Submitted by Whatcom County Library System
Whatcom County Library System (WCLS) is excited to welcome Thom Barthelmess as Youth Services Manager. Highlighting WCLS’s continuing commitment to early learning, the position of Youth Services Manager was recently restructured to be part of the WCLS management team. Barthelmess will provide strategic leadership in planning, organizing, managing, and directing services and activities for youth, birth through high school, system-wide.
Barthelmess has many years of experience in public libraries as a Youth Services Manager, having worked 11 years at the Spokane County Library District and 3 years at the Austin Public Library in Texas. For the past six years he has taught future children’s and young adult librarians at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University in Illinois and curated the Butler Children’s Literature Center. Barthelmess is active in the American Library Association’s (ALA’s) Association of Library Services to Children (ALSC) and has served on the Newbery Award Committee, among others.
Executive director Christine Perkins had nothing but praise for the new hire. “Thom delivers a knockout storytime and presents middle school and high school book talks that had me placing holds on books as soon as he was done,” said Perkins.
Barthelmess is committed to youth services; “Librarians who serve young people make a regular investment in every corner of our community, bolstering our collective intellect with the insight that lives between the pages of a book. If we are cute or quaint or sweet, it is only incidentally. By trade we are strong and fearless and indefatigable.”
Seeing kids and teens as “young temporarily and people forever,” Barthelmess eloquently describes the job of library staff. “We sow the seeds of curiosity and reap the fruits of enlightenment, and we do so by knowing kids and knowing stories and knowing how to bring them together,” said Barthelmess. “We have the best job in the world.”
Although Barthelmess is a little suspicious of the “silver bullet” recommendation, believing we need to serve kids as individuals and resist the one-size-fits-all approach, he does have some personal favorites among books for young readers; Sadie and Ratz, The Thing About Luck, The Story of Ferdinand, A Hole is to Dig, Notes From a Liar and Her Dog,The Rescuers, Gumbrella, and When I Was the Greatest.
