Reaching (and Teaching) Teens

Joyce Valenza, librarian at Springfield Township High School in Erdenheim, PA, knows how high school students do research projects, sometimes with unfortunate results. 'They just use the Internet,' she says. 'I know of a student who did a psychology research paper on Hitler, but because the sites he used were so superficial, the student didn't know that Hitler had written Mein Kampf.' Teens, she says, tell her honestly that they'll do as little work as they can get away with. 'There aren't many students in it for the love of learning,' Valenza says. She feels that librarians need to teach and model good research skills, whether in a school library or a public library.

One of the best opportunities we have, with a generation of young adults who tend to accept whatever they find online as more authoritative than what they find in books-if they bother to look in books-is our library web sites. I've examined the web sites of public and school libraries for the past six years and have seen a tremendous variety of resources and presentations. But almost all of them seem to feel that their sites must 'rock.' Unfortunately, they rarely do, unless they stress the things that libraries do well-how to look for, evaluate, and organize materials that will help students in their homework and possibly in their lives.

Few libraries have a big budget for a professional web designer. Sacramento Public Library, CA, had one and put up a sleek and beautifully designed teen site. Although I'm usually not crazy about black backgrounds-they prove difficult for those with vision problems and learning disabilities-I'm willing to set my prejudice aside here because the design is so simple and the print large and clear. But if you don't want a designer look, it's usually best to go for a simple design that, like a Shaker chair, can impress with its severity teens who regularly look at the most overproduced web sites. Sara Ryan of Multnomah County Library, OR, has gone this route in the library's 'Outernet' site for teens, which she manages. There are no fancy graphics, no image maps, and no yellow type on a black background, just a lot of links targeted at teens ages 12-18, nicely organized and annotated. It looks so simple that it's easy to miss Ryan's site-building philosophy, which she wrote about in the March 2000 School Library Journal ('It's Hip To Be Square '). 'You need to build on the areas,' Ryan says, 'where librarians have undeniable credibility-books, reading, and finding stuff that's hard to find.' Doing it this way isn't only honest, it also models a way of looking at information resources that builds information literacy skills, unbeknownst to the teen visitor.

When it comes to searching the net, she says, don't just put up the logos of all the major search tools on your YA pages. Act instead like a librarian: catalog those tools; tell teens what they're useful for; provide annotations that tell teens what they'll see when they use them. But remember to keep those descriptions brief, or teens won't read them. Offer sites about books and reading: teens who visit a library web site are likely to be interested in books and reading. One example is Cathy Young's Favorite Teenage Angst Books, which has been around almost since the first days of the web. Include opportunities for students to submit their own writing or book reviews. Stress local resources, something nationally or internationally oriented sites don't do. 'Almost all library teen sites have some 'college planning' links,' Ryan points out. 'But not many of them link, say, to the site from their state's department of education that describes the special scholarships available to residents, or the sites of community colleges in the region.' She sums up the idea nicely when she says, 'Think globally, but link locally.'

Ryan counsels against relying too much on teens when seeking resources and design advice for the library's teen web site. 'When you have a teen advisory board design your site, the look of the site will reflect the personal tastes of that particular group of teens. This isn't a bad thing.but other teens may find the site hard to navigate, useless, or just plain goofy-looking.' Phyllis Saunders and her staff at Arizona's Chandler Public Library, with the assistance of the library's cheekily named teen advisory board, ASIF (Advisory Students in an Interactive Function), chose not to stray too far from plain and simple with the library's Teen Matrix site. The graphics are not extreme, and the one animated gif on the Teen Matrix homepage is so subtle you have to look for it. But it does offer a lot of resources for Arizona teens, includes links to local sites of interest, and lets readers submit book reviews. Saunders doesn't attribute the Teen Matrix's popularity to any particular magic on the site but to hard work on her part and that of her staff's. To promote the teen reading program, the Chandler PL youth services staff visited every junior high in the area to spread the word with enthusiasm.

Los Angeles Public Library's Young Adults site, a part of its Teenscape program, is a blend of resources on teen-oriented topics (anime and comics, men's and women's sports, TV, movies, and books) with announcements about library programs and activities.

The Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, NC, which has created the fun and useful BookHive site for kids, with booklists and annotations of recommended titles, has unveiled a more teen-oriented but equally worthwhile book site, Reader's Club, for young adults. Here's a perfect example of a library site for teens that doesn't try to make the library into anything more or less than it is, while emphasizing its strengths. When you pull up the site on the screen, the newest reviews are always displayed first. The Reader's Club's brief reviews, each of which includes a scan of the book's cover, let readers add their own comments. They're organized by genre, letting horror fans and those who prefer inspirational fiction find what they want. The whole package is clearly not as good as having a live, 3-D librarian giving a book talk to a middle school or high school classroom, but it's a lot more effective than putting up a spartan, text-only book list, as many libraries do.

Perhaps the most visually impressive of the YA sites is Teen Links, from the folks at Hennepin County Library (HCL), MN. This page borders on the theatrical with its many JavaScripted mouse-overs (when you roll the cursor over 'Life Stuff,' for example, text pops up on the left side of the screen, reading, 'Do you need information on topics such as sex, health, dating or college and careers?'). HCL considers the site part of its 'eLibrary,' to be used both in and out of its buildings. Aware of the ongoing need for teens to work on school projects at the library, for example, clicking 'Write On' on the TeenLinks homepage will open Microsoft Word if you're using the page in the buildings (otherwise the site simply reminds you it's available if you come in).

There's a nice, appropriate-and well-annotated-collection of links on the site, too, that features both global and local links. The Music section, for example, includes Internet sites like Kissthisguy.com: The Archive of Misheard Lyrics (www.kissthisguy.com: the title comes from rock lyrics being sometimes hard to decipher, and one famous mishearing of a line in Jimi Hendrix's 'Purple Haze' goes: ''scuse me, while I kiss this guy'). But it also offers music sites with a Minnesota emphasis, such as Minneapolis PL's Musicscene, with ads and announcements by and about local bands and performers. Put together, the HCL TeenLinks site contains a well-designed set of resources; its creators have acted like librarians, but they've rocked a little, too.

No library site is going to be the 'place to go on the web' for any community's teens. But it can make a difference if its creators remember that a YA site should always play to the strengths of the library sponsoring it, and those strengths usually focus around 1) books, reading, and writing; 2) annotating, organizing, and offering resources on topics teens deal with, from the best U.S. history sites to information on local birth control clinics, and 3) that something extra-whatever that something is-that makes that library's YA services unique. But there's no need to look as if you rock. Either you do it (by providing the information, reading, and writing resources community teens need) or you don't, and the color of your background and links really doesn't make much of a difference.