Youth Libraries Group, Scotland

Category: Blog

The following is a guest blog by Lisa Penman about the Youth Libraries Group, Scotland:

I’ve been on the Youth Libraries Group, Scotland committee for over two and a half years, I’m currently the Vice Chair and the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway representative.  We have a fantastic team in YLGS who all have a passion for what we’re doing and strongly believe that we can make a difference to young people’s lives through our various library roles and within our YLGS roles helping others in the profession to deliver excellent services through the points below:

• To advocate quality provision of public and schools’ library services to children and young people by disseminating best practice on professional issues.
• To inspire, support and represent all those working in or with library services for children and young people through publications, annual conference, meetings, training courses and events.
• To provide specialist expertise, knowledge and advice to CILIP, the Government, the book trade and related professions on issues relating to books, reading and library services for children and young people.
• To create opportunities to network with colleagues and those in related professions.

I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved in the planning and implementation of many great events and training days that I’m very proud of and which will always stay with me. Most recently was our Libraries Supporting Equal Access and Diversity training day where we had sessions on delivering British Sign Language in Bookbug, making libraries autism friendly, using Therapets in libraries and more.  We had excellent feedback from our delegates and a good day was had by all.  Another of the events we’ve had which will forever be a fond memory was our Carnegie and Kate Greenaway celebration last year to celebrate 80 years of the Carnegie medal and 60 years of the Greenaway.  As the CKG rep, I hosted an event where we had Theresa Breslin speak as a previous winner of the Carnegie Medal, Vivian French talk about judging picture books against the criteria, Amy McKay talk about the medals as the CKG coordinator and Lauren Thow discussed her successful school shadowing group.  We then pitched our book selections before a vote was taken to pick out the CKG nominations for YLGS.

Being a part of YLGS and a CKG judge has been excellent for my library positions, I always had a good book knowledge but being a CKG judge has really expanded this and I can help colleagues, teachers, parents and young people with much more detail than I could have before.  It’s also been very beneficial to book buying, having read the majority of new books and knowing what is worth buying to add to our collections.  Other benefits of YLGS are organisation, event planning and public speaking skills that I have been able to build on not to mention the usefulness of networking, especially helpful when you need to reach out to other library authorities.

I place great value on my roles within YLGS and CKG.  Not only for the reasons mentioned but for the friendships and alliances I’ve made, as I mentioned at the beginning we are a fantastic team and I think this comes across in our events helping make them the success that they are.  If anyone is interested in joining the YLGS committee then please get in touch.  We are also holding our Annual General Meeting in January at Floris Books in Edinburgh and we’d be delighted to see you there.