Nancy drew the silent spy jabberwocky poem12/27/2023 Offering the certificate shows you can rise above whatever negative feelings you might have about the young man and his behavior, and it shows that your library is non-judgmental and welcoming. The professional reaction is to honor his request as best you can. If this is the case, librarians only help him succeed by reacting unprofessionally with anger and online gossip. Maybe this teen really is an internet troll, looking to score free stuff and make fools out of librarians. Furthermore, sending the certificate would reflect well on the library. It wouldn't cost me anything to send the attachment, so I wouldn't be placing an undue burden on my library budget. Second, I would send this young man a PDF document containing a certificate of completion for the summer reading program. She should receive the questions, provide the requested information, and move on. A librarian does not get to decide which questions are worthy of her time. Becoming offended by his request is not only silly and a waste of energy, but poor library service as well. A polite email to this effect, citing any pertinent article numbers from the library's policy documents, is all that is really required. It is perfectly fair to argue that summer reading prizes, which have been purchased with library budgets approved by local taxpayers, can only be awarded to residents of the library's service area. Libraries may not have a specific policy to address this issue, but they do have precedents based on what they have done in past years. Either my library allows prizes to be awarded to non-residents, or it doesn't. My answer to this question doesn't need to be emotional. This teen's question, essentially, is whether he can receive summer reading prizes from a library of which he is not a member, which is located in a community in which he does not reside. I want to share, however, how I would treat him in the event that I did receive one of his emails.įirst, I would act under the assumptions that his request is legitimate and that his intentions, good or bad, are not really my business. Because I am not working in a library right now, I am not likely to be contacted by him myself. Frankly, many librarians are handling their encounters with him in ways that are completely at odds with the spirit of librarianship. What does matter is how librarians are (over)reacting to the emails. It does seem that he is legitimately a teenager, so it is possible that much of this is just the behavior of an immature kid with too much time on his hands. I can't tell, based on the comments I've read, whether this so-called scammer's heart is in the right place or not. He has supplied the rules for the contest, one of which is to be persistent in "begging" libraries to send some small token to mark the completion of the program even if they initially refuse to send prizes. I saw one post suggesting that all libraries respond to his emails with cat memes to get him to end contact, and another bragging about asking him meaningless questions over email (presumably to troll him and see if he will give up or reveal himself as a fraud.) The teen himself (whose name I have omitted to protect what little privacy he has left in the library world) claims that his registering for multiple summer reading programs is part of a contest he has going on with his friends. Others call him a scammer, insisting that he is trying to cheat libraries out of their prizes. Some commend the young man for his out-of-the-box thinking and his devotion to libraries. Responses from librarians have been fascinating. Over the past couple of weeks, librarians on PUBYAC and Facebook have been discussing email correspondence they have received from a teen in California, who, for the second year in a row, has signed up for multiple summer reading programs across the country and then contacted libraries asking to have his prizes sent out-of-state to him.
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