I have wanted to create a Teen Topics collection for years, since I got my first school library job in 2016. During my brief return to public libraries in 2019-2020, I got to work with a similar collection. However, it was poorly promoted and managed by the system, and the youth services librarians had little control over the content. When I returned to school libraries in 2020, I knew I wanted to create this kind of collection at my new school. Took me a while to sort out budgets and backend stuff, but this month I finally got to launch it. So let’s walk through these collections: what they are, how they can be beneficial, and how I put mine together.

I’ve had a bunch of scattered conversations lately about cataloguing and figured it was time to put it all down into one place. Some background: I am a high school librarian. I am the only FT person in my library, the only person with an MLIS, and the de facto head of the library. You name it, and I’m probably in charge of it, if not actually doing it.