I’m in my first working year as a public librarian and I’ve been transferred to a new job where I’m in charge of collection development and outreach for the young-adults section. I have no experience in that particular field and never took any relevant courses in library school.
What do teenagers really want to read, nowadays?
What, other than books, do they want from a library?
Outreach – what can I do to let local teenagers know the branch library is there, and entice them to use it occasionally? (At present, our small YA section is pretty underused, except by tutors and their students.) Are there programs we could institute?
I’m hoping you’ve already hooked up with YALSA, but if you haven’t, go read through the documents on the site, join their e-mail list and the like.
Beyond that, go find some libraries that seem to have good YA programs going - check out their web sites and see what they do. One of my friends is a YA librarian and she’s done things like a Battle of the Bands for teen bands, with donated prizes and such (she runs YA services for a district instead of a branch, though).
Think about prepping booktalks (Here are some examples, though a quick glance makes me think those might be for younger kids. Try to get into the local schools to do booktalks and start telling the students what there is - maybe offer to host tutoring sessions in the library?
Bear in mind that I’m an academic business librarian, so I don’t really work with the YA crowd, but I did take YA lit in library school…mostly because I like the books.
When I was that age I read mostly fantasy and sci fi. Douglas Adams and Tolkien. I also read comics, both the newspaper kind and the comic book kind. Reading was incredibly uncool, it’s probably taboo now. Maybe if you had issues of seventeen and YM they’d go. IMO if you really want to market to teens get a myspace site.
Speaking only as a former-teenager who used to live at the library…
My local library had a huge box full of random comic-book albums (with real covers, not papery-magazines) and it always got raided. There was the usual (Asterix, Tintin, Lucky Luke, all that stuff) but also weird semi-french artsy things, long history stories, crime-and-sex albums that aproached porn at times (but since it was drawn, it was alright), not to mention comic-book versions of real books, like The Hobbit. I worked there after school at one point, puting books back on the shelves as they came in, so I know how popular this was. I believe they actually had more than would fit in the box, but since so many were out at any given time, it worked.
Most popular genre? Fantasy (I worked there during the LotR/Harry Potter craze)
Most used service? Internett and computer acces. My library also kept some of the most popular PC-games, and you could play for a limited time with headphones. I suppose the idea was that getting them into the building in the first place was a stepp in the right direction.