PLA 2006: Making Traditional Library Services Teen Friendly

Dawn Bussey noted that libraries have competition among teens as a place to hang out, so we need to make sure that our buildings, programs, and services are enough to draw this user group to our libraries.

Mary K. Chelton discussed some research about how teens use libraries. Only 16% of teens surveyed preferred search engines to libraries. She talked about how teens generally have no concept of intellectual property rights, and plagiarism is rampant, partially because copying and pasting someone else’s content is so easy. She discussed “domain learning” with teens, which shows that teens often don’t know what they’re looking for, and therefore have a hard time formulating a search query in order to find it. Teens don’t only want facts when researching, they want contextual information about how things feel, affect people, etc. She also talked about librarians who see problems with the way teens interact with librarians—not prepared, don’t know what they’re looking for, don’t respect librarians’ authority or information-finding supremacy. Instead of trying to find positive ways to help these users, we often focus on their shortcomings, which doesn’t help them or us. She emphasized that libraries need to be ready to accommodate teens by functioning as a socializing space. Otherwise, we’re doomed to fail with this age group.

Angela Pfeil talked about spaces online for teens: like the library’s website. She encouraged librarians to look at virtual reference program statistics, and see how many of those users are teen. Many of the users of virtual reference programs in the U.S. are teens. Virtual reference extends our presence temporally—sometimes to 24/7 availability. She noted that teens are nocturnal and it’s not surprising that they turn to Google for homework help, which they are likely doing at 11:00 at night, when no library is available to them. She emphasized the importance of getting librarians online who not only know how to deal with teens, but know how to deal with users online as well. She talked about the prevalence of multi-tasking among teens and younger adults.

Aaron Schmidt gave us some PEW statistics: 75% of online teens and 42% of online adults use instant messaging. Teens consider e-mail as a way to talk to old people. He showed a sample IM transaction, noting that this user on IM was very friendly and outgoing, while in person she was rather shy and quiet. Offering service via IM lets users connect to us in the medium in which they are most comfortable. He suggested the IM programs to use (AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN) which are all free (free is good). Aaron noted that the buddy list is a great marketing tool, as teens add the library to their buddy lists which allows us to automatically be with them whenever they are online. Because we are coming to them in their space and on their terms they start to trust us. Aaron also discussed MySpace. MySpace is huge—it’s the most popular site on the web right now. There are 250,000 user accounts being created every day. It gets more traffic than Google. Libraries are beginning to create MySpace accounts: putting the library, again, out into the spaces our users are inhabiting online. Aaron talked about video games in libraries. Games are the content of choice for many and tell stories and present challenges to the users. Aaron’s slides are available at http://walkingpaper.org/pla

Dawn Bussey talked about her library’s “Latchkey Lab” where they had an after school program available with a police officer in the room with the students. When she became director, she replaced the police officer with a staff member who actually liked teens. But the attendance was still very poor. The library updated the teen space and collection, started some new services and programs, and worked to change staff attitudes toward teens. They’re working toward creating both a social area and a quiet area for people to study. The staff remind people that teens are users too, that the teens are not violating the code of conduct, and they have every right to be in this public building as anyone else. How does the library’s Board support teens? What is their attitude toward teen services? She emphasized that it’s important to get your Board on the same page as the staff, in terms of attitude toward service areas. Their new after school program will be called ASK@riverforestlibrary (After School Kids). They are looking toward having homework help tutors in the library every day after school, food one day a week, movies, games, book discussions, information literacy programs, etc. The Board felt that this was a “daycare” service, and not something that taxpayers should be paying for. She was able to go out into the community and raise the money for the program independently. She encourages librarians to be prepared, in teen programming, for noise, teen stuff (backpacks), group work, socializing, noise, and group computer play.