The Teen Third Space

My final session was The Teen Third Space. There were 3 speakers during this panel, two talked about teen spaces in libraries and the third spoke about having a teen webpage separate from the library website and catalog. Here is a link to the handouts--it is a word doc, so don't be surprised when it asks you if you want to open it.

Kimberly Bolan is a facilities planning and design consultant and has published a book displaying her design triumphs. She is also a librarian with 20 years of experience. She went into the history of the idea of a "third place" and summarized it as being a social surrounding separate from home and work or school, as well as an environment that facilitates community building. She argued that creating a comfortable teen space increases use of all our services, which is always desirable. In order to get teen input, she recommends showing teens the options, rather than saying "you want [this], don't you?" (Hmm, reference interview anyone?) A couple of the things she says makes teens happy in a space are food and drink and a variety of furniture.

Anthony Bernier is an assistant professor at San Jose State University. His presentation was called, "Why Bean Bags 'Bite:' YA Seating." Obviously not a big fan of the bean bag chair, not only because they are messy and get smelly, but because teens don't like them and they are uncomfortable. He have 4 "rules" for choosing teen area furniture:

1. Maximize Options
2. Mix and Don't Match
3. Offer Movement
4. Explore the Floor

What this comes to, is offer a variety and don't make teens sit the way our grandparents thought teens should sit. Offer chairs and stools that are comfortable and offer a number of ways to position themselves. Let them put their feet up, mix up the colors and don't expect things to stay where you put them.

The final presenter was Angela Sigg, web developer of the Denver Public Library. She worked with teens and staff at her system to create a teen web page for the library. Her summary of what teens like in a website:

• short blocks of text
• one that reflects what they like and who they are
• mentions regular teen patrons
• features their reviews of books and movies

What they don't like:

• Boring!
• too much text
• using teen "lingo"--trying to be cool

That was the last of it. Sorry to say I did not win the raffle, and neither did Cheresse--they were giving away some cool notebooks and teen read week shirts.

Oh, speaking of teen read week, the YALSA president's meeting was just before the panel, and the president urged us all to register if we are participating in teen read week. It is free and helps them report the number of participants, which in turn helps them get funding. All around goodness.

Excellence in Library Services to Young Adults

This morning I attend YALSA's Excellence in Library Service to Young Adults. It was a great showcase of 4 different library's projects in serving unique populations of teens. There were posters from about 10 library systems all together, but only 4 presented. All were larger systems, although some of them did not have prior teen programing or services in place. Many of these projects were gateways into further serving teens, even if the programs themselves did not last.

The first library, which I missed the name of, held a 2 day teen summit where they invited teens to come and hear speakers on different hot topics. To entice teens to the summit, they emphasized big name speakers and provided a box lunch. One cool idea I came away with was to have a sign in "sheet". When their sponsor wanted to keep track of who attended with a paper sign in, the librarian came up with the idea of putting a regular flat sheet over the tables and provided sharpies for teens to "sign the sheet". This allowed tracking for numbers and names, and ended up being a piece of artwork when teens added their tags to the sheet as well.

Brazos Price from Austin Public Library was the second presenter. He spoke about their Second Chance program which formed a library branch inside both the short and long term juvenile facilities in their city. The teen spaces were very neat and clean, with a lot of tables and space, and had an impressive number of books. They started out with donated ARC's and second hand books, but have impressed their admin so much that they now have their own budget for new materials and have surpassed a couple of their branch libraries in circulation numbers.

Hennepin County Library/Brooksdale Branch started an International Teen Club at their library. The program is really inspirational in its scope. Most of the members are Hmong, but they are open to any nationality. They have developed their own programs, volunteer to help the library, designed their own logo which they use on marketing and t-shirts, made a dvd to teach new immigrants how to use the library, started a peer tutoring group and give workshops to other clubs that want to start one and have cultural workshops to help keep their culture alive here in the US.

The New Scotland Branch of the Albany Library System created a Skate Club to help bring a population of skaters into the library. The skaters had previously used the library only for internet, bathrooms and water while they spent the day skating on the expanse of concrete in front of the library. The branch librarian was smart enough to recruit a library school student who also happened to be a pro skater to come facilitate the club and they partnered with a local for profit indoor skate facility. He brought video of his own skating and encouraged the teens to do so as well. The club grew into an advisory type of group and gave feedback as to how the teen area in the new branch should look and feel, as well as helped develop their new teen employment program. The Skate Club will not be back this year since Albany is going through a lot of closures and reopenings with remodels and new libraries being built, but the group's input will live on and many of the teens that were involved with the club are now involved in other ways.

The final presentation was really short. The Alameda County Library recruited teens to teach seniors how to use computers and navigate the internet. It sounds like it was a very positive experience.

One thing I took away from this session was the power of giving teens a voice. Making them feel that the library is their place, instead of just a place they visit. One way that I saw this in many of the sessions was allowing the teens to come up with their own logo/graphic that represented who they are. At some point, I would like to facilitate an art contest with that in mind.

First Day and YALSA 101

Today was the first real day for me. I got to the conference around noon, picked up my large (ugly!) orange bag (it looks like it could be a flotation device, or used to ward off a hunting incident) with all the conference information in it, and my badge, then went for lunch with Dave and a friend of his from KCLS. Later, after checking email and wandering the floor a bit, I stopped by the YALSA 101 presentation.

The session was presented by the YALSA officers, who told us about ways that we could get involved with YALSA, through committees and publications. We also learned about Teen Read Week, Teen Tech Week and the YALSA Literature Symposium coming up in November.

It turns out that YALSA is a big presence on the web, utilizing twitter, blog, MySpace, Facebook, Ning and a few other sites to connect with members. A new one I hadn't heard of is called Friend Feed and can be used to gather all of your social networking sites onto one page, and integrated into a Google page or Facebook. In this way, you can keep track of what all of your friends are doing from the same page, regardless of what social networking medium they use. I will have to check it out.

I also found out about an effort called Support Teen Literacy Day. I am still a little unsure how the program works, but I intend to find out more. What I gathered from the talk was that publishers donate books and they are given to teens who are in the hospital with long term illness.

After the 101 class I, and most of the other attendees went to Morton's for the YALSA happy hour. I was interviewed along with another librarian about our zine collection and the work we do with teens in relation to zines. That may end up as a pod cast on the YALSA site. Dave also met up with me there and we made some new acquaintances--Janine from the iSchool (UW) was one. She had a lot of good information about YALSA committees and book lists.

I ended the night having dinner with one of my cohort today that I didn't know would be here until she texted me earlier today to say she was coming from Portland. She is an academic librarian, so our paths probably won't cross often at the conference, but I hope we will get to hang out at least once more.