Tagging

For this competency, I chose the resource Going Places with Youth Outreach: Smart Marketing Strategies for Your Library, by Angela B. Pfeil. The tag cloud from the Librarything page on the resource, found at http://www.librarything.com/work/2700096, looks like this:

Children's(1) children's services(1) librarians(1) libraries(2) Library marketing(1) library science(1) marketing(1) outreach(3) pbotw(1) ProCollection(1) professional(1) programming(1) programs(1) public relations(1) services(1) teen(1) youth(1) youth services(2)

I chose this title because it is a book for librarians and library administrators that provides guidance on marketing libraries to children. Since my topic is engaging early readers in public libraries, this book provides a great deal of information and strategy that relates closely. It includes sample outreach programs and further information on marketing, in addition to providing a clear guide, broken down into steps, on how to develop a thorough plan to market youth services.

RSS Feed

I added the RSS feed of the Kids & Families Calendar for Skokie Public Library. The calendar can be found here.
Although Skokie is not close to where I live now, I lived there for several years when I was little. I looked at a few other public libraries, and this one seemed like it had some great ideas for activities to do with kids & their families. In order to engage young children in public libraries, we need to have exciting and fun activities for both the children and their families to participate in. Hopefully some of the events scheduled on Skokie Public Library's calendar will help me get ideas for what I would do in a public library to bring kids in and get them involved.

Podcasts

This competency was more difficult to complete than the others. I had trouble finding podcasts that really seemed suited to the topic I have chosen, rather than just reviews of children's books. After some unsuccessful searches on other engines, I did find one finally by searching for 'library' on iTunes: the official ALSC Blog Podcast, which can be found at http://childrenslibrarian.libsyn.com/. I particularly enjoyed Episode 4, which talked about Podcasting and how to use it with children's programming in the library. [Note: Be sure you have a program, such as Apple's QuickTime, that will play .mp4 files before you use the above link.]

It led me to a great resource at the ALSC Website with lots of resources for librarians trying to bring children into their libraries: Kids! @ your library. Although I am not working as a librarian yet, I was very excited to find this website and get an idea of what we can do to bring children into libraries more and more.

The Association for Library Service to Children is a wonderful organization and resource for youth librarians. Its podcast was very appropriate to my topic of engaging early readers in public libraries, because it provides ideas and strategies on how to do so.

Other Blogs

I used Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/) to search for other blogs that related to my topic of interest. I looked at a few of the results and linked from one of them to Abby (the) Librarian, which seemed to be a very appropriate and relevant one. It is the blog of a new children's librarian in a suburb of Chicago. She posts ideas and activities, "day[s] in the life," and book reviews. Here is a great idea that she used in her library to engage young children in summer reading activities.

We're also trying out a couple of non-prize incentives, one of which is our gong. Yes, that's right. We have a gong. Actually, we have two gongs, both brought in by staff members. Whenever a kid completes the Summer Reading Club, they get the chance to hit the gong. We brought it with us on our visits to the schools and preschools and the kids seemed pretty wowed by it. They can hit it one time, as loud or as soft as they would like, and that way the whole library (and possibly the whole town depending on how hard they hit it...) will know what an awesome job they did finishing the Summer Reading Club. Nobody's finished quite yet, so I can't tell you for sure that it's awesome, but I'm betting it will be. I'll report back later in the summer when, hopefully, the library will be ringing with GONNNGGG after GONNNGGG.

It looks like Abby provides some great ideas for working with children in a library. I look forward to reading more of her experiences and thoughts in the future.