Serving Teens Through Readers Advisory

A guide to help readers' advisors serve teens. Offers techniques to connect with teens on their own terms, provides tips on creating a positive advisory experience, and includes "sure bets" lists, thematic reading lists, and sources of reviews.

A one-stop resource for all kinds of readers' advisory issues, including: how to advise patrons on all kinds of media, from fiction and nonfiction to audiobooks, graphic novels and even reference materials; how to provide services to senior citizens, teens and even readers who are incarcerated; how to handle author visits and book groups; how to enhance storytelling, even for adults; how to market and promote RA; and much more.

This guide will help readers' advisors understand what teens appreciate about their favorite genres while also serving as a helpful collection development tool.

There are plenty of resources about teen services that focus on YA readers’ advisory and programming ideas. But the basics of day-to-day service to teens in the library setting, a discipline requiring specific skills, is all too often glossed over in professional literature. As a result many LIS grads begin serving teens armed with an incomplete understanding of why their job is both important and unique, and what they need to know from day one. This compromises their effectiveness as both young adult librarians and advocates for teen services. In this down-to-earth book, former Library Journal Mover & Shaker Velásquez explores real-world challenges and obstacles to teen service that often present themselves, offering solutions and guidance for both new YA librarians and those wanting to freshen up their approach. Presenting fresh ways of thinking about the role of the teen services librarian and how it fits into the organizational structure, Velásquez Combines field-tested approaches with current research to tackle common teen library service issues such as truancy, curfews, programming philosophy and mission, privacy, and organizational resistance, whether subtle or overtAddresses each topic from the perspective of working with teens, family members, fellow colleagues, and community stakeholdersPresents realistic strategies to help shift a library’s culture towards one that embraces teens and teen servicesShows how to get the most out of a library’s teen space, discussing factors like location, age restrictions, time of day restrictions, and staffing, plus suggestions for using the shelf-space of the YA collection as a starting pointThis book goes beyond the “what” and “how” of teen services to get to the “why,” ensuring that both new and experienced practitioners will understand the ways teens want to use public space, discover and create information, and interact with peers and adults.

Graphic novels have found a place on library shelves but many librarians struggle to move this expanding body of intellectual, aesthetic, and entertaining literature into the mainstream of library materials.

" ... With an emphasis on non-fiction and the boy-friendly categories of genre fiction, this book offers a wealth of material including tips for how to booktalk one-on-one as well as in large groups, methods of performing indirect readers' advisory with parents or teachers, and suggested read-alikes as well as titles to offer a boy in place of a book he did not like or would not read ..."--Page 4 of cover.

ALA's popular and respected Whole Library Handbook series continues with a volume specifically geared towards those who serve young adults, gathering stellar articles and commentary from some of the country's most innovative and successful teen services librarians.