YA Staff: Knowledge, skills and abilities

Offering quality customer service is an important responsibility for a young adult librarian. The best way to find out what those services should be like is from the teens. The sample survey distributed in class was a good example of a way to evaluate the library services because it included most of the library services. The survey had given the option to choose which ones need improvement and which ones were done well.

According to our manual there is a lot of training to be done with teens and teachers. This is something that I thought about today when I was at the "Back to School" Meeting at the Grand Army Plaza. This meeting talked about a program that will be available for high school students grades 10-12 who are interested in working in libraries. This program is called a "Multicultural Internship" Program where 50 high achieving teens will do 200 hours of service from November to June and will receive a $250 stipend for their work. This is a great way to teach teens to be information literate and to be able to use those skills further on in their career.

In addition, the Brooklyn Public Library has established a special link for parents and teachers on their website to get helpful information. Librarians need coordinators of young adult services to answer questions concerning improvement of services to teens in the libraries. The library is flexible and works better if it takes time to address these questions. Librarians are proud of their hard work and they give each other credit for goals achieved throughout the year. If a program worked for a certain library it goes into a special survey called a "Survey Monkey." I learned a lot of important library information at the meeting and I hope that I will be able to participate in the ones to come. It is difficult to reach the ideal reference service mentioned in the manual but if you try to address most of the concerns and show that you care about teens this will improve library attendance and circulation.