Educational and Recreational Services of the Public Library for Young Adults

Abstract

Young adult (YA) services as a specialty concept in public emerged in 1920s as a way to bridge gap for early adolescents between smaller, more personalized, and protected children's rooms and open ranges of adult [1, p. 3481. In New York Public Library and in Cleveland Public Library, YA services took fornm of separate rooms and collections and was conceived as an extension of children's services. In Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, service included a trained readers' advisor with a few introductory shelves selected for young adults. Both readers' advisor and shelves were physically located in adult Popular Library. Many libraries took more interest in facilities and location of separate YA rooms than in adequately trained personnel, and resulting lack of service provided in these rooms led them to be given up as failures, even though the need for an informed, sympathetic librarian who was trained to recognize and to respond to needs of adolescents persisted in every department of library [ 1, p. 349]. The arguments over location of collection, rather than over quality of staff, continue to this day. Since YA services were initially seen as a transition from children's services, and since society then definitely regarded adolescents as children, it took many years for public librarians to see that YA services, conceptually, should more logically be aligned with adult services [2, p. 3]. Some schizophrenia continues, however, because more personalized nature of delivery of YA services still has more in common with children's services than with adult services, even though most interesting materials for young adults are drawn from adult sources and parallel adult interests. While technically YA service is a specialty, with strong roots in traditional readers' advisory function of public libraries, specialized nature of such services does not mean that YA librarian should not also be a generalist. YA librarians are most accurately described as