Get ready to vote! The YALSA election runs from March 19 through April 25, and to help you be an informed voter, we’re sharing interviews with each of the 2014 YALSA Governance candidates.
We will start with the candidates for Board Director-at-large. YALSA Board members serve three-year terms, during which they jointly determine YALSA’s policies, programs, and strategic direction, in accordance with YALSA’s bylaws. They attend both virtual and in-person meetings and serve as liaisons to YALSA’s committee chairs and members. A full description of Board duties and responsibilities can be found here.
Candidates, who will be presented in alphabetical order, were asked to craft “Twitter-length” responses (i.e. around 140 characters). Full biographical information on all of the candidates can be found on the sample ballot.
Today we have an interview with Gretchen Kolderup.
Name and current position: Gretchen Kolderup,Manager for YA Education & Engagement @ New York Public Library.
Why did you decide to run for a YALSA office? What excites you about serving on YALSA Board?
I’m jazzed about the opportunity to to dig into the work of our association with others who care deeply about library services for teens!
What areas of YALSA’s Strategic Plan do you think you can best contribute to? Why?
Member recruitment/engagement. My YALSA experience has been so meaningful; I love sharing that & helping others hook in to the association!
What is the most pressing issue facing YALSA today?
Remaining relevant and effective to its members as well as financially stable as our profession continues to change.
What priority activities should YALSA take on to address the “paradigm shift” as described in The Future of Library Services for and with Teens report?
Sounds silly, but: help ppl feel comfortable getting out of comfort zones. Report shows evolution’s necessary & good, but change can be scary.
What attributes have helped you succeed professionally?
Determination, creativity, collaborative leadership style. Learned from building YA svcs from scratch in my first job & leading The Hub!
What do you see as the primary role of the Board?
Board fulfills YALSA’s mission to expand & strengthen teen services. Should help members in the now & advocate for members’ futures.
If elected, how will you help YALSA members (in their daily work, in their careers, other)?
Provide practical tools (like YALSA’s Pub Lib Eval Tool), create opps to recognize & share best ideas, advocate for teen services nationwide.
What else would you like voters to know about you?
Whether I’m elected or not, I’m interested in helping us all become even more stellar librarians for teens. Always up to collaborate or chat!
I’m cheating a little because I haven’t actually played Minecraft with teens on the brand new multiplayer server space I just rented. But I do play a lot of Minecraft with my friends, I have talked a lot about it with teens, and I am going to offer the game as a regular teen program starting next week. Here’s what I’m doing to bring Minecraft to the library, and links to some interesting ideas about things you might do with it.
But first, what is Minecraft?
Minecraft is a game where you roam a landscape full of different sorts of blocks that you can move around to build anything you want. You can dig deep to find different resources, and explore to find a variety of environments. At night, zombies and other monsters come out, so you need to protect yourself. The game was created by Swedish programmer Markus Persson, and is being developed by his company Mojang. It’s still in beta, so there are new updates all the time. Minecraft is getting prettier and more involved with each new permutation.
I love this game because it demands creativity. You have a world, and you can do anything. It’s even more fun with friends, where in building your world you find yourselves cooperating by sharing resources, planning building projects, helping each other and showing off for each other. I can’t wait to see what happens when I turn my group of teens loose in their new world.
Here’s a video for you to take a look at Minecraft.
Click through for more.
You can buy the game here for $21.95, a discounted price while it’s still in beta. There is an outdated free version that you might try to see if you want to buy the game. I also recommend watching YouTube videos or looking at screenshots to get a feel for the environment.
Once you decide to play, your first task is to survive your first night. You need to find a way to protect yourself from zombies, skeletons, spiders, and other monsters, which in Minecraft parlance we call mobs. Ideally, you want to build yourself a shelter, but in a pinch, just stack yourself up on a tall stack of blocks, dirt or sand will do, and wait for morning. When the sun comes up you can search for more resources to strengthen your fortifications.
After you’ve tried it out for yourself, or at least done a bit of research, ask your teens about it. Are they playing Minecraft? Would they like to? You may find that some of them are already familiar with the game.
To play single player, you can buy one copy of the game, download the launcher to any computer, and let teens sign in with their own accounts. If you want to play together, you’ll need to set up a multiplayer server. There are instructions for how to host your own server available, which may appeal to some of your technologically inclined teens. You can also to rent space from a number of services. I’m renting space from Minecraft Box.
You may want to purchase a few copies of the game for your library, so that teens who don’t own the game can play. This might be tricky if you are bound by institutional orders because at this point, Minecraft can only be purchased with a credit card. It took some repeated queries for me to get permission to buy the game myself and get reimbursed.
Once you have interested teens, access to the game and a multiplayer server, the possibilities are limited only by your collective imagination. Plan a city, spread out and work on your own projects, explore the intricacies of the game, or make
