospital’s library as she works through a medical degree, visiting the community museum’s archive,  and bringing her own kids to the local public library for story time and crafts. If you start yelling at her now, or making her feel like a bad person because she made a library mistake at the age of eight – will all the rest of that happen?

We encourage libraries to serve kids because they are patrons and worthy of respect on their own merits, regardless of anything else. Are they there? Yes? Then that’s it:  they are your patron, and it’s your job to serve their information needs. If it helps you to do this even better by taking that long view – go right ahead!

Treating kids like patrons also means letting kids make some decisions about their reading. Would you return to a library where staff took books out of your hand, and said they were too easy or too hard for you? Obviously, you would not! That would be terrible! Library staff can help to guide kids to find books they enjoy, and books they will gain value from reading – but it is not at all your job to confide anyone to reading only a level you think fits their grade level. We share information freely in libraries – it is one of the foundational ethical principles of our profession. Doing otherwise is poor service by a library to a patron.

And of course, good  library service is more than “just” books or games or technology!  But it is for sure those things too. We will happily – and forcefully – correct anyone who says kids should not be playing games in the library.  This is an annoying habit left over from the Bad Old Days of librarianship, where staffers believed it was their duty to improve the morals of people by giving them only “improving” books. People. These dark days of bad service are behind us as a profession; be sure they are not darkening your library! Talk to us if this is a problem to be solved in your library; let’s see how we can make it better for everyone.

Programming is one of those things that is too easy to overlook when you are working in a library. Too many schools, especially, have only one or two people working in them – and maybe nobody has training in what it means to run a good library. Again, the days where we shushed and just handed people books are over – good riddance! Programs are a great way of encouraging kids, especially those who may be more reluctant readers, to connect with the library and with your stuff.

Don’t worry about spending a lot of money – that’s fun, but not necessary. Start a lunchtime book group, bring in an author – in person on using Skype Classroom, do some drawing about a book. It goes without saying that adding glitter to any program will make it ten times more fun – and about 50 times more complicated to clean up. We’ll leave that decision to you to make. (Note: Mary really likes glitter, and doesn’t care that it never comes out of the carpet!)

We have talked about a lot of theories and ideas so far today; now let’s get more ideas from Kelly on how these work out in real library work!

Additional Resources:

We are providing a few sample ideas here. CMLE members – get in touch with us if you want to talk about your this in more detail. We are here to help you!

• Guidelines for Children’s Library Services by IFLA Libraries for Children and Young Adults Section
• Beyond Books: Library Services for Children By: U.S. Department of Education
• The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC),a division of the American Library Association, is the world’s largest organization dedicated to the support and enhancement of library service to children. ALSC’s network includes more than 4,200 children’s and youth librarians, children’s literature experts, publishers, education and library school faculty members, and other adults dedicated to creating a better future for children through libraries.
• Children’s Book Sequels A-Z arrangement of children’s books in series, sorted and searchable by author and series

Books Read

As always, all the book information we are sharing here is from Amazon.com. If you click on a link, and happen to buy a book – or anything else – Amazon will give us a small share of their profits on your sale. Yay! Thanks in advance for your support!

Dexter meets Mr. and Mrs. Smith in this wildly compulsive debut thriller about a couple whose fifteen-year marriage has finally gotten too interesting…

Our love story is simple. I met a gorgeous woman. We fell in love. We had kids. We moved to the suburbs. We told each other our biggest dreams, and our darkest secrets. And then we got bored.

We look like a normal couple. We’re your neighbors, the parents of your kid’s friend, the acquaintances you keep meaning to get dinner with.

We all have our secrets to keeping a marriage alive.

Ours just happens to be getting away with murder.

Early one morning a young boy wakes to his special alarm clock. He puts on his hearing aids and clothes, then goes to wake his father. Together they brave the cold as they walk down the dirt road that leads to the beach.

Rhyming has never been so much fun as in Steve Webb’s bold, new picture book, which encourages children to read aloud, following the easy and catchy rhythm of the text.

“Skunka Tanka
Skunka Tanka
Tanka Tanka Skunk!
They’ve got the beat, and so do their friends.”

Conclusion

Thanks to Kelly for coming in to work through this topic with us! Be sure you are subscribed to this podcast to get all the library skills directly to your favorite app each week. And you can check out our shownotes for each episode to get all the info we discussed, along with the links to more resources. Every episode we have created is on our website: cmle.org.

If you want to enjoy our book group podcast, subscribe to Reading With Libraries to get a new book, or a whole new genre, each week.

Thank you listening today for joining us! Check back in with us next week for another library competency – we are looking forward to more chatting about library work.