Welcome to 2021, YALSA members and friends!
Like many of you, here at The Hub we are looking forward to a new year full of expanding our community, expert advice, and excellent new books. Over the last few months, we’ve made some changes to The Hub behind the scenes, and now, with the turn of the calendar, we are excited to launch a new look for the site. With more contrast and less visual clutter, The Hub hopes to be a favorite source for all your collection development, acquisitions, and readers advisory needs!
Our Selected Lists teams will continue their excellent work with the 2021 Top Ten lists coming soon and nominations for 2022 titles opening later this month. Based on your feedback in our reader’s survey, we are making a few changes to how we roll out those nominations, so look for a new, more usable format in March!
Like you, we are looking forward to the 2021 ALA Youth Media Awards and are planning some pieces in connection to YALSA award winners, past, present, and future. We are excited about expanding our content to bring you more readalikes, themed posts, and book-related ideas for your daily life in Youth Services. If you have an idea for a book display, a themed list, or any other content for The Hub, please send us an email. We might want to feature your great ideas or even have you write for The Hub!
The Hub Reading Challenge will be back — though it might look different from years past. Watch for more information on that in February! We are discontinuing our monthly round-up post, but if you’d like to receive each new post in your inbox, you can sign up to Subscribe here.
Finally, we are excited to launch a new feature called Dear Reader. It’s a Dear Abby-style advice column where a team of our best readers will collaborate to answer your trickiest reading questions. Have a particular patron who seems to have read it all? Wish you had more options for those D&D fans? Need help transitioning that young teen into YA? We are here to help. Just send us an email (yalsahub@gmail) with your question, and we’ll do our best to answer!