services for children and young adults
The future lives in the young folks of today. So it is not strange that any library without boys and girls trooping through its doors seems to have an odor of the past, the mustiness of age, to be not wholly alive. In fact, the library‟s work with children and young adults forms one of its most vital social phases. Perhaps this is because any agency serving young people must be alert, quick to catch the current humor, flexible in method and approach [Rose, 112].
We have often noted that our most supportive clientele groups tend to be older individuals, often retired and with time available to indulge their hobbies, which thankfully sometimes include the public library. But, loathe as I am to say it, the future does not belong to the baby-boomer generation; it belongs to their grandchildren's generations. Ernestine Rose stated the above in her 1954 book on public libraries. She may have been thinking about the higher purposes of serving the development of youth, but one might also think about serving children and youth in terms of developing a future set of library users, a set that could benefit from good, focused services now and could benefit from evolving, focused services in their own futures.
But this leads us back again into the discussion of what is the purpose of the public library. One thing we can all see is that in the absence of robust social services, the underfunded and underappreciated public library is often thrust into the role of providing services to the public that it is not prepared for in terms of resources, inclination, or focus. One of the constant issues I heard expressed by library staffs during my research was that they feel like they are often expected to be day-care or after-school-care centers, without having the training or resources to perform such a task.
On the other hand, almost all public libraries seem to accept and embrace the educational part of their mission with reading activities for children and young adult outreach initiatives. Sometimes these are done in conjunction with local schools, sometimes they are done seemingly in competition with them when the relationships between the two social agencies (libraries and schools) are not strong.
In our text, Linda Alexander and Barbara Immroth suggest that we might want to address the topic in a new way - not focusing on the negative connotations of becoming a de-facto social safety net or on the positive view of the classical modes of youth services. They suggest that public libraries might be able to organize youth services into four thematic areas as a way of linking libraries to the community by linking youth the the community.
It's an interesting concept, but not necessarily an easy sell. One immediately notes that it doesn't say anything about "reading." Of course, reading is clearly a component of both cultural heritage and education, but it isn't stated in the same terms as classically understood by libraries. Also, the whole concept of public sphere seems like a self-defeating effort, especially when one ponders the difficulty of getting teens interested in things like civics in high school. (The newspaper strip Zits often tells difficult truths to us.)
But the authors seem to think that this kind of four-pronged approach to thinking about children and youth services might, in the long run, be a way to more solidly integrate the public library into the private and public lives of today's youth (and, by extension, tomorrow's adults). One might even evolve to a situation where the public library is adequately funded and the staff trained to be able to happily become the after school place. (I can hear the refrain: "in your dreams!")
If the library seems to be a "nice to have" historical artifact to much of today's populace (an arguable contention, I know), might it become a "must-have" institution for tomorrow's populace if the approach to children and youth services were re-thought?
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