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Public library service to children and teens: a research agenda
Library Trends, Spring, 2003 by Virginia A. Walter
ABSTRACT
THIS PAPER DEALS WITH FOUR SIGNIFICANT UNANSWERED QUESTIONS related to children's and young adult services in public libraries: 1. How have public library services to children and young adults developed over time? 2. How and why do young people use public libraries? 3. How can we evaluate the effectiveness of public library service for young people? 4. Why should policymakers fund public library services for children and young adults? After reviewing the existing knowledge base that can serve as scaffolding for the needed research, the author suggests strategies for refining and implementing this research agenda.
INTRODUCTION
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On a typical day in a typical midsized public library, up to 60 percent of its users will be under the age of eighteen. Toddlers come for storytimes. Teachers and day care providers bring groups of children to find books and information, to be instructed in information literacy skills, and to hear stories. Schoolchildren drop in for after-school programming or homework assistance. They browse the shelves and participate in book discussion groups. Children of all ages cluster around the computer workstations where they look for information about their current sports and music idols as well as for materials for school reports. They play games, do e-mail, and chat with friends from school and around the world. Teens show up to see and be seen, to check out CDs and magazines, and to do their homework. They advise library staff on collection development and services; they also provide some of those services as paid workers or volunteers. Even babies are now legitimate library users in their own right, not just cargo for parents and caregivers who must bring the little ones along on their library visits. Infants have their own story programs and library materials--lapsits and board books. Their parents may attend educational sessions that disseminate the latest research findings about early childhood literacy and instruct them in techniques for encouraging the reading skills in their own preschool children.
A surprising amount of this activity remains unexamined by the research community. Children's and young adult librarians, while they are often reflective practitioners, are usually too busy to conduct research studies themselves, and academics have often found children to be less interesting or somehow less legitimate subjects than adults. There are, therefore, many gaps in what we know about library services to people in their first two decades of life. This paper identifies four significant unanswered research questions related to children's and young library services. It outlines the existing knowledge base that can serve as scaffolding for the needed research and suggests strategies for implementing this research agenda.
THE BIG FOUR: QUESTIONS NEEDING ANSWERS
The major gaps in research about public library services for children and young adults can be summarized as four questions:
* How have public library services to children and young adults developed over the years?
* How and why do young people use public libraries?
* How can we evaluate the effectiveness of public library service for young people?
* Why should policymakers fund public library services for children and young adults?
Note that these questions fall into four traditional areas of scholarship: historical research, user studies, evaluation research, and policy studies. The sections that follow provide a brief rationale for the significance of each of the four major research questions and an overview of the theoretical and empirical foundations on which to build the scaffolding for continuing scholarship.
HISTORICAL RESEARCH: HOW HAVE PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICES TO CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULTS DEVELOPED OVER THE YEARS?
Public library service to children began a little more than 100 years ago. It was created by a small band of determined women who persisted in spite of the opposition or lack of interest of many of the most influential library leaders of the time. The record of their achievements has considerable relevance today as we try to redefine the role of public libraries in the lives of children in a vastly changed society. What can we learn from the past that can inform our future?
A single historical study of the genesis and development of library services for children has not yet been written. However, Christine Jenkins (1994, 1996) and Anne Lundin (1996, 1998) have contributed important pieces of feminist scholarship about the women whose leadership was so critical in the early years. Walter (2001) relied on Jenkins and Lundin as well as other documentation and primary sources for the first chapter of Children and Libraries: Getting It Right (2001) in which she traces the historical roots that influence the library services of today. The writings of influential early children's library leaders such as Anne Carroll Moore (1969) and Frances Clarke Sayers (1965) are sources from which we can tease out the philosophy and values that guided the emergence of the field.
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