Website example

Through a Google search for teens and public library programming I found several excellent public library sites to choose from. The Hennepin County Library TeenLinks site lists all activities happening at the library for teens as well as book reviews. The site has a good design and lots of information.

I am especially interested in the programming they are doing at this library. Finding other public library sites and investigating their activities is a great way to discover innovative programming. It is also interesting to see how many libraries have pages on social networking sites and try to connect to teens through them. The Hennepin site has information about the activities they are doing for teens, and I will be taking note of some of them for the future.
http://www.hclib.org/teens/SummerProgram.cfm

Research visual overlap

The following image was taken from an article titled "Teens and Information Literacy...and the Public Library written by Katie Day. The article was found through a Google search for research on teens in the library.

The article can be found here: http://librarianedge.pbworks.com/f/KDay_Teen_InfoLit_and_Libns.html

The author has done an extensive literature review to determine the role of the public library in the literacy development of teens. The image illustrates how school libraries have a greater impact on teen information literacy than do public libraries, yet the role of public libraries is not insignificant.

A picture is worth how many words?

This image was found through a search on Google Images for teens in the public library. As an aspiring teen librarian, I am interested in learning about teen advisory boards. I think it is important to ask your community members for input, and what better way than asking teens what they would like to see at the library. The picture is of the Board of Library Teens at a Swanton, Ohio public library. This group plans activities for the library and excursions for teens.

http://www.swanton.lib.oh.us/teen_bolt.html

LexisNexis and a Citation Pearl Growing Search

For the Citation Pearl Growing search I started by entering the terms "teen library use" into the search box in LexisNexis. I am interested in finding statistics on how many teens use public libraries in the United States.

I was pleasantly surprised to retrieve 999 hits.

I chose to view one article titled "Libraries tune into teens." At the bottom of the page of the article, subjects are listed. One of them is public libraries so I decided to conduct the search again using teen public library use as the search terms.

This narrowed the search to 961 hits.

I noticed United States was a subject heading for some of the hits so I added it to my search resulting in 625 hits.

One of the hits had "statistics" listed as a subject so I added it to my final search to find 16 articles, all of which are not relevant. At least I was able to handle browsing 16 hits rather than the last 625 hits. I found one of the 16 particularly interesting...Libraries shelve old ways.

The Citation Pearl Growing Search worked well in LexisNexis. This is particularly useful if you do not know the best terms to search since it is possible to look at articles to find subject headings. LexisNexis uses a controlled vocabulary; therefore, the type of search used here is perfect for this database. My search terms were not terrible complex, but the citation pearl growing search should be used in cases where the user is not sure of the technical language. The technique used in this type of search could be applied to other types of searching when subject headings are presented in the results.

LibLit and a Browsing Search

Since Library Literature has a browse feature, I chose it for the Browsing Search.

I was interested in finding some critiera for choosing young adult books for my library's collection.


First I chose to enter "book selection" into the search box.

Of the hits, "book selection/evaluation" looked the most interesting.

The 18 records found are all along the lines of my initial search. On the left side of the page, there are like searches to choose from so I would be interested in selecting other topics from the list.

Once I selected Book selection/Evaluation on the left, I found an article called Commentaries on Collection Bias I would like to read.

The Browsing Search is easy to accomplish but not terribly useful when looking for something very specific. Some databases have this option but not all. Usually one can search subject headings, yet the researcher needs some technical knowledge of the subject in order to choose the terms closest to the search in mind. I had a hard time beginning my search in Library Literature because it was necessary to determine the correct heading to look for initially. Even so, I was able to figure out the best terms to use in order to find the articles I sought.

Project Muse and the Specific Facet First

In this search I was interested in finding articles concerning reviews of young adult fiction titles. My facets included books reviews, young adult or teen, and fiction.


I started with book reviews.


The result was 16634 hits which is an unmanageable amount of articles.

In order to narrow down the hits I added the second facet of teen which yielded 1474 hits.

The third facet, fiction, narrowed the results to 626 hits, and the titles appear to be more along the lines of what I am looking for.

This is still more than I would like to comb through so I decided to limit the search by date in order to find the most recent articles. Using 2009 found 232 hits, many of which I am interested in looking at for ideas for conducting a teen book club. One of the first hits, Sucks to Be Me: The All-True Confessions of Mina Hamilton, Teen Vampire, is a book I have not read but would like to know more about.

The specific facet first search worked well for this search even though the initial term was not a terribly specific phrase. Even so, it was the most specific phrase in the search so it was used first. I did not want to narrow this particular search to just one or two articles because my interest is in finding many reviews of recent young adult literature. If the final searches had narrowed the results to just a couple of articles, I would have removed the last search term to broaden the search. It was important to find quite a few articles to look through, and I was able to do this in Project Muse with this particular query.

WorldCat and a Building Block Search

The first search I conducted in WorldCat was to discover works which deal with young adults and programming. I started broadly by looking for keywords programming and library. Using those terms as keywords yielded 10543 hits. At a quick glance I could tell many of the hits referred to topics not close to my interest.

To narrow the search further I decided to add student or teen since my primary interest has to do with that population. The 101 hits are much closer to the topic I am interested in, yet there are still items I do not want to spend time reading through.

I still found hits which did not interest me, and I wanted to add another keyword in order to limit the search to public libraries.

The final result was 19 hits, many of which interest me. One in particular, Thinking Outside the Book: essays for innovative librarians, is something I would like to borrow through our ILL.

The building block search worked really well in WorldCat for this query. It was important to determine which words would yield a more narrow search through each step of the process. Examining the results each time led me to know what to add to the subsequent search. Building block is a search I use frequently. I was pleased to see how well it worked in WorldCat.

Library Thing Tagging

2006(11) 2007(11) adventure(13) beauty(33) body image(8) borrowed(4) Conformity(8) cosmetic surgery(6) dystopia(72) Fantasy(43) fiction(81) friendship(10) Future(35) futuristic(20) Image(4) library(7) Paperback(6) plastic surgery(14) post-apocalyptic(13) Pretties(6) read(21) read in 2007(4) rebellion(5) romance(14) sci-fi(60) Science Fiction(112) Scott Westerfeld(12) self image(5) sequel(7) series(40) sf(13) speculative fiction(10) tbr(14) teen(33) teen fiction(10) Trilogy(12) Uglies(23) Uglies trilogy(16) unread(8) utopia(10) ya(104) Young Adult(120) Young Adult Fiction(19) young adult literature(4)

http://www.librarything.com/work/112043#

I chose a very popular young adult novel by Scott Westerfeld titled Pretties. Pretties is one title in a trilogy, all of which are commonly asked for at the public library.