Teen Readers' Advisory {Special Topics Assignment}

Teens. Working with this age group seems to come with an all or nothing attitude. There is no ambivalence allowed. They are at in between space in their lives, discovering their independence and who they are. They come from varying backgrounds and home lives, some have friends that come with them, and some come to make friends. I love working with teens. I decided to keep this paper focused on general teen advisory rather than diving into one of the many holes I could have gone down.

In 2015, the Institute of Museum and Library Services reported that there were 7.2 million attendees at teen/young adult programs. That means that there were 7.2 chances to interact with teens/young adults. To get to know them, to provide a library service to them, to recommend a book to them. While there are similarities, of course, between providing Teen RA and Adult RA, there are differences.

Teens generally will need to be approached first, but with open ended conversation (while this is not always the case, for the sake of this conversation and topic, we are talking about the ones that are more reluctant to approach on their own). They tend to be less apt to approach the desk and ask for help and therefore it is incumbent upon us to remove the barrier and go out into the stacks and teen area and open the door for to that conversation and make us approachable.

It's also important to make sure that we know our teen collection as the content can vary greatly within the collection. While a twelve year old may love high fantasy and action packed adventure, he may not love the steamy content that comes along with A Court of Thorn and Roses by Sarah J Maas. Or he might not care. But if you don't know it's there, you don't know how to recommend the material. (More or less a true story, but the boy was 10, his girl cousin was 11, and the girl cared, he did not... :) )

Basically, I think teens are awesome and fun and I love doing readers' advisory with them.


Comments

  1. KelleyMarch 4, 2019 at 12:23 PM

    Brandy,

    Of all the age groups that the library serves, I think teens are definitely the most fickle and hard to read. I love that you chose to focus on providing readers' advisory to teens as a whole, instead of a specific group, and that you stressed their reluctance to seeking help finding new titles. I agree completely with what you said about making sure we know our teen collections, so as to better connect them with titles they will likely enjoy. I, personally, am not as well-versed in our teen collection as I would like to be. I should probably get to work on that. Great topic!

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    Replies
    1. BrandyMarch 8, 2019 at 10:55 AM

      Thanks, Kelley! Teens can definitely be hard to read, can't they? I do think the best part in providing RA to teens is to know the books you have in the collection or to know what you have access to in order to help them find what they might like. And having a cache of resources on hand is a great way to get started with that. Something I left out, inadvertently, is to have RA access online for teens. They would definitely be a generation to make use of those resources!

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