Reading Spaces

YAAN: prototypical social media for ya librarians

I just came across this article by Cindy Welch, an LIS prof at the University of Tennessee. Welch illustrates how the Young Adult Alternative Newsletter (YAAN) provided a forum for youth advocates in North America in the 70s to share ideas, but importantly, it also provided a place for support, professional identity and political expression. We hear the voices of early advocates like Mary K. Chelton, Joni Bodart, Larry Amey (editor of a Canadian newsletter, Young Adult Hotline) among others. The histories of young adult library services are few and far between, so it was a pleasure to find this one. The host site for this article, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, is pretty interesting too and worth a closer look.

an LIS concept for young adults: new work from Anthony Bernier

Anthony Bernier presented a paper at the recent Library Research Seminar on the emergence of dominant discourses on youth used in LIS: the "storm and stress" model, the youth-in-crisis or youth-at-risk conception and the more recent youth in development (i.e. The Search Institute stuff). He makes a call for giving the extra-disciplinary discourses on youth a rest, in favour of allowing an LIS-derived conceptualization to emerge. Here's a link to the abstract: Download Bernier.

SHARP 2010

In a few weeks, I'll be giving a paper presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Reading, Authorship and Publishing. My paper is called: "Enough Books to Make Reading for Fun Possible: The inconspicuous emergence of the Canadian young adult novel and the rise of the teenage reader."  A copy of the abstract along with abstract from the other presenters in the session Reading Through Life is available here or from the SHARP Conference Website.

Reading through Life Sessions: Abstracts

Immigrant Youth's Perceptions of the Library: A Pilot Study

Joe Artinger, a recent MLIS grad from FIMS, and a librarian at the Ontario Police College, will be presenting a paper at this year's annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Information Science, that is based on work he did with me for a guided research project. The presentation is entitled, "Immigrant Youth's Perceptions of the Library: A Pilot Study Involving Youth Ages 14-18 years of African and Caribbean Origin". Here is the extended abstract  [Download CAIS053_ArtingerRothbauer_Final] and more information about the conference can be found at the CAIS website.

Project Teen Canada

From the website:

Project Teen Canada 2008 is the latest in a series of historic national surveys being carried out under the direction of Dr. Reginald W. Bibby. The surveys, known as the Project Canada Survey Series, consist of seven adult surveys conducted every five years from 1975 through 2005, and four youth surveys carried out in 1984, 1992, 2000, and 2008.

"The Quest of Michel de Certeau" by Natalie Zemon Davis

Davis, Natalie Zemon. 2008. "The Quest of Michel de Certeau." The New York Review of Books, 15 May 2008. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21375