I’ve been given a green light to start circulating this information though I don’t have a formal job posting available for you as yet.

My immediate supervisor, our Head of Youth Services, will be retiring the first week of August. We are beginning a search for a replacement.

La Crosse, WI is a town of 50,000 on the banks of the Mississippi with a Main Library and two satellite branch libraries. Our youth services department is very lively, with highly attended storytimes and I’ve got a healthy knitting group that meets on Wednesdays. Our teen librarian does a lot with gaming, which draws in a high number of young men, and we’re doing a lock-in in August. The community heavily uses the library and loves coming into our bright and cheerful children’s area, where we have computers, puzzles, highly beloved bean bag chairs, and a vintage giraffe. It’s a space built and intended for children and has the added benefit of being a little bit separated from the rest of the building, allowing for children to be a little noisier.

The youth services staff (head, 4FT, 2PT, 5 aides) is based at the main branch with forays to the branches for programming and collection development responsibilities. We had a dozen at tie-dying at one of the branches last week and eighty for a program on bi-lingual bugs. We are supported by the community and are blessed with an extremely dynamic director. The staff as a whole is coming to embrace social networking tools with internal blogs, wikis, etc. Our current website is being revamped, yours truly is responsible for the new youth and teen sites when they go up (October).

As many of you know, I came to LPL from Chicago Public Library last November. The staff has been very welcoming. The winter was one of the harsher ones I’ve survived–but the natives were saying that too, so apparently it wasn’t just me. Three local coffee shops within a ten minute walk of the library–one of which makes good soup, another good donuts. If you want to buy there are a lot of houses for sale or there are a number of nice apartment complexes. And I know where to get good waffle fries but have not yet explored the banana splits.

If this sounds interesting, please email me questions and I’ll be happy to answer what I can (my email is on my blog website). If you know someone who would be interested, please forward this on to them.

Once the official job posting goes out, I’ll let you know.

And, as I said with our last position: We’ve got a hedgehog and a raccoon— what can you add to the mix?