Teen Library Websites: Love them or Hate Them?
Introducing Jennifer…. Jennifer is a Young Adult Librarian for the Otis Library at Norwich, CT. Getting a new shipment of books is the best part; it always feels like Christmas morning and she has the hardest time deciding which book to take home first. Thus her bookshelf is filled with books and she has a mile long list of books-in-waiting. She’s also addicted to the internet.
Teen Library Websites: Love them or Hate Them?
I’ve recently spent a lot of time researching library websites in anticipation for our new website for Otis Library in Connecticut. Our site, in trying to be uniform as a whole site, quickly made our teen page less about graphics and more about the information.However, when I first looked around, there were pages that I wanted to emulate (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery). My favorite site was the teen site at the Public library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County of North Carolina. Their Library Loft page is bold, interesting, and chock full of information. The Louisville Free Public Library has a wonderful teen page including, along with many other libraries, booklists. I freely admit to including 2 booklist pages after looking at this page. Teens at the Johnson Country Library’s teen page can change the background theme of their page with several choices including Goth or monkeys. Each library strives to make their page unique and attention grabbing, but according to teens that I’ve spoken with, it may be a lost cause.
1) Do teens really look at library websites?
2) Are they drawn to images/graphics or more information?
3) What do they envision for the library website?
The biggest question of all:
4) Do they even care?
With all the social networking sites (yes, I’m on myspace, facebook, and Shelfari – all under the title YABOOKNERD to make it easy) does it really matter to have a wicked cool teen website? From the teens I talked to, most didn’t really know that we had a website catering to them. Once they did know, they didn’t seem impressed and when asked would be unlikely to use the site, unless they were bored. So in this case – how do we reach out to teens? Does anyone else find the library website a tool of the past?
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Hi Jennifer. Thanks for the acknowledgement of our teen pages at LFPL. Two quick link fixes for you: The link for PLCMC points to our teen pages and the link for LFPL actually goes to the JoCo site. Thanks again for the kind words.
Hi Greg, that was actually my fault! I posted this up on behalf of Jennifer. Thanks for the information, it has been fixed!
I’m thinking the library teen site is pretty much a formality in most cases these days. We have way more traffic in just a few weeks on our MySpace than we do on our teen site. I figure that if you consider all the choices teens have online there isn’t much you could really offer on your site to compete. It makes much more sense to go where they are already -like Myspace and facebook.
http://www.voicesrisingcleveland.com
myspace.com/clevelandlibrary
I do agree that teens don’t really care about the library website. I think the best solution is to turn the front page of your library website into a blog and post any important information on it: events, explanations of services, lists of new items. You can do the same thing for teen specific items on a library MySpace or the like, but I’m skeptical of how much teens actually care about those either.
[…] Library Websites Check out Jennifer’s article on Teen Library Websites at the Alternative Teen Services […]
Thanks Jennifer for the praise of Johnson County’s Teenscene site. I know that our web team works very hard to keeping it up to date and looking cool. But I can see where Keri is coming from when she talks about how little their teen website is viewed. But should we give up on it just because no one is using it or should we really push it and start advertising more?
I think a Facebook/MySpace presence would be more likely to attract teens. A large percentage of the teens in my branch see the library ONLY as a place to get on a computer to access their social networking sites. I’m trying to convince my system that this can be done safely, but it’s an uphill battle.
Jennifer,
I was beginning to feel that way about our new my space page that we have here at the library now. (Killingly Public Library) I’ve been trying to blog about books but no one is responding.
I agree that teens have very little use for a library website or even a library MySpace or Facebook page. I don’t think that teens are interested in adult created webpages, MySpace pgs or blogs. I do wonder if they might be interested if the blog or MySpace page was created by a group of teens. I think that teens might make use of a library MySpace if they set it up and were allowed to make it look like a real teen page (cluttered).
I keep wondering about this too. Many teens see adults as irrelevant as far as the net is concerned. I get the best feedback and participation from teens from physically going where they are… into the schools for visits, putting flyers and info in the YA shelves, things like that. Sometimes I feel our Myspace page and blog are just for my own entertainment, but I think they are important in the larger system-wide library view. I want our director to view the youth services as current and informed, and technologically edgy. We must have these teen sites and keep pushing for more internet connectivity because once these net-generation teens start having kids themselves, we need to be one step ahead of the game not lagging behind.