Sarah Flowers – författare

As high school enrollment continues to rise, the need for effective librarianship serving young adults is greater than ever before. ""Young Adults Deserve the Best: Competencies for Librarians Serving Youth,"" developed by Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), is a document outlining areas of focus for providing quality library service in collaboration with teenagers. In this book, Sarah Flowers identifies and expands on these competency areas. This useful work includes . Anecdotes and success stories from the field.Guidelines which can be used to create evaluation instruments, determine staffing needs, and develop job descriptions.Additional professional resources following each chapter that will help librarians turn theory into practice.The first book to thoroughly expand on this important document, Young Adults Deserve the Best is a key foundational tool not only for librarians but also for young adult specialists, youth advocacy professionals, and school administrators.

Learn how to improve teen services in public libraries by better understanding teen development and having positive interactions with teens to provide appropriate and interesting collections and services.A library can be a tremendous resource for teens—one that helps them to learn about themselves and the world they live in. But teenagers are intrinsically different from children and from adults, and these critical developmental differences affect the ways they interact with others, both in the world at large and in the library. Serving teens effectively in the library requires a basic understanding of who teens are and the developmental tasks they face—factors that affect all aspects of library service, from the specific programs and services we offer to the ways that staff provide assistance to the teen who is seeking help at a library service desk.This book enables library workers to better understand adolescent development, which allows them to provide a positive library experience for teens. Readers will learn how to supply excellent library services with and for teens, including in the areas of collection development, readers' advisory, reference and homework help, programming, and advocacy. The book identifies the best ways to have positive interactions with teens in the library based on their mental development and details best practices for teen services. The concluding section discusses advocating for teens, with emphasis on their right to privacy and equal access to materials and services.

Teen Genreflecting serves as a guide to contemporary teen fiction, encompassing every genre and format, including graphic novels, scrapbook-formatted books, verse novels, historical fiction, speculative fiction, contemporary realistic fiction, and more.Teen literature is one of the most popular and quickly growing segments of the publishing world. Not only are teens continuing to read for pleasure, but many adults have discovered the joys of teen literature. As part of the Genreflecting Advisory Series, Teen Genreflecting provides librarians with a road map to the vibrant and diverse body of literature focusing on recent fiction for teens, organizing and describing some 1,300 titles, most published within the past ten years, along with perennial classics. The authors indicate where each title fits in the genre scheme; its subject matter, format, and general reading level; and any pertinent awards. They also provide advice on readers' advisory services to teens, descriptions of genres and subgenres, and lists of favorites for each genre. As with previous editions, this guide will prove invaluable to librarians building their teen collections and will help them assist teens in finding the books they love, no matter what genre.

Here is a guide that provides basic information to help teen/youth services librarians, library directors, library school students studying teen services, and middle/high school librarians examine all aspects of their teen programs and services to determine where improvement is needed. Find out what you need to develop goals and objectives for evaluation, and learn how to collect the data that will give you a realistic picture of your library’s strengths and weaknesses. You will get practical examples of how to use many different types of data: numerical and subjective data, output measures, user data, circulation and collection statistics, policies and procedures, strategic plans, community needs assessments, budget statistics, program information, facility information, data about training and staff development. Start implementing your program using the data you’ve collected to make changes to your assessment plan, support your case for improved teen services, and plan for future teen services. You’ll also learn to evaluate YA collections, teen summer reading programs, special events, and library staff. This guide comes with an explanation of the YALSA competencies, the YALSA teen services evaluation tool, and models for what excellent teen services programs should look like. Ready-to-use evaluation forms and checklists save precious time and resources and get your assessment geared up in minutes. Sarah Flowers is the president of YALSA and former chair of a YALSA task force to develop an assessment tool for library administrators and teen services librarians to use in order to evaluate an individual institution’s overall level of success in providing library services to teens. She worked for fifteen years as a librarian and manager at the Santa Clara County Library in California.