Who’s missing from your public library?
Sometime today, a co-worker is planning to stop by my office to talk to me about using technology to bring teens into the library, particularly Facebook and Twitter. I will be completely honest here: I don’t know the first thing about teens and/or what technology they use. I generally try to avoid teens. I’m glad there are people who work in libraries who are interested in and enthusiastic about working with teens. We need them. But I am not one of them.
I admit, I don’t see a lot of teens going crazy over Facebook. These days, it seems to be adults who are spending hours of their time oversharing the gory details of their personal lives. While I always love a good trainwreck, it seems like there are some folks on Facebook (mainly people I vaguely knew in high school who friended me, most likely out of morbid curiosity) who are unaware of personal boundaries. The whole “Facebook-as-support-system” phenomenon is starting to creep me out. Also, I cannot think of very many 38-year-olds, male or female, whose provocatively-posed photographs I wish to see on a social networking website. CUT IT OUT. And put those away!
As for Twitter, I’m an unrepentant addict, and while I won’t overshare the details of my personal life or my food choices (other than my love for Taco Loco and the occasional description of a cooking coup or two) I do crack wise and discuss work on occasion. But I don’t see a lot of teens hanging out on Twitter. Part of that is certainly my personal network—as an adult in my mid-30s, I don’t have any reason to be following teens or to have teens following me—but I have a feeling that Twitter appeals more to older oversharers rather than the younger set.
One thing that bothers me about the constant courting of teens in the library is that there are other audiences who are not using public libraries. Ever. I see teens in here all the time. This place is crawling with them on any school day between 2:30 and 5. They’re here on the weekends. There was a group of homeschoolers here the other morning. They have their own room, their own collections, their own programming. And I agree that these things are necessary and important, and I’m not knocking it, but do we really need yet another sparkly new initiative to bring them into the library? I’m not so sure about that.
Teens are frequently described as “our future voters and library supporters,” which is true, but there are current voters and potential library supporters who don’t use the library. The particular group I’m thinking of is adults in their 20s and 30s who do not have children. Children tend to bring people back to the library. We have storytimes and summer reading and all kinds of programming for them. Your average toddler (or even your above- or below-average toddler) can’t bring himself in to the library on his own. Parental intervention is required, and this brings parents back in to the library. But what about those of us who do not have children? Most “adult” library programming is aimed at senior citizens. Book discussion groups tend to attract women in their 40s and beyond. The lectures we have here, while interesting, don’t seem to attract the non-AARP crowd.
These adults are ALREADY able to vote. They ALREADY have a voice in our communities. Many of them are dynamic and are contributing great things to our local cultures. Why aren’t we doing more to attract them to our public libraries?
Here’s my story: I grew up in public libraries. Literally. My mom was on the local library board until she got a job at the library. I did summer reading. I went to storytime. I read voraciously. I volunteered at the library, then got a summer job at the library. I worked at my university library.
Then, when I was in my early 20s, I stopped using the library. My mom still worked there, I still visited her at work, but I didn’t USE the library. I didn’t check out materials. I went to bookstores instead. My overstuffed bookshelves demonstrate how little I used the library for a period of about ten years. Yes, my hometown library was small, but I could have easily acquired just about anything I wanted to read, watch, or listen to via interlibrary loan. But I didn’t, and it’s because I wasn’t sure what was there for me.
If someone like me, who grew up in libraries, can lose interest in public libraries, then there are many, many others as well. And most of them do not come back to public libraries like I did. Most of them continue assuming that public libraries are Not For Them, that public libraries are for toddlers and senior citizens and teens and people without computers and high-speed internet in their homes, but Not For Them.
I truly believe that this is our great untapped audience, yet very few libraries are making concerted efforts to bring them back into the library. Oak Park Public Library has the popular Genre X group (and Mandy and Monica are doing a fantastic job with it). But what else is out there? What are you doing? Do you think we’re dropping the ball with this audience as well?
(I assure you, this isn’t going to turn into some overearnest library blog, but sometimes I’ve just got to let it blurt, y’know? Now back to our regulary-scheduled pettiness, snarkiness, and making fun of stuff.)
