INTERVIEW WITH TRACEY FIRESTONE

Did you get into web design knowing you wanted to do sites for YA librarians, or did you just kind of fall into it? Did you take classes or learn on your own? Any disaster stories from the learning process?
Yes & no... I knew the web could be an awesome resource for YA librarians who are often geographically isolated but I started to learn by creating a personal web site which I appropriately called "NotQuiteRipe." Armed with "HTML for Dummies," a free Geocities (now Yahoo) site and an old HTML editor (can't remember which one) I started learning by doing... and I'm still learning. I haven't taken any classes, though I suppose I'd benefit from one, my sites are *very* simple... just trying to get the information from one place to another. Luckily I haven't had any major disasters - a few embarrassing URL changes (today it's a children's author site, tomorrow it's porn!) but that's par for this course, I take things like that as a reminder to actually use my own pages, take some time to make sure I still connect to the places I want people to go.

How did you end up taking over the Young Adult Librarians' Homepage? Was your library system supportive of that? Is this something you do on your own time, or do you get time during working hours? How about Teen Hoopla -- how did you get involved in that? Any other projects?
Yikes - this was simple dumb luck combined with my big mouth, but it starts way before the Homepage. Remember that Patrick Jones had also created the Virtual YA Index (public library sites for teens). I remember seeing a post in 1998 on either PUBYAC or YALSA-BK from Mr. Jones himself, saying his schedule didn't allow for keeping that list up to date, was there anyone out there who wanted it. I let the message sit in my in-box for weeks and finally sent back a very meek "if you're still looking for someone, I'd love to do this" response. He shot back a very friendly, "OK, it's yours" and off I went, expanding the list to have sites listed by location as well as alphabetically. The Index now includes more sites outside of the US (now including links to 19 Canadian sites and 3 from New Zealand, in addition to more than 200 sites from 39 US states).

The Homepage was also one of Patrick's projects but after one job change, the site was left to the staff at the Allen County Public Library. There the site seemed to struggle for a while (several long-term "broken" links, obvious gaps in new resources) & because people connected me with "Patrick Jones's Web Site," I started getting the complaints! Fearing my reputation might suffer due to the connection, in 1999 I started to work on creating a new YA resource, one that I would use & encourage the librarians I work with to use.

About a month later I saw another message from Patrick looking for someone to take over the Young Adult Librarian's Help/Homepage... I immediately wrote back saying I might be crazy but I was up for the task. He agreed that I might be crazy but he passed the reigns & I've been working on the site ever since. The name has been shortened to "The YA Librarians' Homepage" and I'm always happy to get suggestions of new sites to add.

I signed onto both projects thinking they would be "outside" of my job but since my job is to help YA Librarians to do their job, it was easy to integrate the projects into my work world. My administration is very supportive of everything I do, they know my #1 priority is *our* public - the Suffolk County public libraries - and if others can benefit from my activities, that's an added bonus! I don't think anyone (including me) counts how many hours I work on any individual project, all that counts is that the job gets done and is done to the best of my ability. Besides, I think it's understood that if I (or any of my colleagues) did have to account for the standard 35 hours per week, it'd show a whole lot more hours worth of work!

Teen Hoopla was my first experience with YALSA. I just filled out one of those "I want to volunteer" forms at an ALA Annual Conference and, not long after, I was offered an appointment to the Teen Web Advisory Committee (TWAC). TWAC was the committee responsible for Teen Hoopla's ongoing development & maintenance. At that time there was a lack of committee members who could do the physical maintenance to the site and I was very quickly up to my eyeballs in Hoopla. The following year I was asked to chair the committee and in Spring 2003 I (sadly) finished my term as committee chair as the site sunset with the launch of the new ALA web site. I am now chairing a YALSA Task Force to create a new online resource for Teen Advisory Groups, the new site, TAGS, is slated to launch with Teen Read Week 2003 and working with the YA Galley Committee, preparing for the first formal online vote for the Teens' Top Ten books of the year, also to be held during Teen Read Week 2003.

As for other projects, I am also the web master for the New York Library Association's Youth Services Section and I'm one of our county's Live Librarians, providing live chat reference assistance.

What is Battle of the Books? How does it work? How did you end up coordinating the event?
The Battle of the Books is a county-wide event here on Long Island in which local libraries create & train teams of 6 teen readers (entering grades 6-9) over the course of the summer and compete in an end of summer trivia contest concerning twelve young adult novels. I coordinate the Battle because as the county YA Specialist, I work for all of our libraries in regard to teen services.

This was a program dreamed up by our local YASD as a way to connect teen readers, encourage participation in a non-athletic team sport and to encourage reading for fun. My first year as YA Specialist (a brand new full-time position in our system) was also the year I was President of YASD and I decided that with someone now at the system level to coordinate the event, it was going to happen. To avoid boring anyone to tears, the program details are available at http://www.suffolk.lib.ny.us/youth/bb/ but I can tell you that as we prepare for the seventh Battle, it has grown from 8 teams and 40 teens to 32 teams and over 200 teens!

Do you have any suggestions for using technology to connect with teens? Should we be taking book suggestions by e-mail, etc.? What kinds of strengths/weaknesses do you seen in libraries' web sites for teens? Any favorites, sites that do it well?
My best suggestion is to think of what you can do for your community that doesn't involve walking in the front door. There's so much you can do with the web, in terms of providing quality library service to teens. Plan it, organize it & then do it - post your booklists, take e-mail reference questions (see if can you set up live chats - for reference or virtual programs). Why do Teen Advisory Groups *have* to meet in person? Can't you solicit suggestions (book, program or other) just as easily via a chat room or e-mail? Bring printouts with the ideas from your virtual TAG members to regular meetings.

Let your teens tell you what they want/need in a site. Maybe the local schools already provide great assignment related resources, would your teens benefit more from having a local directory of community resources for teens? Maybe your teens need a place to voice their opinions of books or political trends... or a place to post their writings. I know that flashy, high-tech sites are attention getting but I do believe that if the substance is there, the form is less important. I love sites that are responsive to the community - who cares what I think of a site if the teens who use it, love it? But I'll admit to regularly visiting Hennepin County's site, http://www.hclib.org/teens/, to see what they're doing.

I guess the only weakness I've seen is in libraries that want a web presence so badly that they put something up that doesn't meet the standards of what they'd add to their physical collection or in print materials they'd distribute to the public. This goes for entire library web sites, not just teen pages. Try to have someone unconnected to the library preview the site before it goes live, does it make sense to him or her? Are the basic questions they have about the library answered? Do they know what to do if their questions aren't answered there? Once you have the site up & running, make sure the information posted is timely - it's amazingly frustrating to search a site only to find the program schedule from 6 months ago posted!

Do you find that other librarians are fairly tech-savvy, or not? What kind of workshops do you do? Any interesting stories about those? Do you find that most adult reference librarians are open to serving teens, or do they find teenagers scary?
I do all sorts of workshops... GLBT Teens & Their Needs, YA Collection Development, Using Online Products, Trends in YA Literature... anything that's needed. Some of the workshops are ones I conduct myself and some are ones in which I find outside speakers. As part of my job I do workshops for YA librarians, other members of the library staff, trustees... anyone who'll listen! My best/worst workshop was for the Youth Services Section of the NY Library Association. It was a talk about designing teen web pages and I decided to create a web site, instead of making handouts (people could print what they needed/wanted) and I neglected to print off a copy of everything to use as my notes. The page was great but as I attempted to set-up, we couldn't connect to the outside world. I had a disc but the laptop only had a CD drive... I gave it a few minutes to get the tech to work and then gave it up. I did the workshop off the top of my head, remembering the key points but not being able to show any of the examples...

I find that very few people are comfortable working with teens when the job is thrust at them and they have no training to do it. Even staff that is supposed to work with a different population will have to work with teens at some point in their week. In many of our libraries it's not the designated "YA person" who dislikes teens, it's the rest of the staff who does! I think that many librarians/clerks/pages have groups or people they particularly like (or dislike) serving - it's human nature, we can't all like everyone. I try to explain in my trainings that at the reference desk, I can have little patience with seniors (especially the ones who see me and immediately address the older staff members next to me - no matter what their position) but to let any patron see that feeling is improper and unprofessional on my part... if you've chosen to work with the public, you get to work with the entire public and it's up to you to do the job you were hired for... suck it up and deal with it!

Why did you choose the name "Rebellibrarian" for your personal web site? How many tattoos do you have, and what do they mean to you? Do you see yourself as breaking some of the stereotypes about librarians?
Let's see, right after library school my friends liked to call me "the anti-librarian" because I rarely lived up to their traditional librarian image but that title sounded negative and I'm certainly not "anti" libraries or librarians. I've always been a bit of a rebel and I have some vague memories of my mother or Grandmother occasionally calling me "Reb" so there you go. I never thought that real people (other than a friend or two) would ever see this site... it's my playground for learning new web stuff & for storing things I might want to have access to when I'm away from home - pictures, links to sites - if anyone else finds it interesting or useful, that's cool too.

I have two tattoos - the Tribal Fairy (created by Pat Sinatra) on my ankle & the Book Faery (a blend of two Amy Brown paintings, rendered in skin & ink by Henri Montegut) on my back. I can't say they mean anything in particular... they're permanent forms of art and they can be used to set me apart from the crowd. I have them because I have always loved tattoos (much to my mother's dismay) and when I was old enough, I took the time to find what I wanted, decide where I wanted to put it & found the artists to make them real.

I guess I am a stereotype breaker but only because stereotypes are so lame. They can be good for a joke but not as an accurate representation of reality. I love making people think about things... if we never question our views, we'll never grow.

Contact information
tfiresto@suffolk.lib.ny.us
Suffolk Cooperative Library System
627 North Sunrise Service Rd
Bellport, NY 11713
Phone - 631-286-1600 x1352
FAX - 631-286-1647

URLs
The YA Librarians' Homepage - http://yahelp.suffolk.lib.ny.us
The Virtual YA Index - http://yahelp.suffolk.lib.ny.us/virtual.html
NYLA/YSS - http://www.nyla.org/yss/
RebelLibrarian - http://www.rebellibrarian.com
YALSA's Teens' Top Ten List - http://www.ala.org/yalsa/booklists