Library Needs Assessment of Young Adults

Library Needs Assessment of Young Adults

Introduction

Libraries are repositioning themselves within the landscape of early Adult hood education. While there is a long tradition of libraries having adult's collections and offering adults' activities such as story reading, the focus has shifted to a younger age group. As part of a more general drive to inculcate young Adult into literacy prior to college, associated in some countries with a from-birth curriculum, libraries have developed programs targeted at parents of infants, toddlers, and kindergartners. Rather than being left at home while adults and older adults go out to borrow books (as in the past when libraries required quiet and stillness), this youngest generation is now being welcomed and specifically catered for. The project has taken an ecological approach to adults' socialization into literacy practices in the tradition of ethnographic studies of literacy. It has been argued that 'learning and development cannot be considered apart from the individual's social environment, the ecological niche'. One of the key understandings emerging from ecological studies is that Adults' learning contexts are multiple and intersecting (Carlsen, 1967).

As adults move between homes, sites of formal education, community sites, play zones, and increasingly online spaces, they experience opportunities to participate in social practices, involving literacy in different ways. The idea of 'expanded spaces for learning' has been advanced as taking a more inclusive approach to the range of contexts within which Adult ren learn through participation in the activities of daily life. Attending to dimensions of space and place both implicitly underpins, and enriches, ecological studies of adult literacy. This spatially sensitive approach has been seen in studies of the emplacement of literacy resources in the domestic spaces of adult homes, adult's literacy participation in cyberspaces, and the design of inclusive learning spaces. Taking it to the streets, Neuman and Celano's (2001) comparative study of the literacy affordances of four neighborhoods involved walking through a block of each neighborhood and systematically noting every store and stand likely to sell reading materials, every sign and its condition, and the characteristics of public spaces where reading could be undertaken (Hart, 2006).

Young Adult Library Services

Studies such as these are contributing new layers of insight to the question of addressing inequities in the literacy learning experiences and outcomes of Adult ren growing up in different socio-cultural contexts. They are pointing to the importance of attending to 'geographies of inequality' when accounting for differences in literacy resources, access, and opportunities. Mannion and I'anson (2009) caution, furthermore, that a 'politics of space' disempowers adults as a category of citizens owing to adults' construction, regulation, and control of the physical and social dimensions of adult contexts. In considering the role of libraries as activity spaces for early and family literacy, it is clearly important to consider issues of power, difference, access, and the values accorded to modes of participation in these spaces (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000).

The functions of libraries have been investigated in the fields of information and communication, cultural ...