NOTE: I'll be taking next week off to help my son relocate to Boston. See you September 9.
MY IDEAL LIBRARY FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Before you design your ideal library, you have to think about who it's for. Is your ideal library going to serve an existing population better, or will it help you bring in a whole new clientele as well?
My ideal library would try to build my young adult clientele, both because the future of libraries depends on their future willingness to pay for them and because they are poorly served by so many of our national institutions. We protect kids, but we don't respect them. Young adults feel hemmed in by all the restrictions we impose on them, however good our reasons, restrictions we wouldn't dream of imposing on adults -- on what they can read, view, drink, and smoke, even on how late they can be out. Laws on public internet access treat young adults as if their information needs are the same as those of six-year-olds. Teens growing up in sprawling suburbs have no freedom of movement, no space to create their own fun, and must rely on adults to chauffeur them to ballparks, museums, malls, hockey rinks, and such. In the years when their basic developmental task is learning to make and live with their own decisions, they have little opportunity to do that.
I would have a room in the library just for them, soundproofed so they can make normal noise without outraged elders complaining (ever notice that complaints by grownups ALWAYS trump the rights of kids?). In a society that constantly tells kids the things they like are trash, my collection would be full of not only the stuff they like -- Goosebumps, the Babysitters Club, Stephen King, Gordon Korman, Danielle Steele, and such -- but also with stuff they WOULD like if they only knew about it. There'd be books about young achievers, and articles about young people's accomplishments would paper the bulletin boards. I'd make sure they know about these books through displays, bibliographies of "If You Liked This, You'll Like These," and teasers and reviews on our YA web page.
The music and video collection would be as hip and current as I could make it. There would be lots of viewing and listening stations, and small rooms so that kids could do their viewing and listening in groups. There would be a homework center, where I would gather assignments from all the local schools, and have recommended reading lists and websites prepared for them, along with suggestions on how to find more on their own. There would be lots of workstations with fast internet connections, with unfiltered access (yes, I'd be willing to fight for it). I'd insist that kids have equal right to book the library's program room for their special events. Above all, I'd hire librarians who genuinely like and understand young adults.
Librarians would not be the only ones selecting materials, or creating displays, or recommending books, or even constructing the YA web pages. I would invite the kids to participate in all of those things. The web page would include THEIR book and music reviews. I would also invite them to participate in problem-solving and rule-making when these are needed -- and they will be needed, because many adults will be horrified by all of these ideas. I'd invite their ideas on an appropriate use policy for the internet, and their participation in enforcing the policy. I would do everything I could to make this room genuinely theirs, a place where their ideas as well as their interests are taken seriously. I would make it the one place where they have a chance to wield power through democratic participation.
In short, I would create a room where young adults are treated as if they're real people, as important to us, and as respected, as any adult. You know something? I think they'd pack the joint and I'd have to forcibly chase them out at closing time.
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GREAT AUSTRALIAN WEB SITES
Brian Bingley, Adelaide, South Australia
I do a lot of Internet searching in my job as a reference librarian but don't really have any favourites other than the tool which will wrap up the inquiry that is bugging me most at the moment. Offhand though I would say that the following Australian sites are amongst the most impressive that I know:
Loyalty dictates I start with the State Library of South Australia's website. You can find it at: http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/ and I can recommend the digitized resources of the Bradman Collection (http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/library/collres/bradman/home_page.htm) for cricket afficionados, a digitized version of a 13th century Italian antiphonal. (http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/treasures/antiphonal/index.html) for those who have time to dwell upon the beautiful, and the digitized photographs from our South Australiana database for those who have an interest in social history -- 60,000 images and growing (http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/library/collres/pictorial/pictoril.htm).
The remaining sites I have listed are all slanted towards my interest in searching and are not meant to be especially representative of Australian cyber culture.
Who said that Sunday is a day of rest? It is a day for reflection! http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/ and http://businesssunday.ninemsn.com.au/ are the websites for MSN Channel 9's Sunday television program, Australia's premier weekly public affairs program and its spinoff, Business Sunday. They contain transcripts of Laurie Oakes interviews with key political figures over the past 3 years complemented with Business Sunday interviews of nationally prominent business figures. (Pre-1997 programs are archived and transcripts can be obtained by phoning the show's Sydney office on 61 2 9965 2470.Video tapes of most Channel 9 programs can be purchased by calling the Channel 9 Archives Department in Sydney). Peter Thompson's weekly film review is a valued feature of the Sunday program particularly when the featured movie is Australian made and there are regular features on one or another of the arts in Australia and on Australian culture generally .
The Australian Legal Information Institute database AUSTLII (http://www.austlii.edu.au/), an international trend setter in the provision of fulltext legal resources on the Internet, provides access to Australian State and Federal Acts and Regulations in fulltext as well as transcripts from the Australian courts. Hosted home pages include the Australian Law Reform Commission, Community Legal Information, Project DIAL, the Reconciliation & Social Justice Library, the Treaties Library, Workplace Relations, and a gateway to AUSTLII's New Zealand, South Pacific, UK and Irish counterparts served also by the SIRO search engine which provides the high recall required by the legal community and accepted grudgingly by our reference librarians and quick dippers.
OZLIT: Australian Literature Resources on the Net (http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/) is is not as comprehensive a bibliographic tool as the Australian Defence Force Academy's AUSTLIT CD-ROM database/index but has many additional features such as electronic books and magazines, discussion lists, contacts for writers and publishers, etc .
Beyond the Black Stump Australiana Page (http://www.blackstump.com.au/aussie.htm) is a directory chock a block with Ocker-iana (Anzac, Aussie Rules , Bushwalking, Maps, Stockman, Vegemite, Waltzing Matilda, Wine….) and an extensive range of interests based on those of proprietor Peter Garriga, who has built this site since 1995 into a site with a hook for everyone (Puzzles, Sig Files, URL Watchers, Skydiving, Meccano, Emergency, Homework, Web Searching Strategies Help & Tutorials, etc.)
COOMBSWEB-- ANU SOCIAL SCIENCES/ASIAN STUDIES SERVER (http://coombs.anu.edu.au/), "the pioneer site for Asia-Pacific research and electronic publishing" from the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra "is the world's oldest Asian Studies networked research facility." The site includes the Vietnam WWW Virtual Library, Coombspapers Social Sciences Research Data Bank (an anon.ftp archive), Asian Studies WWW Monitor: Electronic Journal, and Pacific Studies WWW Monitor: Electronic Journal. It is edited by Dr T.Matthew Ciolek and complemented by his Aboriginal Studies WWW Virtual Library at http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVL-Aboriginal.html, the premier Internet site for information relating to our indigenous people.
Meta Matters:Australian gateways to disciplines (http://www.nla.gov.au/meta/sg/gateways.html is the National Library of Australia's subject access point for quality sites on the WWW channeled through "gateways…selected because their caretakers have applied management practices to meet standard criteria.." Modeled on Pinakes, the Heriot-Watt University launchpad to well-known subject gateways in the United Kingdom and Europe.
Official Site of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games (http://www.olympics.com/eng/index.html. A shameless plug. Give it a go.
Images 1(http://www.nla.gov.au/images1/) contains online images from the National Library of Australia's pictorial collections including "over 20,000 historical and contemporary images relating to Australia and its place in the world, including paintings, drawings, rare prints, objects and photographs. The images currently available in IMAGES 1 have been selected from the more than 40,000 paintings, drawings and prints and more than 550,000 photographs held in the National Library's Pictorial Collection. Topics covered include first impressions of Australia, convict days, gold mining and Australian towns to name just a few".
Australian multi-search engines Fossick Australia & New Zealand Internet Resources (search engines and directories) are available at http://fossick.com/Australia.htm (wwweb savvy) and Bam (http://www.bam.com.au/). Bareback surfing here, with no trimmings, no fancy graphics, pure function before form). Both provide links to ANZWERS, the foremost Australian search engine.
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COOL QUOTES
I will not argue for censorship except from the grass roots up; my argument is for making choices about what we consume. The artist is blessed and cursed with a kind of power, but so are the reader and viewer. The story no longer belongs to the author once it's come to live in your head. By then, it's part of your life. So be careful what you let in the door is my advice. It should not make you feel numb, bored or demeaned or less than human. But I think it's all right if it makes you cry some, or feel understood... or even changes your life a little. It's a story. That's what happens.
Barbara Kingsolver. "Careful What You Let in the Door," in High Tide in Tucson
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Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 2000.
