George from http://archdale.blogspot.com writes:
Michael, Just wanted to point you to the video editing contest that our Teen Corner is having for National Library Week. We just debuted a Teen area with furniture, shelving and 4 computers with video editing software and dvd burners.
http://rcplteencorner.blogspot.com/2007/03/teen-video-contest.html
Thanks George! I also see that the library had a “Make a Movie Night” presented by the teen advisory board. This is good on many levels:
The library has technologies the teens may want to use to create content (remember those Pew numbers?) and a space just for them.
The TAB is actively working to educate their library user peers about what the can create with the technologies.
The librarians have created a space – physical and online where creativity and collaboration can play out.
I’ll be using this example at my talk at ALA Annual “Using Technology to Market to Young Adults” with Kimberly Bolan. Hey George – tell us more? What kind of set up? What kind of financial investment?
Update:
Ross writes: There’s lots more about the Teen Corner project (including the live band made up of local high school students that we hosted on the kickoff day) starting here on our Flickr pages:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/asheborolibrary/page3/
We combined funding from an LSTA marketing grant with funding and other support from our library foundation, the Friends of the Library, an endowment and the plain old library budget to pull this all together.
Then George responds: Ross is being a little modest. There was a lot of community involvement: a local Friend helped with all of the interior decorating and color choices, a comic book artist (www.gravyboy.com) did our graphics and a local furniture company stepped in to help with furniture.
We designed a new Teen Library Card and started offering monthly programs with our TAB spearheading most everything.
We have been shocked and very pleasantly surprised that the Teens are raving over the space, the Teen Card and the new computers.
We took the attitude that we were doing this for the teens and let them dictate a lot of what we have done. Especially with the new pc’s. They asked for video editing software and we got it.
We can wait to see what happens next!
Emphasis in bold mine? Teen departments..YA librarians… what are your teens asking for? Are you listening?