A few years ago a colleague emailed me and asked about what his public library should do on their re-designed/re-developed website for its teen presence. I said, “don’t have one.” Well, what I really said is “if you have teen pages on your site then focus them on the adults in teen lives and not on the teens.” Anytime I get asked this question, which I do quite a bit, my answer is the same.
I know, some people are thinking that by not having teen focused web pages on a library site it’s like saying no to a teen space in a library. But I disagree. For public libraries, I think it is different for school libraries, I think spending time, effort, dollars and more on teen web pages as a part of a library site is a waste of time and money. Have you looked at your teen page statistics lately? How well are they doing? And, if you tell me they get lots of hits, are you sure those are teens visiting those pages, or are they the adults in teen lives – teachers, parents, youth serving staff, etc.? Or, if you tell me that your teen advisory board is using the pages then that’s great, but why no one else?
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