Thank you Miranda of teenlibrarian.com for posting a link to our web site. Since we are getting publicity, an explanation of the site seems necessary for our new readers. I’ll start out with a background of how the web site idea came about, and then I’ll bring you up to date about the current progress.

Amanda and I have been interested in sharing our ideas and passion about serving teens for quite some time. At first, we thought about publishing a zine, a self-constructed, self-published, cut and paste primer, on the topic of teen services. After we created a zine to document our 2005 ALA annual conference experiences, we realized how much time, work, and energy goes into making a zine. Simply put, we wanted to publish, but the zine format was too involved and time-consuming to fit our hectic schedules. The teen services zine idea dissipated, but our interest and involvement with the zine format did not go away. We are still very much connected with zines and hope to have them in our teen collections some day.

A few months later, the same year, we came up with another collaborative project idea. We felt that librarians should have access to a web site that previews all upcoming teen-fiction releases. Although publishers post this information on their web sites, they only preview books that are certain to be a big hit or widely popular. We wanted to know about all upcoming teen titles.

Amanda and I both belong to the “don’t reinvent the wheel club”, so we felt the need to do some research before embarking on a new time-consuming project. In our search, we came across two web sites that offer previews of upcoming teen titles, flamingnet.com and teenreads.com. We decided these web sites were resourceful alternatives to the teen publisher web sites, in regards to finding out information about upcoming teen titles. We felt it wasn’t a good idea to reinvent the wheel, so we crossed out collaborative project idea number two and went about our lives as normal.

The third time is a charm. When December rolled around, Amanda and I came up with collaborative project idea number three. We both thought about our teen services resources, and how we would like to share them with other librarians. Amanda has participated in more than a few teen services workshops as a speaker, and has developed some great resources for teen library programs. I did a quick browse through some of my work files, and realized that I too have some valuable documents that might be useful to other librarians. We both have a history of talking passionately about our opinions on teen library services, and so we came to the conclusion that we had something to offer between these ideas and our resources. So here we are, with our own blog, and a content management system, ready to share our ideas.

If you browse the web site, you’ll find that some sections are empty while others look like a work in progress. This is because we initially jumped into the website head-on, creating content and building browsing sections. After we started building content, we realized we needed to take a few steps back. We wanted to make sure we understood what this web site means to us, and where we want it to go.

Right now we are ironing out the focus of the web site, and working on the marketing and project plan. We find ourselves philosophically examining the title of our web site, “Alternative Teen Services”, and how we feel the title represents our work. We hope to keep our grassroots focus because we want the content to be fresh, honest, reflective, and opinionated.

I suspect that after we have these ideas flushed out, the web site will suddenly fill up with more content. But until that day comes, we hope that you continue to read our blog as we update it with news, ideas, and opinions about serving teens in the library.

Stephanie

aim: sisterstephie
yahoo: stephanie_librarian