Public library service to children and teens: a research agenda

It is sometimes necessary to look beyond the books and articles devoted to children's services in order to ferret out important scholarship relevant to the field. Abigail A. Van Slyck's study of Carnegie libraries, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920 (1995), for example, offers fascinating insight on the interplay between space and the services provided for children in libraries. General histories of public libraries such as Civic Space/cyberspace? The American Public Library in the Information Age by Redmond Kathleen Molz and Phyllis Dain (1999) help to contextualize the role of children's services in the parent institution.

Unfortunately, whole decades of public library service to children remain undocumented except through scattered journalistic accounts in the popular library press. While we have fairly good documentation of the early years, we know much less about the period of diffusion in which children's services became institutionalized in public libraries of all sizes throughout the U.S. What happened to children's services during World Wars I and II? How did public libraries respond to the changes in children's lives caused by Sputnik and introduction of television? What were the contributions of extraordinary African-American children's library leaders, such as Augusta Baker, Effie Lee Morris, and Charlemae Rollins? What was the impact of the War on Poverty and the outreach movement on library services to children? How have libraries served immigrant children over time?

Library service for young adults is even more lacking in rigorous historical analysis and documentation. As with children's services, one can deduce the ideas that were held in good currency at various times by reading the words of leaders in the field. Perhaps the most influential is Margaret A. Edwards whose treatise on library services to teens, The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts; The Library and the Young Adult (1969) was revised and reprinted in 1974 and again with a new foreword by Patty Campbell in 1994.

There is one exemplary historical study of young adult services. Miriam Braverman (1979) researched the early years of young adult library services in three urban settings--Cleveland, New York, and Baltimore. Her monograph, Youth, Society, and the Public Library, is a fascinating chronicle of what seems to have been a golden age in young adult services in the 1930s and 1940s. The book also contributes to our understanding of the dimensions of leadership, politics, and economics in public library service innovations.

What is largely missing from the history of young adult services is an understanding of its development since the 1940s. Why did public libraries apparently retreat from targeting high school students at precisely the moment in American history when teenagers were being defined? Why was there an apparent resurgence of interest in young adult services within the American Library Association in the mid-1980s? What is the significance of contributions of more recent young adult advocates and spokespeople such as Mary Kay Chelton, Elaine Meyers, Patrick Jones, and Deborah Taylor?