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March 8, 2010

Library site a hot new social media hangout for teens

SCI-TECH SCENE | Harold Washington's Digital Space goes beyond books to appeal to youth
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March 6, 2010

BY SANDRA GUY
Chicago Sun-Times Columnist
Yves Capitaine, a 16-year-old resident of South Chicago, can be found daily on YOUMedia's online community, posting his photography and freestyle poetry and delving into haiku battles with his sister.

"My sister [14-year-old Rachelle] and I have more than 100 comments on my poetry blog," Yves said. "It's fun."

For adults and children new to technology, the public library offers tutors known as CyberNavigators to show people how to connect the Web and the greater world. CyberNavigators are available at 42 public library locations. Check with your local branch for details.
"I get to know people who come from serious sides of the city whom I've never met," said Yves, a junior at Jones College Prep High School.

Yves even got into a heated virtual battle with his online peers to claim bragging rights at the top of the "leader board" listing the top YOUMedia content producers.

Think YOUMedia is the latest social media teen hangout?

It is, and it's housed on the main floor of the Harold Washington Public Library, 400 S. State St., in the Digital Space for Teens.

The Digital Space offers eight desktop computers, 96 laptops, two PlayStation 3's with a library of games, and musical keyboards and a recording studio so teenagers can create music, art and poetry, or jump online and talk with peers in the secure, password-protected YOUMedia forum.

Select book reviews by teens are also posted publicly at chipublib.org/forteens/teensbookre views/index.php.

The teens work with mentors like Erica Neal, who has watched the young people bloom creatively as they come to the Digital Space regularly.

"Our goal is to draw students in so that they're comfortable hanging out in the library, and then get them to engage with the workshops and technology in the space," Neal said. "We're seeing more and more students who were hanging out, participating in workshops and on the social network. It's been great to see their interests develop."

Students enrolled in workshops may check out digital still cameras or Flip high-definition video cameras for a week at a time to work on special projects.

The Digital Space for Teens is free to high school students ages 14-18 with a Chicago Public Library card, and to young people from the suburbs who get a reciprocal library-borrowing card at the Harold Washington Library. It is open from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays and Sundays, and from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays.

The idea for the Digital Space sprouted from Digital Youth Network, which itself started as a digital-divide research project at the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute and from research and funding by the MacArthur Foundation. It is now a full-blown program housed at DePaul University's downtown campus.

"I saw the Digital Space for Teens when I was walking past the library, and I wanted to become a part of interacting with digital technology. I wanted to be a part of the family," said Yves, who has dreamed of becoming an engineer since he was 12 and saw a video screen of flying cars and trains at an engineering convention.

"If we can learn to manipulate magnets for the greater good, we can invent gasless technology," he said.

Chicago's efforts to attract teens are among a growing upsurge by libraries nationwide to attract tech-savvy young people, said Carrie Russell, director of the Program on Public Access to Information for the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy.

"Libraries are more actively trying to meet new users' needs rather than passively acting as a repository," Russell said.

Yet, libraries are still figuring out how best to achieve wide user access in the digital age, she said. For example, how do libraries "lend" a digital iTunes download?

More and more, libraries depend on licensing arrangements with vendors rather than owning a digital product outright, Russell said. "The vendor might require that a library pay an additional fee every time the library lends a licensed product, so it makes the idea of library lending much different" than in the past.

Yet, Russell believes that libraries will increasingly develop partnerships with the likes of Google and Yahoo in order to obtain access to downloadable books, music and other properties that readers increasingly demand.

Posted by tumulty at March 8, 2010 10:55 AM

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