YALSA Teen Services Evaluation Tool

YALSA stands for The Young Adult Library Services Association, and is the part of the American Library Association (ALA) that deals with teen and young adult services. The ALA creates evaluation tools for libraries and library departments to use to test out how their libraries measure up to current field standards. The evaluation tool for teen services emphasizes:

- Leadership and professionalism

- Knowledge of client group

- Communication, marketing, and outreach

- Administration

- Access to Information

- Services

The specific natures of these categories is available at: http://www.ala.org/yalsa/guidelines/yacompetencies2010.

The most teen-specific of these categories for me are knowledge of client group and access to information. A library is in a unique position to provide space and resources for free to the community at large. Making this useful and desirable to teens requires knowledge about what teens are currently into, what things they would like to have and use, and what kinds of knowledge they are trying to obtain. In order to serve the population, one needs to understand the population. I believe I am in a position to understand many teen needs because I interact with teens regularly due to my regular anime and comic convention attendance, in addition to volunteering with local teens at an after school program occasionally.