Interview with a librarian and video essay

This is a video I made for my social media class. I added an interview with librarian Jacoba Wells at the end. I added the interview so that I could include it on this blog.

I have saved the screen captures of the interview portion to share here in addition to the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBacC9WwGzA

Pannoni, A. (2014, September 22). Public Libraries Offer More Than Just Books to Teens. U.S. News & World Report.

This article is about how public libraries serve teen populations in areas other than providing physical books. According to Pew Research Center, 65% of teens 16-17 years old have used a library in the past year. This is more than half. And, it turns out that older teens are less likely to admit to finding the library useful even though they are actually using it. Two key items: Teen spaces and digital tools.

The Monroe County Public Library here in Bloomington is taking on these two important aspects when their new Teen Center opens in January. There will be a teen space for hanging out, and also a new Digital Creative Commons (DCC) that is available to adults as well as to teens. I am glad that the DCC will be open to all library patrons, as one of my hypotheses is that the library Maker's Commons ideas, and Teen Center ideas are all applicable to adult populations as well and will ultimately be the kinds of programming that help libraries transition from "book keepers" to "information keepers" and remain relevant.

YALSA Teen Services Evaluation Tool

YALSA stands for The Young Adult Library Services Association, and is the part of the American Library Association (ALA) that deals with teen and young adult services. The ALA creates evaluation tools for libraries and library departments to use to test out how their libraries measure up to current field standards. The evaluation tool for teen services emphasizes:

- Leadership and professionalism

- Knowledge of client group

- Communication, marketing, and outreach

- Administration

- Access to Information

- Services

The specific natures of these categories is available at: http://www.ala.org/yalsa/guidelines/yacompetencies2010.

The most teen-specific of these categories for me are knowledge of client group and access to information. A library is in a unique position to provide space and resources for free to the community at large. Making this useful and desirable to teens requires knowledge about what teens are currently into, what things they would like to have and use, and what kinds of knowledge they are trying to obtain. In order to serve the population, one needs to understand the population. I believe I am in a position to understand many teen needs because I interact with teens regularly due to my regular anime and comic convention attendance, in addition to volunteering with local teens at an after school program occasionally.