Sunday, July 15, 2007

The blog Pop Goes the Library has a young, hip attitude that I enjoy. I enjoy knowing what teens will be into, (even though I work with the younger "Dora the Explorer" crowd) and this blog has that feel.
As a whole, teens don't trust librarians, so, having librarians that teens will think are hip may just save us with the next generation.

In my first semester of library school I took a course "Human Information Behavior". My fellow RUSSL classmates can all remember that one. We had to get up and talk about the information seeking habits of some group or other, and I chose urban teenagers. The best research I could find was from a study by two Drexel Library Profs, Denise Agosto and Sandra Hughes-Hassell:

People, places, and questions: An investigation of the everyday life information-seeking behaviors of urban young adults
Library & Information Science Research, Volume 27, Issue 2, Spring 2005, Pages 141-163
Denise E. Agosto and Sandra Hughes-Hassell

They met with about 30 teens, had them keep track of where they met their everyday questions for a period of time, then sat with the teens in smaller groups to compare and rank results. With teens who were even teen leader homework help library volunteers, they overwhelmingly did not look to librarians to get information. Its a point to consider. We have to go a long way to meet teens halfway, and to gain their trust. Learning about reaching out via new technologies is cool in my book, maybe the teens will think so, too.

1 comment:

Sophie Brookover said...

Thanks for reading, and for the compliments! I see you're taking a class with Steve -- please tell him I said hello. :-)