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Denise E. Agosto
Young adult library services were founded on the idea of meeting teensā needs and interests, yet an adult-centered perspective dominates both the research and practice in this area. This chapter presents a small-scale content analysis of professional literature as proof of the prevailing adult-centered perspective. It then suggests that a teen-centered perspective for public library research and practice is a better approach in terms of benefits to the target population. A truly teen-centered perspective means that we must change our thinking to (1) conceptualize adolescents as āteensā instead of āyoung adultsā; (2) focus on teen development; (3) focus on teens as individuals first and foremost, and as members of their age and other demographic groups second; and (4) make teensānot information resourcesāthe center of our work.
Library services for teens were founded on the idea of providing information resources to meet teensā needs and interests, yet since their inception much of the related research and practice has been conducted from an adult-centered perspective. For example, a great deal of the scholarly and professional writing relating to teens and libraries has taken the form of theoretical or thematic analyses of young adult literature, with the goal of enabling librarians to encourage youth to read the highest quality books. Certainly, there is value in encouraging teens to read (or watch or listen to or play) high-quality materials, but this approach is an adult-centered approach, with adult scholars and adult librarians assuming that they know what kinds of resources teens need and want and that they can identify the best books (or websites or video games) to meet teensā needs and interests.
This concept of adults determining what is ābestā for teens has also led to an emphasis on collecting and recommending award-winning materials, with adults serving as the driving forces behind award designations. There are literally hundreds of youth literature awards, many of which are for young adult (YA) materials (Hilbun and Claes 2010). Even in the case of youth choice awards, librarians still typically select the short lists, and adults still determine what is best for teens.
āTeen-centeredā refers to (1) direct youth participation in program and service design, (2) research that uses teens as research subjects or participants, and (3) library programs and services based on research that uses teens as research subjects or participants. In a more teen-centered approach to library research, teen behaviors, thoughts, and preferences would serve as the main sources for research data, as opposed to information resources serving as the most common data for analysis. In a more teen-centered approach to library practice, teens themselves would serve as the experts of their own thoughts, behaviors, needs, and preferences, and teens themselves would determine what resources and services are the best fits to their needs and interests. This is not to suggest that current library research and services for teens are exclusively adult-centered. There is an element of the teen-centered approach in both practice and research, with a growing number of public libraries setting up teen advisory boards and other mechanisms for enabling teens to provide input on program and service design (Tuccillo 2010), and with a small but significant body of teen-centered library and information science (LIS) research being disseminated via academic outlets each year (see, for example, some of the entries on the Young Adult Library Services Association Research Committeeās research bibliography [YALSA 2009]).
The concept of a teen-centered approach to public library services is not new. Librarians have been encouraging teens to participate in library services on a limited basis for decades. Tuccillo (2010) traced teen participation in both public and school libraries back as far as the early twentieth century, and she argued that librarians have placed importance on fostering teen participation ever since. What is new is the level of teen participation that is required to achieve the vision of a truly teen-centered approach.
The question that drives this chapter is, What should be the central focus of todayās library research and services for teens? I will argue that the teen-centered focus is the best approach for creating the public library research and services that can best benefit teens. With this goal in mind, I will show how we must change our thinking in order to lead the field toward a truly teen-centered approach. My intention is not to suggest the elimination of the adult-centered approach but to nudge us further into teen-centered thinking, with the goal of making the teen-centered approach the guiding perspective of library research and services for teens. In this vision, the adult-centered approach does not disappear, but it does become less of a focus, falling beneath the broader teen-centered umbrella guiding library services and research for teens.
AN ANALYSIS OF REPRESENTATIVE LITERATURE IN LIBRARY SERVICES FOR TEENS
Before I can outline necessary changes for making the teen-centered vision a reality, I need to provide some proof of my contention that the adult-centered perspective is dominant. One way to determine the prevailing perspective of a field is to analyze its professional literature. Looking at the current LIS professional literature for teen librarians, many of the articles focus on analyzing information resources, programs, and services from the adult authorsā perspectives, without gathering data or input directly from teens. As an example of how the adult-centered perspective dominates the current teen librarianship professional literature, I will analyze the most recent three complete years of articles published in Young Adult Library Services.
Young Adult Library Services is, of course, the member journal for YALSA. It is edited and run by active YALSA members, most of whom are teen librarians working in public libraries. Its writersā guidelines explain: āYoung Adult Library Services is a vehicle for continuing education of librarians working with young adults (ages 12ā18) that showcases current research and practice relating to teen services and spotlights significant activities and programs of the divisionā (YALSA 2011). Thus, the target audience of the journal is teen librarians, and the intent is to provide them with the most relevant and significant research, lessons from practice, and YALSA news and activities. It is not intended to be a research journal read by academics, but a continuing education resource for practitioners. For many teen librarians, it is their main external connection to the field of youth librarianship after completing graduate school.
I used the Library Literature and Information Science Full Text database to gather all of the articles published in Young Adult Library Services for the period 2008ā2010, a total of 220 articles. I hypothesized that authors of research articles were more likely to include direct input from teens in the form of data than were authors of practice-based articles. To calculate the percentage of research-focused and practice-based articles within the dataset, I defined research very broadly as any article that (1) included analysis of some form of data, defining data in the broad sense of any text, such as a book or website; any information collected via a survey, interview, experiment, or other data-gathering means; any information collected systematically about a library program or service, such as attendance or circulation figures; or any use of a theoretical or conceptual framework; and (2) included at least one scholarly reference. All other articles, such as descriptions and announcements of information resource awards, program reports that described programs but did not analyze program success or impacts, editorials, and so on, were considered practice articles.
I used standard qualitative content analysis techniques to analyze the main topics of the articles in the dataset, coding each article for one main topic, iteratively collapsing the emerging list of topics into broader categories until there were eight distinct topic categories for the practice-based articles and five topic categories for the research articles. In some cases, an article could have fit into two or more categories. I chose just one main category per article to simplify analysis and reporting. I used simple descriptive statistics to calculate the quantitative findings.
Practice-Based and Research-Based Articles
Table 1.1 shows the percentages of practice and research articles in the dataset. Of the 220 articles published during the three-year period, 21 (9.5 percent) could be considered research using the very broad definition of research above. The remaining 90.5 percent were practice-based articles. As a journal aimed at practitioners and intended partly as a vehicle for dissemination of professional association news, it makes sense that the majority of the articles were nonresearch pieces. However, this analysis indicated that teen librarians who keep up with the field only through professional journals such as this one were exposed to only a small body of the relevant research, just five to 10 items per year for this particular journal during the period of analysis.
TABLE 1.1 Practice/Research Breakdown of Articles Published in Young Adult Library Services, 2008ā2010
| CATEGORY | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | TOTAL |
| Practice (nonresearch) | 64 (91.4%*) | 53 (84.1%*) | 82 (94.3%*) | 199 (90.5%) |
| Research | 6 (8.6%*) | 10 (15.9%*) | 5 (5.7%*) | 21 (9.5%) |
| TOTAL | 70 (100%*) | 63 (100%*) | 87 (100%*) | 220 (100%) |
* Percentage of total articles published for that year.
Main Topics of Articles
Data analysis of the practice articles yielded eight main topics, as shown in table 1.2. The most frequent main topic was āteen book/resource awards,ā accounting for 43 of the 199 total practice articles, or 21.6 percent. Articles falling into this category were announcements of award winners, discussions (as opposed to scholarly analyses, which were considered research) of award-winning books and other information resources, texts of teen resource award acceptance speeches, and descriptions of teen information resource awards.
An additional 18 (9.0 percent) practice articles discussed ābooks and other resources for teens,ā such as bibliographic essays of recommended teen books about a particular topic or representing a particular genre. Combining the information resource awards category with the other information resources category, a total of 61 (30.7 percent) of the practice articles were discussions relating to teen information resources, most commonly fiction books. This means that nearly one-third of the practice articles focused on teen resources.
The other most common practice topics included āprograms and servicesā (33 articles, or 16.6 percent), āeditorials/columns/professional adviceā (27 articles, or 13.6 percent), āprofessional books/other professional resourcesā (27 articles, or 13.6 percent), and āconferences and professional associationsā (...
