Public libraries adapt their services to attract more teens

Crystal Faris, teen services director for the Kansas City Public Libraries, says that through new programming, staffing and renovating branches to create new nooks for technology such as video games, the city’s libraries have seen a 25 percent jump in teen attendance.

“Teens prefer to be social,” Faris told the Kansas City Star, “and when we can provide the opportunity for them to be with their friends and be on the Internet and play games and have access to good books and magazines, what better place to be?”

On any given night, one of the library branches may be host for an after-hours lock-in, an online video game event, an open mic night, podcasting, an anime meet-up, a teen book club, a movie night or a YouTube workshop. Teens at one branch even have their own MySpace page.  The library’s Web site features a page just for teens, offering teen fiction recommendations and an online gallery of teen patrons’ artwork.

“Of course we want them to check out books and read,” said Gabi Otto, who oversees teen activities at one branch. “But I think first we have to get them coming to the library, to develop a relationship.”

Hundreds of library systems have reached the same conclusion.  In London, Ontario, faced with the challenge of bringing teens to the library and pitching literacy to them in a new way, employees made popular video games such as Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution available at library branches. “It’s all literacy, but it’s meaningful and it’s fun and that’s really key with teens, because if it seems like school, then we’re going to turn them off,” said Julie Brandl, the library’s co-ordinator of children and youth services.

Brandl told the London Free Press that “Literacy doesn’t have to be rote, it doesn’t have to be boring. Because they are so technologically savvy and because the world that they live in is often sound bites . . . they’re communicating in a different way.”

“Literacy is not dead, but it’s how to reach them,” said Brandl. “It’s going where they are in terms of technology. It’s all about making it easy, accessible and relevant.”

The American Library Association promotes the use of video games to reach out to kids (and adults), and on Nov. 15, 2008 held a National Gaming Day involving hundreds of libraries across the US.