Happy 1-Year Birthday to Jbrary!

It’s our 1-year birthday today!

We are so grateful to every single person who has supported us and watched our little YouTube channel grow. To celebrate, we’d like to share some Jbrary highlights interspersed with children’s librarian themed “Hey Girl” memes featuring my nephew Blake because THAT’S HOW WE ROLL.

Let’s start with a look at some statistics:

• YouTube Suscribers: 1,031 (we did it guys!)
• YouTube Views: 268, 084
• Pinterest Followers: 797
• Twitter Followers: 546
• Facebook Followers: 258

But those are just numbers.  What’s really made this year special is the people we’ve connected with.  Our community of practice.  The youth services librarians all across the world who we learn from every day and who inspire us to keep doing what we’re doing.

So what did we get up to this past year? In addition to filming over 200 videos, we were also involved in some neat projects.  We participated in the CLEL Bell Awards blog tour by highlighting our favourite books to sing.  Thank you so much to Mel from Mel’s Desk for allowing us to promote this awesome resource that highlights picture books that provide excellent early literacy development support.  We also wrote a guest post for Pragmatic Mom featuring our Top 10 Multicultural Books to Sing.  If you couldn’t tell, we kind of like to share our love of music!

In an effort to share all of the wonderful resources we find on our blogroll each season, we also started writing a quarterly column for the newsletter published by the Young Adult & Children’s Services section of the British Columbia Library Association. Our column in YAACING, “We’ll Link To That,” features all sorts of professional development goodies for youth services librarians. So far, we’ve written a column for Fall 2013, Winter 2013, and Spring 2014. We are super excited to keep giving shout outs to those who share their work online for us all to benefit.

Lastly, we’ve made an effort to provide new, weekly content on our blog.  From storytime plans to evaluating our babytimes to reflecting on what it means to be an On Call Librarian, we spent the last year talking about things that advocate for our field.  Our most popular post is our Superheroes Preschool Storytime, followed closely by Song to Get the Wiggles Out.  We’re also very proud to have participated twice in Flannel Friday, first with our Jamberry felt song and then with the catchy Pyjama Party song our co-worker Miranda taught us.

 So where are we off to next?  For starters, we plan to begin our second year as Team Jbrary  by presenting a Guerrilla Storytime at the 2014 BCLA Conference on April 1st.  Then in June we’ll be heading to Las Vegas for our first ever ALA Annual Conference! We are so excited to meet all of our online friends in real life and hope to meet many new faces as well.

What a year, what a year, what a year, what a mighty good year!