Library Resolutions

Happy New Year Youth People!!

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Are you a New Year's Resolution person? Personally, I'm not, but I was thinking about what I want to accomplish this year at work, and thought that I might just be a resolution person at work. 

My 2026 library resolutions:

1. Say no more often. I think in this profession, we often tend to be yes people. We like fun things and want to be involved. But, we need to think about boundaries and burnout and the fact that those are real things. In an article for the American Library Association, Matthew Weirick Johnson says, "Causes of burnout can be extensive and multifaceted, including overwork but also erosion of work-life balance..." Saying no is necessary sometimes, even though it can feel hard. 

2. Plan ahead more. Our library has a really great programming model in which four departments work together on programming (youth services, adult services, outreach, public services). This allows us to do so much more than we could otherwise, but also creates an interesting dynamic when it comes to planning. Youth librarians, at least in our library, tend to do more of the programming in house, which means more planning and prep time is needed. This often means that looking forward is harder, and things are not planned as far in advance as in the adult services department. In an effort to work together in a different way, I'm working on planning a little bit differently this year.

3. Get more people to write for this blog! This is where you come in! If any of you are interested in contributing to the blog, please reach out to us at yss.wla@gmail.com. We all do such cool things, and we'd love to share more of what you're doing on a local level with a wider audience. 

Do you have any work resolutions for 2026?

You can read the full article on burnout here. [Keeping Up with...Burnout. Weirick Johnson, M. ala.org]  https://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_up_with/burnout

Welcome to Our New Bloggers

We put out the call for contributors to the blog and we received answers. Please join us in welcoming our two newest bloggers. Sam will be blogging on alternate Tuesdays with a "Tuesday Tips" column and Kristine will be blogging intermittently as she sees information.

Let's meet them!

SAM JONES

I grew up in Crivitz, WI, a small town in northern Wisconsin. I graduated from UW Madison's iSchool this spring. I also went to Madison for undergrad, where I majored in English literature and minored in Gender and Women's Studies and Digital Studies. I currently work at Beaver Dam Community Library, where I am the Youth Services Librarian. I have two guinea pigs, Peanut Butter and Jelly. My favorite thing about being a youth services librarian is seeing how excited children or teens get when they realize how many things the library can provide them, like when they find a book they didn't know existed or when they attend a program for the first time.

KRISTINE MILLARD

I am working on my MLIS at UW-Madison' iSchool and expect to graduate next year. Many moons ago, my minor at UW-Whitewater was Library Media. I then worked for several years at the Lodi Public Library and now manage a research lab at the Waisman Center studying how toddlers with autism learn language. I was excited to combine these professional interests last semester at the Sun Prairie Public Library when I focused my practicum on creating circulating kits and other resources for children with autism and other sensory needs. When I am not working or studying, I may be found hiking, or nestled at home with my cat and a craft or gardening project.

We are still interested in additional contributors to the blog. If the spirit moves you to share resources and information with your sister and brother youth librarians, please contact me lochwouters at gmail dot com and we'll take it from there to find a convenient way for you to contribute.

2021 Cybils Awards Announced

The children's literature blogosphere continues to be a vibrant space for discussing, reviewing and reveling in great children's and young adult literature. Annually, kid lit bloggers comb through the literature and announce their picks for the best books in the previous years. The Valentine's Day announcement is pretty sweet!

You can see the winners here at the Cybil's website.
 

Cybils Winners Announced

The 2020 Cybils Awards, given by bloggers for outstanding and popular children's and teen books, have recently been announced. Divided into categories by type of book, these awards are cheekily described by the Cybil-ites thusly: 

The Cybils Awards aims to recognize the children’s and young adult authors and illustrators whose books combine the highest literary merit and popular appeal. If some la-di-dah awards can be compared to brussels sprouts, and other, more populist ones to gummy bears, we’re thinking more like organic chicken nuggets. We’re yummy and nutritious." 

Stop here for this year's complete list (released on February 14).

And to find out more info about the award and it's background, stop here.

Rethinking Practices: What a Blog Tagging Project Taught Me About Social Justice - Part 2

This is a continuation of an article written by YSS member Emily Zorea. You can find Part 1 here.

During the time working on the blog tagging project, and reflecting on the process, I had to recognize my positionality as a school librarian professional assessing a (mostly) public library professional blog. Although the interests of both youth service librarians and school librarians largely intersect, our work is different. In a school space, my priorities reflect the vision of my school district. In the public library, the vision for youth services often reflect the vision of individual library boards, as well as initiatives and priorities from professional organizations, such as ALA or WLA.

I also needed to assess my privilege as a white librarian working in a predominantly white-dominated field. I consistently asked myself, “Who is this blog tag benefitting?” My goal was to choose tag terms that would do the least amount of harm, especially to the marginalized populations that librarians serve. It can seem trivial, but the words we apply to ideas do matter, even if those words are blog post tags. 

Social Justice and Tag Categorization

Although I worked through many tags and found new terms, the tags that fell under “Diversity” and “Inclusion” themes were especially through-provoking places for me to assess my understanding of positionality, privilege, and power. Although I had not considered this before, the YSS blog is a powerhouse of social justice content, examining what social justice can and should look like in library spaces. Hundreds of posts cover topics related to social justice, many from an inclusion or diversity perspective.

In my tag categorization, I used the definitions of inclusion and diversity as presented by Jones, Moore, and Walton:

“Inclusion means that there is respect for everyone’s voices, stories, and knowledges. Diversity, which addresses representation in its most basic form, is a necessary precondition to inclusion: We need to get everyone to the table to do the messy work of promoting and enacting social justice to create a more inclusive environment” (p. 219).

Using their definition, and after reviewing the blog posts different tags are currently connected to, I realized that tags, including “affirmations”, “African-American lit”, “allergies”, and “American Indian Studies in Wisconsin” could fall under a larger “Inclusion” tag due to their theme of respecting voices, stories, and knowledges.

Similarly, “#ownvoices”, “anti-racism”, and “#WeNeedDiverseBooks” addressed themes of bringing everyone to the table. I categorized these tags, and more, under a “Diversity” tag.

Moving Forward

It may be helpful for current and future blog administrators and contributors to have not only a list of the paired down tag terms (the eventual goal of this project), but also to have a definition of those terms. For example, adding a short definition for both inclusion and diversity in my tag term categorization document shows the reflection needed for me to commit to those terms. Something similar for other terms may be very helpful, especially for tags that specifically address social justice topics.

Small sample of tag recategorization. Current blog tags falling under a "Diversity" theme sorted and categorized on the left-hand side of the table, and the new tag term, "Diversity, reflected with a definition on the right-hand side of the table.

Inclusion themed tags

Additionally, I found dozens of excellent posts while reviewing tags that address social justice topics in library spaces. I hope that at one point, those posts could be curated into a “Best Of” blog post so those ideas can be shared and reviewed again. For professional learning, the YSS blog has the most library specific information I have seen yet addressing how to do social justice in library spaces. I hope this work can continually be showcased.

Reflection

In a time when we are rethinking so many things, re-orientating our work in a social justice framework offers us an opportunity to rethink our practices from the ground up. This project caused me to deeply think about how positionality, privilege, and power intersect in my teaching and school library work, especially on projects that appear to be neutral. It also caused me to reflect on the differences between inclusion and diversity. Although these terms are commonly used interchangeably, they represent specific and different ideas

I know social justice takes a lot of work. Social justice, as much as it is a commitment that the library field holds, is not quick work. It requires action, and building coalitions with others who share mutual interests in an issue for the work to advance. In libraries, I see this happening already in our partnership building work between the library and organizations in the community. As much as this has been a time for us to assess our practices, such as curbside pickup and Facebook live Storytimes, I hope we can also use this time to asses our social justice commitments and continue the work needed for our libraries to be spaces that welcome our whole community.

References:

Jones, N., Moore, K., & Walton, R. (2016). Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future: An Antenarrative of Technical Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 25(4), 211-229

Rethinking Practices: What a Blog Tagging Project Taught Me About Social Justice - Part 1

YSS member and board member Emily Zorea is a graduate student in UW-Milwaukee’s Masters of Library Science and Masters of English program. She serves as the school librarian for the Ithaca School District. Her research interests include community-based projects where technical and professional communication, education, and libraries intersect. 

How can I do this better? This is a question I have asked myself over and over since March 13, 2020. As a school librarian, when education moved online, our school library program needed to move virtual as well. In-person relationships between my students and community turned to virtual meetings as we Zoomed our way throughout the spring, and now the fall and beginning of winter.

All of us have been asked to rethink our professional practices over the past months. In schools, teachers are lesson planning for in-person and virtual students, and are asked to be ready to teach virtually with only a few hours’ notice. In libraries, we have found ways to offer virtual Storytimes, book clubs, readers advisory, and curbside pickup, among other services.

Our most vital practices-such as checkout and readers advisory- needed to be rethought in a pandemic, and libraries have led the way in creativity and problem-solving. Although it can be exhausting to continually problem-solve and rethink ways we offer services, rethinking our practices can reveal new options we previously may have overlooked.

YSS Blog Tag Categorization Project

For those who do not know me, hi! My name is Emily, and I am the school librarian at Ithaca School District in Richland Center, Wisconsin. I just completed a two-year YSS board position as Director-at-Large. I have also served as a blog contributor here on the YSS blog. Academically, I am finishing a double master’s degree in both Library and Information Science, as well as a master’s degree in English in Technical and Professional Communication.

This fall, the amazing Marge Loch-Wouters mentioned she was beginning the process of working on recategorizing the tags used on our YSS blog. There are currently 1,637 tags! The large number of tags means that the terms are not as helpful as they could be in finding past posts. Marge’s vision was to go through each tag, and find ways to recategorize them. The goal was to bring down the 1,637 number to a more manageable list, such as 100 tag terms the blog would commit to.  

 I asked if I could help, and Marge graciously showed me how to get started. I also requested to make this project a piece of a final project in one of my graduate-level English classes. After receiving permission from my professor, I virtually met with Marge to discuss the project. Knowing that I would not be able to finish the project this semester, we agreed that I would work through as many tags as I could, and Marge would continue the project in the winter of 2021.

A small sample of the current 1,600 tags

After Marge identified all the current tags used on the blog, I began the process of reviewing each tag, one at a time. I looked at all the blog posts each tag was connected to, considered the essence of what the blog past was trying to accomplish, and then worked to identify or create a tag term that would communicate the blog posts’ idea. Before the end of the semester, I had recategorized 172 tags.

Rethinking “Neutral” Communication

In libraries, we often try to present neutral information in ways that are clear, helpful, and efficient. We certainly would never knowingly promote systems of injustice in our community. We would certainly never knowingly reproduce oppressive practices that affect marginalized audiences. Identifying new tag terms might seem like a very neutral task.

And yet, very often, regardless of our personal commitments, we reproduce the systems we have been taught in our work. Even if those systems are oppressive. Even if those systems exclude marginalized audiences.

The truth is that our work and communication is never neutral. Legacies of our past creep into our work, unless we take the time to reflect and make intentional choices to think and act differently.

Communication, Library Spaces, and Social Justice

In this time of a pandemic, we all have been asked to rethink our practices, to think about how we can do them differently, virtually. What is especially needed in this time is reflection, not only on how to present Storytime on Zoom in effective ways, but how to think about how our positionality, privilege, and power affect our decisions, and community messages of either acceptance and welcome, or exclusion. Especially when we are working on seemingly “neutral” projects, like a blog tagging project. Because all of our work matters.

Natasha Jones, Kristen Moore, and Rebecca Walton wrote the article, “Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future” as a call for the field of Technical and Professional Communication to embrace social justice as one of its core values. Although this text was written for an audience in the field of technical and professional communication, as a professional in both professional writing and libraries, I see tremendous possibilities for this article, and the social justice framework this article describes, to be used interdisciplinarily in library spaces to inform our practices.

In their article, Jones, Moore, and Walton define macro level concepts of positionality, privilege, and power. These concepts affect the ways people engage with identifying markers, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ableness, religion, and class (p. 220). This heuristic can offer librarians a model to think critically about how certain groups in their community are marginalized and disempowered, and to identify specific ways library work can promote agency and advocacy (p. 220). 

Simply defined, positionality is the idea that different aspects of our identity, such as race and gender, are historical and dynamic (p. 220). What it means for me to be a woman is part of a historical social construction that continues to shift as new understandings of gender are cultivated in our culture. Also, what it means to be a woman varies over time and in differing phases of life. For this reason, it is dangerous to define identify markers-like gender-in universal ways.

Privilege is an unearned advantage that benefits those gifted this status at the detriment of those who were not (p. 220). Being offered a job over another candidate because of my race, and conforming to racial expectations, is an example of privilege.

Both positionality and privilege grant unearned advantages, and by extension, those receiving those advantages often are in positions of power to make decisions that impact others (p. 220).

Part 2 of this report will be published on Tuesday December 15. You can find that post here.

What's Up at the Blog?

Image by Mediamodifier from Pixabay 

You are!

Our blog, started in December 2007, has over 2000 posts since it's beginning!

Who is doing all this posting? Well, lots of WI YSS members and friends of YSS have pitched in. Many have taken turns over the past thirteen years to provide content that informs, enlightens and helps WI youth staffers keep up-to-date and in-the-know.

Currently, we have 2-3 contributors who are each responsible for content for one day weekly or more often if the spirit or circumstances (like COVID-19) suggest additional content.

Here's where you come in.

We are looking for a couple more people to volunteer to help us provide content for one day a week. Content can be links to resources; news about events or upcoming CE; opinions about any aspect of children's or teen services; programming or collection development ideas; diversity and inclusion; parenting tips; or any of 100 different pieces of info you'd like to share with colleagues around the state (and sometimes around the country) that you run across in your work. You can even recruit other colleagues to help you write/locate content as well for your four posts monthly so we can include even more voices on the blog.

If 4 posts month seems like a lot, you can also just volunteer for one post monthly (like our Throw-It Thursday column). Many voices make strong content!

It's super fun and super simple. If you'd like to volunteer to help out, we'd love to have you on the blog team for as little or a long as you want. Just email lochwouters@gmail.com for more info or to volunteer.

With over half a million views of the posts (our blog averages between 50-100 views daily) since it's inception thirteen years ago, it's a great place to shine out on behalf of the Youth Services Section and great youth services in our state.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon

How did I not know?  I am a fairly well tuned-in person when it comes to all things reading obsessed, so how have I missed Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon every year?  And to add insult to injury, it takes place TWICE a year!  So I have been doubly oblivious.  Well, no more!  Now I know that every April and October the book loving world via Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, Facebook and more comes together to read for 24 hours straight.  There are mini challenges and cheerleaders and snack-eating encouragement.  This would be fun to extend into the physical library, possibly with teens or as part of a Read Down Your Fines program.

Not sure about reading for 24 hours in a row?  Find more information on Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon HERE.  I found the FAQ page particularly helpful (and amusing).