One of my missions during my time as a temporary teen librarian has been to build relationships between library staff and teens in the community. I really want our teens to know that we have staff dedicated to working just with them, and who care about them and their needs and interests.
It’s important that our teens get to know their library staff members, by name and by face. The members of the Teen Library Council already know who we are, but other teen library users may not have had an opportunity to meet either of us (the teen team at our branch currently consists of myself and a library technician).
We have an awesome display board in the teen area that’s maintained by the library technician, and I thought it might be fun to add a “staff picks” board to the mix. Every month we could each pick a title to promote on the board, in addition to a continuously changing display of cool teen books. Our names and pictures would go on the board (a silly picture of me, of course, because I am a goof), giving teens a chance to see who their teen library staff members are (Joy’s the cool one, I’m the weird one….)
The library technician put all of my ideas together into a really cool-looking display that I’m very happy with! My first pick-of-the-month is actually a manga, since that’s an area I know a bit about, and it’s a part of the collection I’d like to highlight.
Here’s the final product so far – the display will be changing every month, giving us opportunities to highlight different titles, authors and areas of the collection.
(I’m holding a stuffed cat in my outstretched arms, if you’re curious.)
