Today I spent about 4 hours at the Issaquah branch of KCLS shadowing the reference librarians there for an assignment. The class is on reference services, so we're supposed to shadow someone providing an information service, in order to see how it's done in the field. My supervisor in ITS was nice enough to introduce me to one of her friends from library school, Mike, who agreed to let me shadow him. He's the Young Adult librarian (actually half YA librarian and half reference librarian), so although he spent some time at the reference desk during the afternoon, he also had a meeting of a youth reading group that gave feedback on YA collection and services. Even when I was at the reference desk, I didn't see anything I would classify as strictly reference service, but I did get a good view into the life of a public library, from the perspective of a librarian rather than a patron.
I'm not going to give too much detail about the experience, because I had to write it up for class. I was just really surprised by what I saw when I was there, not at the reference desk but around it, in the library, and in myself. I'd never thought that I'd be so interested in YA librarianship, but here I am, seriously considering it.
I also hadn't realized how much I've changed since I was a teenager. Case in point: one girl picked up a book, started reading the cover, then dropped it back onto the cart with a vehement Ewww! Gross!
Curious, I picked it up and read the cover; it was a book about a teenage boy who really wants to take a girl's shirt off. Sounds like a normal human male to me,
I said. This girl must have been 13 or 14; it's been so long since I was at all embarrassed by anything like that (at least in books!) that I found her reaction enormously funny. As I thought about it more, I realized that I went through the same stages, and that I've only forgotten about them. This is the sort of thing that makes me interested in being a YA librarian: helping teens to explore themselves through books.
But I would never be a teen again for the world.
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