"Own the Night" Teen Party

Daily Hours: 5
Total Hours: 19

The "Own the Night" Party is an event for kids in grades 6-12 in celebration of the end of the school year.  I was surprised to hear that the Goodman Branch is the only branch who puts on such an event!  The branch closes at 5:00 on Saturdays and it reopened last night at 5:05 to teens only.  Jesse Vieau, the teen librarian for the entire MPL system (although the Goodman Branch will be getting their own teen librarian in July) had brought a car load full of electronics down from Central, including DJ stations, an Xbox, a Wii, and iPad animation stations. Nate Clark from the Media Lab at Central was there running a green screen station where the kids could have their photos taken and photoshopped onto different backgrounds.  There was a table full of free pre-pub books for the kids, as well as a craft table.  There was also pizza, chips, cookies, and juice, which were all devoured by the 40 or so kids who came to the event.  Despite the fact that Jessie had gone to the middle school earlier in the day and told some 200 kids about the event, Chris said that she knew almost all the kids as branch regulars.

As youth services isn't my area of expertise, it was interesting to observe all the elements that go into putting on a successful event.  I think one of the best things about the organization of everything was having so many spaces for kids to enjoy the activities that best fit their liking.  Some kids quietly used the computers for the entirety of the event, one kid stayed glued to the DJ station with his headphones on for the whole three hours, others only played video games, and one group of girls stayed at the craft table almost the whole time, making duck tape flowers and beaded bracelets.  Thinking about space usage in libraries, it was especially impressive to notice how all the different events could take place at the same time (and each be pretty loud in their own right) but they never overwhelmed one another with noise.  One of my favorite parts of the night was hanging out by the animation stations and watching how adept they were at making the videos, intuitively learning the technology and then teaching each other little tricks.  Everything ran pretty smoothly, besides one incident towards the end of the night when one kid was getting too rough and Jesse had to escort him to the door and make him leave the event.  In what I thought was a clever move, Chris made signing up for the summer reading program a pre-requisite for being entered in the drawing at the end of the night.  As I helped kids sign up on the computers, I was surprised to learn that for the last few years the summer reading program for kids 6th grade and up has been run completely online.  The graphics and cool interface of the account pages were pretty neat, and I look forward to seeing how the program plays out this summer at the branch.

At the end of the night, we started putting things away and taking stock of the state of the library after 40 kids had free run of the place with food in their hands.  As there is no janitorial help over the weekends at the branch (!), we spent the next hour emptying garbages and using the carpet sweeper to tackle the remnants of the chip war that apparently had taken place unseen in a corner of the library.  As we cleaned, Chris commented on how nice it was to just leave at closing time and then walk into a clean library each morning when she worked at the downtown library in the past.  She also talked about the teen events with food and games she used to run each week in the summer in the past, in particular how she used to make all the kids sit at a table when they ate (it's those little things you don't think about when planning the big-picture program that you can only learn from experience!).  But what I found most interesting was that fact that she said twenty years ago, she was the first person to establish teen programming at MPL when she rocked the boat by going out and getting a grant for the weekly events.  And just look at how far things have come since then, iPads, DJ stations, and all!