By Sandra Hughes-Hassell, JRLYA member editor

Welcome to the Journal for Research on Libraries and Young Adults. Beginning with this issue, JRLYA will move to a dynamic publication schedule. As soon as a manuscript has met our rigorous review criteria, it will be published online.  The JRLYA advisory board believes that moving to a continuous schedule will allow YALSA to provide high quality, original research from scholars in our field in a more timely manner.  This change also aligns with YALSA’s use of electronic and social media to communicate, collaborate, and educate its members.  As new manuscripts are added to JRLYA, they will be publicized in YALSA E-News and via YALSA’s social networking tools.

In this issue of JRLYA, we are pleased to publish two papers which focus on the theme of multiple literacies, specifically visual literacy and media literacy.  In their paper “The Cover Story,” Annette Goldsmith, Melissa Gross, and Debi Carruth use compositional analysis and semiotics to investigate how the US jacket of Adele Minchin’s 2004 young adult novel, The Beat Goes On, reflects the novel’s HIV/AIDS content.   Paul Mihalidis develops an argument for media literacy education as the pedagogical foundation for the learning commons model for school libraries in his paper “Media Literacy and Learning Commons in the Digital Age,” highlighting the Chelmsford High School Learning Commons in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, as a vibrant central space in a school for just this type of integrated learning.

JRLYA is currently accepting manuscripts for upcoming issues based on original qualitative or quantitative research, an innovative conceptual framework, or a substantial literature review that opens new areas of inquiry and investigation. Case studies and works of literary analysis are also welcome. The journal recognizes the contributions other disciplines make to expanding and enriching theory, research and practice in young adult library services, and encourages submissions from researchers, students and practitioners in all fields.

The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults uses the Chicago Manual of style endnotes. For complete author guidelines including example citations, please visit the author guidelines. While submissions average 4,000 to 7,000 words, manuscripts of all lengths will be considered. Full color images, photos, and other media are all accepted. Please direct any manuscripts, questions, or comments to Sandra Hughes-Hassell, Member Editor, at yalsaresearch@gmail.com.

By Paul Mihailidis, Ph.D, Assistant Professor, Emerson College and Director, Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change

School libraries today feel increasing pressure to reinvent themselves in the face of increasing financial pressures, new media technologies, and a progressively media-savvy population. Their transformation from information reserve to knowledge center has been fast underway. This paper builds on that evolution to develop an argument for media literacy education as the pedagogical foundation for the learning commons model for school libraries. This would position the school library as a dynamic media literacy learning hub, anchoring entire schools around knowledge, expression, collaboration, and creation in both virtual and physical spaces. The paper will highlight the case of Chelmsford High School Learning Commons in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, as a vibrant central space in a school for just this type of integrated learning.

Introduction

In the leafy Boston suburb of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, a sign hangs above the entrance to the Chelmsford High School Library: “We set sail on the sea because there is knowledge to be gained (John F. Kennedy).” The library’s motto—Ask, Think, Create—has signaled a shift in how the space is conceived, used, and positioned as a learning commons for the digital age.

School libraries today feel increasing pressure to reinvent themselves in the face of increasing financial pressures, new media technologies and a progressively media-savvy population. A 2010 forum hosted by the New York Times titled “Do Libraries Need Books”¹ exemplified the increasingly contested landscape for the direction school libraries need to take in the digital age. Over 400 comments poured in from participants across the United States and the world. Most criticized the idea of a bookless library as a way to further cater to a fragmented and distracted generation. On the other hand, the forum bred interesting dialog about the role of new media technologies in the school library and the relevance of the printed word for 21st century learners. While participants openly questioned the efficacy of removing books from the center of the school, they also pondered how the library of tomorrow stands to keep pace with a mobile, wired, and digital youth.

Amid the rapid changes in new media technologies, the school library has worked to reinvent its core mission around that of the learning commons. Focused on addressing the needs of a more active and multimodal learning community, the learning commons model is predicated on empowering active and collaborative learning. Described in a 2010 report by the Ontario School Library Association:

The Learning Commons integrates the new and the old in a seamless physical and virtual space in which all formats can be assimilated and studied. The Learning Commons liberates the exploration of ideas and concepts, encouraging inquiry, imagination, discovery and creativity through the connection of learners to information, to each other and to communities around the world. For schools, the Learning Commons incorporates the classroom, the school library and the school board to connect students to the real and virtual worlds that are growing and maturing around them.²

This growing movement in school libraries across North American is predicated on building a more active, inquiry-based, and connected sense of learning: one that is integrated throughout the library and extends outward into the school and community. It involves collaboration among facilities, educators, and learning techniques, all anchored around the central space of the school library.³ By its conceptual makeup alone, the parallel educational trajectory that most closely resembles this is media literacy. Media literacy, a growing and now-established field associated with the media education movement writ large, is premised on promoting critical thinking skills through the ability to access, evaluate, analyze, and produce information.⁴ Media literacy, much like the learning commons model described above, is premised on an active learning agenda based on interactivity, collaboration, and expression, centered on empowering youth voices in a participatory age.

This paper develops a concentric framework for media literacy education and the learning commons model for school libraries. This new model positions the school library as a dynamic media literacy learning hub, anchoring entire schools around knowledge, expression, collaboration, and creation in both virtual and physical spaces. It highlights the case of Chelmsford High School Learning Commons as a vibrant central space in a school for just this type of integrated learning. This may be the most opportunistic time for school libraries. Seeing the potential that new media technologies have provided for new cross-school collaboration and integrated models for learning beckons much positive energy for the school library. If it is able to position itself as a media literacy learning commons, extending its knowledge center to incorporate production, creation, curation, and critical inquiry, it stands to become a vibrant, interactive, and fundable space that learners of tomorrow can harness for lives of active and engaged participation.

Media Literacy and the Learning Commons: An Orientation

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, an organization with a mission to prepare learners for the 21st century, lists media literacy as a core literacy in its frameworks:

People in the 21st Century live in a technology and media-suffused environment, marked by various characteristics, including: 1) access to an abundance of information, 2) rapid changes in technology tools, and 3) the ability to collaborate and make individual contributions on an unprecedented scale. To be effective in the 21st Century, citizens and workers must be able to exhibit a range of functional and critical thinking skills related to information, media and technology.⁵

This definition clearly roots these skills in the context of critical thinking and technological fluency, clear indicators of the outcomes embraced by media literacy education and the learning commons movement.

As media continue to grow central to civic and political functions of modern democracies, models for teaching and learning about media have increasingly become the focus of literature about learning in this digital media landscape. Media literacy’s overarching goal for teaching and learning outcomes are informed decision-making, individual empowerment, nuanced understanding of mediated, savvy consumption and production skills, and participation in local, national and global dialog.⁶ David Buckingham, seminal media literacy scholar, succinctly aggregated the myriad of approaches to media literacy when he described it as:

“A critical literacy that involves analysis, evaluation, and critical reflection,” that is possible only through the “acquisition of a metalanguage—that is, a means of describing the forms and structures of different modes of communication; and it involves a broader understanding of the social, economic and institutional contexts of communication, and how these affect people’s experiences and practices.⁷ Media literacy certainly includes the ability to use and interpret media; but it also involves a much broader analytical understanding.⁸

In the K-12 landscape, much work has been devoted to finding ways to integrate foundations of media literacy into classrooms and with teachers.⁹ New approaches to technology in the classroom and with teachers have begun recognizing digital realities for youth and learning. In her newest book Digital and Media Literacy, Renee Hobbs stresses the competencies needed to prepare students for lives of fast-paced change and technological evolution. Hobbs doesn’t see the core of media literacy changing in this context; rather, she finds it ever more necessary to harness the human curiosity, the ability to listen, and seek diverse knowledge across platforms. These dispositions provide students with the basic competencies to handle a reality of integrated information spaces, constant sharing, public identities, and low barriers to production.¹⁰

Nevertheless, media literacy integration into the school remains somewhat of a challenge. Up until very recently, most media literacy initiatives were reserved for understanding how to effectively consume messages¹¹ with little exploration into the ways that social media platforms and mobile technologies have shifted the typical producer-receiver structure for messages. Because of the lack of a clear fit in the K-12 environment, most successful media literacy work has been done on the periphery, integrated into sections or parts of classrooms, detailed in afterschool and extension programs, and left largely to self-starting educators who care about the process.

With clear pressure on teachers to maintain outcomes associated with testing standards and rigid curricular structures, one space in the school where media literacy seems best positioned is the school library. Libraries have traditionally served as the central information repository for the school. They struggled with the reputation they established as a space for sitting in silence and isolation while finding information. Part of this image problem stems from a clear lack of resources and infrastructure and from the fast-paced technological change that is defining youth information habits today.

Nevertheless, school libraries fundamental relevance and contribution to learning must embrace the digital revolution emerging around the world if they are to flourish in the digital age. Mizuko Ito’s¹² work in schools showed how students engage and form knowledge communities that are both self-serving and collaborative when the motivation and intrinsic freedom to explore and engage are present. As the school library is continually pressured to make the transition from information reserve to knowledge center, media literacy education has the ability to ground the library in more active and collaborative learning approaches for the entire school, and to help recast its image as a creative and collaborative space.

At Chelmsford High School, the learning commons model has taken this initiative head on. By transforming its space into a more open, dynamic, and integrated knowledge center, the learning commons at Chelmsford High School has integrated learning, technology, and interactivity throughout its space and extending into the school. While still in relative infancy, this model has shown how the school libraries of tomorrow can better embrace the powers of technologies and platforms to serve the learners of a digital world.

An Uncommon Transformation: The Chelmsford High School Learning Commons

The Learning Commons at Chelmsford High School occupies 12,500 square feet of space, serving over 1600 students and approximately 110 teachers. The town population is roughly 35,000, with 14 percent minority groups. With a median income of 82,000 dollars and average taxes of just over $5,000, Chelmsford is considered a middle- to upper-middle class community.

The school library began its transformation around 2003–2004, when administrators from the school, with some capitol funding from the town and backing from the town administration, began to think creatively about what innovative and dynamic approaches they could take with the library space. They centered this approach on how the library could facilitate collaborative work across content areas, and reinvent the library as a space where students could gather, talk, work, and socialize. These ideas were refined over years, and by 2008, the library was physically reconstructed as a learning commons. Today, school librarians associated with Chelmsford’s Learning Commons meet regularly with departments and individual teachers to plan lessons, integrate technology into learning and exploring, share resources, and discuss general ways to enhance student learning in a digital age.

Valerie Diggs, head of school libraries in Chelmsford, has garnered national attention from scholars, advocates, and educators who support the forward-thinking vision for her complete remodeling of the Chelmsford High School Library into a Learning Commons. What Diggs is more concerned about, however, is the resistance she sees from some in the community. “Parents post comments on our site that students should be learning more, and not just playing instruments and drinking coffee,” notes Diggs. “The idea of a school library as a collaborative and open knowledge center is still seen as somewhat shallow, or too unstructured to be part of a school’s core learning goals.” What hinders the school library from its realized value to a 21st century school is that the large-scale changes it must conduct to arrive on the forefront of integrated and multimodal learning are twofold. The new changes are difficult to quantify into tangible measures of success, and are often decided by constituents that are increasingly removed from the classroom and hesitant to embrace this large-scale change.

Nevertheless, the Chelmsford High School Learning Commons continues to believe that it can become the dynamic space schools need to engage a wired generation of active learners. In a practical sense, this involves showing teachers, administrators, and parents how, as Regina Lee Rodgers writes, “the ‘learning commons’ model has the potential to be a laboratory for students, librarians and faculty. It is a collaboration space and requires partnerships and cooperation across disciplines.”¹³ Diggs, for her part, sees the transformation of the library from an information reserve to a knowledge center as central to this process, citing the work of scholars¹⁴ who have paved the way for her library’s transformation.

How has the Chelmsford High School Learning Commons integrated media literacy into its purview? Diggs and her staff spent considerable time planning not only the physical shift in space but also the pedagogical shift in the library from passive to active. This meant creating an agenda for the library based on some of the learning outcomes that encapsulate the current agenda for media literacy: dialog, critical inquiry, collaboration, informed decision-making, savvy information production and consumption skills, and understanding how to negotiate identity and participation in digital contexts. The following shifts in the Chelmsford High School Learning Commons predicate its integration with core media literacy learning experiences and outcomes, and with facilitating an integrated and collaborative model for the school.

1. Print to the Periphery—Diggs’s first unique move made was not to eliminate the printed word, but to move it from the center of the space to the periphery. The printed word is still felt throughout the space, but it largely consists of reference material, classic and seminal literature, and popular titles for teachers and students. Diggs sees the idea behind this shift as one that “creates a space more accustomed to open learning, and collaboration, where the library can now be seeing as a dynamic space where teachers and students can explore together.” Continued Diggs:

Older library designs created an atmosphere of individuality, where students could not be seen or heard, and in fact those were the rules of school libraries for a long time. With knowledge transfer and exploration shifting from linear to more of an organized chaos, the library could no longer live in the past. So by creating a more open and fluid design, we want students and teachers to see the space as inviting, where they can come, hangout, explore, investigate, collaborate, and created. Those are the hallmarks of the learning commons approach at Chelmsford High School. ¹⁶

Beyond simply filling the periphery of the library with books, Diggs also tried to make the physical space more interpersonal by inserting booths to break up the stacks, and create the feel of spaces that students are used to “hanging around” such as Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, and so on. Diggs cautions that this is not a nod to reframing the library as a large brand or consumer environment; rather, it is “to help integrate the learning process with an environment students find themselves naturally more comfortable and productive in.” In her 2010 book Media Literacy, Social Networks, and Web 2.0, scholar Belinha De Abreu makes a convincing argument for how schools need to integrate and design learning environments for students of this interactive age:

Schools need to begin by looking at how they bring in the technologies that students are using in their homes and for their personal use and bridge opportunities for learning in the classroom. However, it is more than just using the technology, it is about understanding where the future exists for our children.¹⁷

By moving print from the center to the periphery, the Chelmsford High School Learning Commons has taken the first step in designing a coherent space for understanding the technological landscape for students, and also the spaces and environments that support the opportunities to bridge learning techniques and approaches in virtual and physical spaces.

2.  Introspective to Interactive—The library’s traditional position as information reserve came with the distinct notion of learning as an introspective pursuit: a direct and in-depth relationship with texts that in most cases required solitude, deep concentration, and the static retention of knowledge. In his 2010 work The Shallows, David Carr laments the loss of this ability to be introspective:

And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us, in ever and more different ways…We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive. Tuning out is not an option many of us would consider.¹⁸

What does this shift signal for the library? For Chelmsford’s Learning Commons, it means understanding how learning has moved from an introspective to an interactive pursuit. This in no way alludes to completely ignoring the need for deep information processing and concentration, but rather an increasing attention to what Henry Jenkins describes as a participatory culture:

Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends.¹⁹

One way this is done in Chelmsford’s Learning Commons is through the inclusion of live music sessions, open mic sessions, poetry readings, poetry slams, listening lunches, group workrooms, and a general focus on expression and interactivity. Students are even treated once a week to morning coffee. The focus is one in which a collaborative environment can help reframe the library away from a place where there should be no interaction, noise, or dialog to one that is open, friendly, creative, and interactive. When students feel comfortable in the space—having coffee with friends or playing music together—they stand to feel more engaged around the library as a place to explore, learn, and interact.²⁰

3.      Information to Investigation—In hyper-mediated environments, media literacy scholarship has been concerned with how youth understand the value of their information habits online. This means an attention to credibility, verification, and savvy navigation on the web. Media literacy scholars²¹ see the value of critical web navigation skills as central to building a strong knowledge base in a digital age.

In the learning commons model, teachers and librarians must be prepared to have the technological infrastructure and instructional knowledge to help in mastering search and investigation online.²² Students are often implored to never judge a book by its cover, and here it’s no different. When doing class projects, historical inquiries, or any type of in-depth exploration, students are mentored by the staff on how to effectively search and navigate online, judge credibility of sources, and use print materials to support, start, or sustain any project that requires in-depth investigation.

Diggs sees the role of inquiry as a core function of libraries since the day they were born. Today’s youth “need to know the fundamentals of judging creativity and credibility online,” said Diggs, “as it is the core of empowering their knowledge about the world and their participation in local communities once they move on to higher education and careers.”

4.  Consumption to Connectivity—Finally, the Chelmsford High School Learning Commons has created a landscape for connectivity as its overarching agenda for the library. In the context of the learning commons, this refers both to connectivity within the learning commons space, and connectivity between the learning commons, the classroom, and the community. Popular scholar Clay Shirky sums up the need for connectivity when he writes in Cognitive Surplus, “The logic of digital media, on the other hand, allows the people formerly known as the audience to create value for one another every day.”²³ Creating value for one another is at the forefront of Diggs’s approach to the learning common model. “The learning commons in the end of the day is about providing students, teachers, and the community a way to connect to information, to each other, and to their aspirations and dreams,” says Diggs. “It’s about finding a way to think about the library as a vibrant learning environment.”

In the learning commons space at Chelmsford High School, this is reflected in many ways. Laptop computers connected wirelessly exist throughout the library, available for students to use at their leisure or for structured projects. iPads are available for loan, loaded with apps and platforms to help students become accustomed to mobile technologies for learning. Physical board games are also available for students to play, showing that a learning commons space is not simply about technology, but about connecting in a very human way.

This connectivity also extends into the community, something that Diggs believes is also a priority of a truly collaborative and interactive learning commons. Chelmsford High School’s Learning Commons manages a Twitter feed, a regular streaming update of what classes are doing in the space on a daily basis, and a database of resources that can be accessed from home. These extensions into the community only strengthen the position of the learning commons as an integrated space not only for libraries but also for school systems, districts, and vibrant communities.

The Chelmsford High School Learning Commons, in the face of shrinking budgets and resources, has become a dynamic, collaborative, and creative space aimed at providing a learning environment for students growing up in a hypermedia age. The true value of this space will be in its ability to show teachers, and parents, that technologies and interactivity are vital to the life skills of youth in the 21st century. Mizuko Ito²⁴ and Larry Rosen²⁵ have written extensively about the gap in participation and usability between parents, teachers, and youth in terms of gaming, learning, and expressing. They highlight the generational gatekeeping by parents and teachers in the context of fast-evolving technologies as an impediment to embracing interactivity, collaboration, and technology for deep learning. The learning commons model for school libraries, integrated with the core learning outcomes of media literacy education, can be the bridge that helps connect teachers and learners in a fast-paced and ever-changing information age.

Towards an Integrated Model for 21st Century Media Literacy Learning Commons

The technology of today, whether it is the Web 2.0 tools, the social networking sites, or the newest gadgets provide schools with a unique opportunity to foster an understanding of the power of the information world and the Internet through media literacy education.²⁶

In a 2010 paper, Diggs and the author of this paper first mused about the media literacy learning commons approach. What emerged from that was a theoretical model (Figure 1) that incorporated various critical components of both media literacy and the learning commons—access, investigation, critical analysis, expression, and appreciation—that the authors felt comprised an inclusive way of seeing the unique connections in these movements, and how combining them stood to strengthen the overall scope and reach of the learning commons model for K-12 schools.

Figure 1—The 21st Century Media Literacy Learning Commons Model²⁷

In this model, students are asked to employ a range of critical thinking and information skills, exploring how and where to access information, how to navigate and search for information effectively online, how to assess messages for accuracy and credibility, how to negotiate privacy and expression online, and how to use newfound digital platforms to empower creativity in our lives. The model was aimed at creating a learning environment where students engage with information and media as an extension of their daily habits.²⁸ Wrote the authors:

What can reenergize the role of the library in this environment is its focus on providing not only access to information—which no longer needs concentrated physical space—but also direction for learning how to become an active, engaged, expressive, and empowered media user in everyday life.²⁹

The learning commons model has the ability to serve as a hub for integrating media, technology and 21st century digital fluency. Below, we build on our theoretical model for the media literacy learning commons by offering a concentric framework for schools to consider for how media literacy learning commons can integrate into the larger landscape and mission of the learning commons (Figure 2).

This model takes from the core shifts in the Learning Commons ideology, evidenced through the Chelmsford High School case study, and applies the outcomes of media literacy education as a core necessity for integrating learning, technology, and community in the digital age.

Figure 2—Concentric Framework for Media Literacy Learning Commons

In each of these concentric spaces, tied together by a collaborative and open design where the “stacks” form a nice periphery to the central space, there exists an open concept based on the implicit blending of spaces, competencies, and fluencies. Together, these spaces disrupt common silos for the library and the school³⁰ and promote the entire school in the context of the learning community.³¹

The Expression space encompasses media literacy outcomes around empowering voice, activism, and creativity.³² In this part of the learning commons, students engage in creative acts—poetry, music, art, public speaking—and are encouraged to engage in physical and virtual acts of expression. Here the learning commons space also transitions from quiet to conversational, where students do not feel prohibited from engaging in discussion within the space. While certain parts of the learning commons are and should be reserved for quiet and concentrated study, those spaces, along with the books, move to the periphery.

The learning commons space offer wireless access, mobile technologies, and laptops throughout. The librarians at Chelmsford High School guide students and classrooms in the art of Inquiry in both digital and print realms. This part of the concentric model involves providing points of access and models or guides for investigation through web tools and print materials. Students learn to differentiate information online and develop sophisticated search techniques and habits of inquiry around classroom projects. This part of the model is driven by the library staff serving as an open and knowledgeable outlet for both classrooms and students who use the space for independent and structured work.

Along with cultivating habits of inquiry, most youth today are creating and sharing content online.³³ Schools of the past would have separate areas for media production and for media consumption. In the Production space of the learning commons, an emphasis lies on multimedia storytelling. This does not mean high-end production equipment or the need to have any advanced technological skills, which are means of production that have always been restrictive to youth because of barriers to access and high transaction costs.³⁴ Rather, space for production means space allowing students to create and share stories with simple online platforms, and cultivate habits of participation. When involved in a class project, the outcome as a static paper is of value, but in an age of creative expression and access to so many voices, the learning commons is best positioned to help teach the ethics of online voices, styles of public dialog, and keen attention to what it means to create content in print, video, and audio format for the web.

The final concentric circle reflects the goal of the newly positioned learning commons for all students, teachers, administrators and parents. If indeed today’s youth must learn to exist and thrive in a fast-paced and media-centric society, they must learn to connect with community in meaningful and mediated ways. As society shifts from the hyper-consumption of information, goods, and services, to more sharing, collaboration, and group mechanics,³⁵ the learning commons as a community space can be that central hub where learning exists in the context of new models for social production.

Through this new space and framework, what Chelmsford High School is attempting to do is change the culture of the library and, accordingly, the school. The learning commons movement has been present and growing for some time now in North America and beyond. As media grows more and more central and ubiquitous in the lives of youth worldwide, if media literacy is seen as the pedagogical approach for the learning commons of tomorrow, it can enable opportunity to keep pace with ever-quickening technology changes, and increasing pressure for resources and budgets. If the culture of the library can be re-envisioned as a space to engage, collaborate, and explore, the opportunities to meet new demands for media literacy education, garner more support for the central role of the library in the school, and help empower the learners and leaders of tomorrow will be greater than ever before.

References and Notes

1. See the forum online.
2. Ontario School Library Association, Together for Learning: School Libraries and the Emergence of the Learning Commons: A Vision for the 21st Century (Toronto, Canada, 2010), 6.
3. David Loertscher, Carol Koechlin, and Sandy Zwaan, The New Learning Commons: Where Learners Win (Salt Lake City, UT: Hi Willow Research & Pub, 2008).
4. Patricia Aufderheide and Charles Firestone, Media Literacy: A Report of the National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993); Art Silverblatt, Media Literacy: Keys to Interpreting Media Messages, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001); W. James Potter, Theory of Media Literacy: A Cognitive Approach (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004).
5. “P21 Framework Definitions,” Framework for 21st Century Learning. Partnership for 21st Century Skills, May 2010.  http://www.p21.org/‌documents/‌P21_Framework_Definitions.pdf (accessed February 22, 2012).
6. Elliot Gaines, Media Literacy and Semiotics (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).
7. Carmen Luke, “New Literacies in Teacher Education.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 43, no. 2 (February 2000): 424–435.
8. David Buckingham, Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003), 38.
9.  See Belinha De Abreu, Media Literacy, Social Networking, and the Web 2.0 Environment for the K-12 Educator (New York: Peter Lang, 2011); Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel, “From Web 2.0 to School 2.0.” Threshold 5, no. 2 (2007): 4-8; Kevin Oliver, “Integrating Web 2.0 Across the Curriculum,” TechTrends 54, no. 2 (March/April 2010): 50-60; Cyndy Scheibe and Faith Rogow, The Teacher’s Guide to Media Literacy: Critical Thinking in a Multimedia World (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2011).
10. Renee Hobbs, Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture and Classroom (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2011).
11. W. James Potter, Media Literacy, 3rd ed. (CA, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005).
12.  Mizuko Ito, Heather A. Horst, Arthur Law, Annie Manion, Sarai Mitnick, David Schlossberg, and Sarita Yardi, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009).
13. Regina Lee Roberts, “The Evolving Landscape of the Learning Commons”, Library Review 56, no. 9 (2007): 803-810.
14. David Booth and Jennifer Roswell, The Literacy Principal: Leading, Supporting and Assessing Reading and Writing Initiatives, 2nd ed. (Markham, ON: Pembroke Publishers, 2007); Ross Todd, “If School Librarians Can’t Prove They Make a Difference, They May Cease to Exist,” School Library Journal 4, no. 1 (2008); Christopher Shoemaker, H. Jack Martin and Barry Joseph, “How Using Social Media Forced a Library to Work on the Edge in Their Efforts to Move Youth From ‘Hanging Out’ to ‘Messing Around,’” Journal of Media Literacy Education 2, no. 2 (2010): 181-184.
15. Renee Hobbs, Digital and Media Literacy (2011).
16. All quotes from Valerie Diggs come from interviews and discussions in fall 2011.
17. Belinha De Abreu, Media Literacy, Social Networking, and the Web 2.0 Environment for the K-12 Educator (2011).
18. David Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (New York, Norton, 2011): 134.
19. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006): 8.
20. David V. Loertscher. “The Time is Now: Transform Your School Library into a Learning Commons,” Teacher Librarian 36, no. 1 (2008): 8-14.
21. Belinha De Abreu, Media Literacy, Social Networking, and the Web 2.0 Environment for the K-12 Educator (2011); Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share, “Towards Critical Media Literacy: Core Concepts, Debates, Organizations, and Policy,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 26, no. 3 (2005): 369-386; Renee Hobbs, Digital and Media Literacy (2011).
22. Scott Bennett, “Libraries and Learning: A History of Paradigm Change,” Libraries and the Academy 9, no. 2 (2009): 181-197.
23. Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: Penguin, 2010): 52.
24. Mizuko Ito, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out, 2009.
25. Larry Rosen, “Understanding the iGeneration: Before the Next Mini-Generation Arrives,” Nieman Reports 64, no. 2, (2010): 24-26.
26. Belinha De Abreu, Media Literacy, Social Networking, and the Web 2.0 Environment for the K-12 Educator (2011): 62.
27. Paul Mihailidis and Valerie Diggs, “From Information Reserve to Media Literacy Learning Commons: Revisiting the 21st Century Library as the Home for Media Literacy Education,” Public Library Quarterly 29 (2010): 1-14.
28. Valerie Diggs, “From Library to Learning Commons: A Metamorphosis,” Teacher Librarian 36, no. 4 (2009): 32-38.
29. Mihailidis and Diggs, “From Library to Learning Commons,” 2009.
30. Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008).
31. Richard DuFour, “Schools as Learning Communities,” Educational Leadership 61, no. 8 (2004): 6.
32. Alfonso Gutiérrez and Kathleen Tyner, “Media Education, Media Literacy and Digital Competence,” Communicar: Scientific Journal of Media Education (2010).
33. Kaiser Family Foundation, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-Olds, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (Menlo Park, CA, 2010); Pew Internet & American Life Project, Teens and Social Media (Washington, DC, 2009).
34. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2009).
35. Rachel Bostam and Roo Rodgers, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (New York: Harper Business, 2010).

By Annette Y. Goldsmith, Guest Faculty, University of Washington Information School;  Melissa Gross, Professor, Florida State University School of Library and Information Studies; Debi Carruth, Doctoral Candidate, Florida State University School of Library and Information Studies

Teens can learn about social as well as medical ramifications of HIV/AIDS on their lives by reading young adult novels featuring a character who is HIV positive, but it is not always evident from its book jacket that a book discusses HIV/AIDS. This US-based study investigates how the jacket reflects the HIV/AIDS content of a novel in which the disease is central to the plot, and what picture of HIV/AIDS the jacket presents. Compositional analysis and semiotics are applied to the US cover of Adele Minchin’s 2004 young adult novel, The Beat Goes On, first published in the UK. The analysis concludes that the jacket presents the narrative accurately overall. However, the front and back of the jacket do not reveal the subject matter; one must first open the book to the inside flaps to discover manifest HIV/AIDS content. The jacket images signify intimacy, vulnerability, and danger, but also hope through education and activism. Gaining insight into the information teens get from jackets as an entrée to the novels themselves is important because though many teens may not see themselves as personally at risk, HIV/AIDS continues to be a major public health problem in the US.

Introduction

Since the publication of M.E. Kerr’s Night Kites, the first US young adult novel featuring a character who is HIV positive, HIV/AIDS has been gradually finding a place in young adult literature.¹ Two related content analyses of young adult novels with an HIV positive character describe this body of literature and the picture of the disease that it presents to readers. Gross analyzes the first wave of novels published from 1986–1995.² Gross, Goldsmith, and Carruth update the earlier study by identifying and discussing novels published from 1996–2005.³ However, no researcher has yet considered what readers can glean about HIV/AIDS from the text and images on the book jackets of novels that focus on the disease. As advertising and as art, book jackets play a major role in communicating the content of the story, thereby potentially leading young adults to information about HIV/AIDS that is important to their lives. The current study examines the book jacket of Adele Minchin’s novel, The Beat Goes On, to see what the complementary visual methods of compositional analysis and semiotics—that is, looking at both formal composition and underlying meaning—can determine about the HIV/AIDS content therein.⁴

In the studies by Gross and Gross, Goldsmith, and Carruth, the units of analysis are novels available in English.⁵ All feature a protagonist in the 11-19 year age range and include a character who is HIV positive or who has AIDS. An annotated bibliography updates the project to include 2008 imprints, for a total of 93 books.⁶ In 40 of the 93 books, HIV/AIDS is central to the plot . In 29 books, it is a subplot, and in 24 books it is only mentioned in passing. The research questions of these studies deal exclusively with information derived from the story: who the HIV positive characters are and what relationship they have to the protagonist; how the disease is contracted; if the protagonist is afraid of HIV/AIDS; what eventually happens to the characters with HIV/AIDS; and if there is any indication that the disease can be controlled.

The two research questions at the heart of the current investigation focus on the book jacket copy and images as the reader’s first point of contact with the book:

1. How does the book jacket reflect the HIV/AIDS content of a novel in which the disease is central to the plot?
2. What picture of HIV/AIDS is presented by the book jacket?

The Beat Goes On

Several factors make the book jacket from the US edition of Minchin’s The Beat Goes On an appropriate choice for visual analysis. It is one of the 40 books in which HIV/AIDS is central to the story. Of those 40 books, it is one of only five that uses both text and images to depict HIV/AIDS content, suggesting there is sufficient content to make a detailed analysis worthwhile. The five books may be classified by artistic style: two have a photographic cover, two have a more painterly cover, and one uses collage. The Beat Goes On, with a photographic cover, is reasonably representative of this group.

It could be argued that the cultural content of a story set in the UK will not be sufficiently familiar for researchers in the US to understand, but it is the US edition of the book, repackaged for a North American audience, that is being interpreted. The elements of this particular novel—music, health, dating—are fully accessible to a North American sensibility.

The Beat Goes On was originally published in the UK by Livewire Books/The Women’s Press in 2001 and subsequently in the US in 2004 by Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, with a paperback release from Simon Pulse in 2007. The jacket under consideration is from the US edition because this is the version that readers in the US will see. Both jackets feature photographic images of a teen girl’s face, but in most other respects are quite different.

The US book jacket from The Beat Goes On introduces a contemporary story told from the point of view of Leyla, an engaging 15-year-old narrator. Leyla is shocked but then supportive upon learning that her 16-year-old cousin, Emma, whom she has always admired, has contracted HIV through unprotected heterosexual sex during a one-night stand. Leyla not only accepts the situation but also becomes an advocate for her cousin, accompanying Emma to her support group and even teaching drums to young people living with HIV/AIDS. The Beat Goes On won the Branford Boase Award, a UK prize for the most outstanding book for young people by a first-time novelist.

Background

Gaining insight into the information young adults get from book jackets as an entrée to the novels themselves is important because HIV/AIDS continues to be a major public health problem in spite of advances in treatment. Even though recent increases in diagnoses may be due in part to more people taking advantage of the opportunity to be tested, youth aged 13-24 years are still “at persistent risk for HIV infection.”⁷ Young adults in particular may no longer see contracting HIV/AIDS as the death sentence it most certainly was at the outset of the pandemic, thinking instead that it can easily be managed. Certainly they are less concerned about personally becoming infected. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that while 30 percent of young adults aged 18-29 in 1997 said they were personally very concerned about becoming infected with HIV, that number has now declined to only 17 percent.⁸

Though increasingly HIV/AIDS education is available to students in most public schools, it does not necessarily follow that students fully comprehend the implications of HIV/AIDS or even that school administrators are aware of how much the students know. Taking the disease for granted is very risky. When asked, many college students in Washington, D.C. said that they did not realize that one in twenty people in the District was infected, a rate higher than in many African countries. It was assumed by university officials that students coming to orientations had already been educated about HIV/AIDS. Consequently, the information provided to students lacked a sense of urgency.⁹ In this case, several factors contributed to an overall public impression that HIV/AIDS is no longer an epidemic, whereas in reality at this time Washington desperately needed to be the focal point of a major HIV/AIDS information campaign. This societal attitude is still prevalent and young adults still need information. One place they can find it is in books that are marketed to them.

At first glance it may seem odd to focus on young adult fiction for HIV/AIDS information. After all, there is plenty of solid nonfiction on the subject. Yet readers can derive a great deal of information from fiction. In The Beat Goes On, there is useful information in the narrative, as well as in a list of teen HIV/AIDS resources appended at the end. For example, teens who contracted HIV/AIDS through vertical transmission (from infected mother to child during pregnancy or breastfeeding) and receive treatment are now surviving to become adolescents; there is one such character, Ellie, in The Beat Goes On.

Fiction invites readers into the story to experience situations vicariously. With so many young people affected directly or indirectly by HIV/AIDS, fiction can help them understand the disease as a social as well as a medical phenomenon. Certainly Leyla learns a great deal about the social implications of HIV/AIDS, and readers have the opportunity to learn along with her while enjoying the story for its own sake.

Unfortunately, subject access to fiction that presents HIV/AIDS information is not always provided in the cataloging data, book summaries, or in reviews of books.¹⁰ Although some bibliographic finding aids are now available, not all readers or adults interested in helping young people find HIV/AIDS fiction necessarily know about or have access to these works. This situation intensifies the importance of the book jacket content in helping readers identify stories that contain HIV/AIDS content.

Why Look at Book Jackets?

Book jackets (also known as dust jackets) and book covers (where there is no jacket) are designed to attract and engage the potential reader’s interest. The jacket often takes the place of the cover and can serve as both poster and protection.¹¹ Editorial, sales, and marketing departments of book publishing firms consider the book jacket to be an important selling tool, and may even involve key retailers in the process.¹² Publishers, booksellers, and reviewers commonly highlight cover art in their catalogs, websites, and reviews. Book jackets “help readers make sense of the kind of book they are about to read, giving an impression of its genre, its tone and the kind of audience it seeks.”¹³ Book jackets target a group of readers. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the reader will notice information about HIV/AIDS presented in such a prominent part of the book.

The book jacket has had an established role in publishing and advertising at least since the 1940s, when publishers pressured booksellers to display their books face out. Front cover images were first widely reproduced in the 1950s in the trade and popular press to accompany book reviews.¹⁴ The cover of a book jacket is often the first point of contact the potential reader has with the book, and it is an important factor that readers consider.¹⁵ According to Cat Yampbell, “If a teenager is not looking for a specific title, author, or genre, the cover is the factor that sells one book over another.”¹⁶ If the book is first published as a hardcover, the jacket is key; subsequent publication in paperback generally depends on hardcover sales. For a paperback edition of the hardcover or a paperback original, it is the front and back covers that matter. If the hardcover book has won an award and the medal can appear on the paperback, so much the better.

Artists and designers use basic design principles and sometimes even semiotics training to attract an audience’s attention; Stokes mentions an advertising company called Semiotic Solutions.¹⁷ However, the cover must reflect the content or the reader will be disappointed.¹⁸ As Yampbell points out, the cover artist may not have had time to read the book, and working from a summary can result in material that is “superficial, ineffective, incorrect, and/or misleading.”¹⁹ Some designs will become historically important, but the emphasis is on the present: the jacket has to distinguish itself from its shelf-mates in order to be noticed in the competitive, ever-shifting world of teen media.²⁰ Certainly the need to stand out from the pack is an important tenet of advertising in general.²¹ Book jackets are frequently updated to shore up sagging sales, reflect changing mores, herald a film version, and sell the book to new audiences.²²

Images of HIV/AIDS

There are a limited number of visual images associated with HIV/AIDS. The best known symbol is the red AIDS ribbon designed by artist Frank Moore, a member of the New York activist group Visual AIDS, in 1981 as a fundraising device for HIV/AIDS care and research.²³ At first universally seen as an effective vehicle to raise consciousness and funds for research, a backlash against the AIDS ribbon began to gather strength in 1993.²⁴ HIV positive photographer David Seidner criticized the symbol as having been reduced to a fashion statement, a mere sop to celebrity egos that usurped media attention from the increasing number of deaths and amount of human suffering attributable to the disease.²⁵ In effect, the ribbon was being reified at the expense of political action to fight HIV/AIDS. Celebrities were divided about whether to wear the AIDS ribbon; soap opera star Deidre Hall reported being harassed because she would not.²⁶ The AIDS ribbon may no longer be a ubiquitous symbol in Hollywood but a simple search in Google Images confirms that it is still incorporated into countless AIDS organization logos around the world.

Other symbols have emerged in HIV/AIDS prevention campaign brochures and posters, many of them quite graphic, as documented in various art exhibits.²⁷ Much of the material targets the gay community since this community was identified early on as a large at-risk group. Several posters from Toronto AIDS groups promote safe sex through condom use, associating condoms with AIDS prevention.²⁸ Condoms with the faces of, among others, Bart Simpson and Kermit the Frog, appear in a lighthearted but informational piece by Charles Cave.²⁹ In a well-known 1986 poster, the pink triangle associated with the gay community accompanies the sign “SILENCE = DEATH” against a black background.³⁰ Images of the AIDS Memorial Quilt organized by The NAMES Project immediately conjure up the social and political context of the disease; and in this case, art as community memorial and fundraiser.³¹ More recently, the high-profile (Red) campaign, with a red logo using the word “red” in parentheses in a variety of product names, has tried to persuade consumers to support HIV/AIDS research in Africa through concert tickets and other purchases.³² In France, there is a small round stylized version of the virus that was an instantly recognizable icon in the 1990s but has since been replaced by the AIDS ribbon.³³

Early designers were influenced by the advertising industry and pop art; their intention was pragmatic.³⁴ As activist Douglas Crimp explains, “…we will have to abandon the idealist conception of art. We don’t need a cultural renaissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS.”³⁵ Since many designers also worked in advertising, there was a natural symbiosis between the two fields.

One example of this overlap is the KNOW HIV/AIDS logo within a circle that plays with red and black type to accentuate the “no” in “know” so the text also reads, “NO HIV/AIDS.” Developed by Viacom Corporate Relations, this logo was a joint large-scale project of Viacom and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation with a campaign that set aside $200 million in 2004 to raise public awareness about HIV testing through its website, www.knowhivaids.org (which redirects to the CDC site, www.hivtest.org).³⁶ Viacom companies including Simon & Schuster, publisher of The Beat Goes On, participated in the 2004 campaign by using the logo and incorporating HIV/AIDS content in their products.³⁷ Publication of The Beat Goes On may well have been linked to the KNOW HIV/AIDS campaign since it displays the logo on the inside back flap of the jacket.³⁸

For such a highly-publicized disease, however, surprisingly few images of HIV/AIDS have become established in the public imagination. Since the early 1980s, the AIDS ribbon has won out as the definitive symbol.

Methods

Of the various approaches to understanding art that were reviewed for this study, two methods were chosen, compositional analysis and semiotics, also called semiology, because together they can aid in both appreciation and meaning.³⁹ Compositional interpretation is informed art appreciation; what Rogoff calls “the good eye” and also describes as “connoisseurship.”⁴⁰ (Though “the good eye” sums up the standard art history approach to analysis, Rogoff prefers what she calls “the curious eye,” meaning considering questions associated with critical theory.)⁴¹ Examining artistic forms can be an end in itself or, as here, it can also act as the foundation for other methods.

Compositional analysis, following Rose, is concerned with provenance and production, but the primary emphasis is on describing the image itself in terms of content, color, spatial organization (perspective), light, and expressive content. This method also draws on relevant items in Gillian Dyer’s list of non-verbal means of communication, which take into consideration appearance (age, gender, national and racial characteristics, hair, body, size, and looks); manner (expression, eye contact, pose, and clothes); and activity (touch, body movement, and positional communication).⁴² Dyer also refers to props and settings but neither applies to the book jacket in question, which consists solely of a close-up image.

Art critic Erwin Panofsky’s iconographic analysis may be considered an extension of “the good eye,” though Rose largely situates his work in her chapter on discourse analysis and mentions that he is linked to semiotics.⁴³ Panofsky posits three levels of meaning in works of art. He describes the levels separately but intends them as a single organic process:

1. Primary or natural subject matter; also called pre-iconographical. Similar to compositional analysis, this level requires description and elementary interpretation. Dyer calls it “denotative.”
2. Secondary or conventional subject matter; also called iconographic. Requires understanding of specific symbols. Dyer calls it “connotative.”
3. Intrinsic meaning or content; also called symbolical and iconological. Requires understanding of the entire cultural background of the painter and the painting, including customs and mores, period, class, religion, etc. Dyer calls it “ideological.”⁴⁴

Panofsky’s approach overlaps with semiotics in distinguishing between the denotative and connotative, and looking to the broader social context for meaning.

Semiotics belongs to critical theory and uses a complex but precise set of tools to analyze images, making it a popular method for media studies researchers. In particular, an analysis using semiotics is interested in the social meaning behind the text. The method encourages researchers to reflect on their biases. Studying the context of how images are received by the intended audience is an important part of the process. In this regard, it should be noted that this study does not address audience reception, but lays the groundwork for a future reader response study.

Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on signs is at the heart of semiotics: the sign is a unit of language and the building block of semiotics.⁴⁵ The sign, according to Saussure, consists of two aspects, the signified and the signifier. In the real world, the object the sign represents is called the referent. The signified is a concept or material object; the signifier is the sound, image, or concept evoked by the signified. The relationship between the signified and its signifier can take on many different meanings. As both Rose and Dyer point out, interpreting signification must be done in the context of the larger world of advertising images and ideology.⁴⁶

Charles Sanders Peirce refined Saussure’s work to suggest three different kinds of signs: icon, index, and symbol.⁴⁷ Rose explains this system in terms of baby-related signs.⁴⁸ In iconic signs, the signifier has a likeness to the signified. For example, a photo of a baby looks like a baby. Indexical signs have inherent meaning which is often culturally constructed. A diagram of a pacifier on a restroom door, for instance, will denote the availability of baby changing facilities. In symbolic signs, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary but still easily understood. In this case, a photo of the baby represents the future. Many other writers have adopted Peirce’s typology.

Several researchers, notably French critic Gérard Genette, have addressed the importance of the paratext in understanding the work as a whole. The paratext consists of everything that is in addition to the naked text that involves the public or private life of the published book: “…the paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public.”⁴⁹ The peritext refers to those elements within the book, and the epitext to those outside of it. Genette situates the book jacket as part of the publisher’s peritext since creating the jacket is a task for the publishing firm.⁵⁰ Sipe and Higonnet acknowledge the role of the peritext in picture books.⁵¹ The peritext is also significant for young adult novels.⁵²

How to analyze photographic images is a topic of debate among semioticians. To a certain degree, photographs, even if manipulated, appear to record reality more closely than other visual media.⁵³ Roland Barthes states that while a cultural appreciation (the studium level) of photos is certainly possible, he also proposes that parts of some photos are beyond signification. He calls this a response at the punctum level, in which a particular detail with intensely personal meaning can pull the viewer out of his or her critical self.⁵⁴

The following analysis of a particular book jacket serves to demonstrate how the methods of compositional interpretation and semiotics may be combined for a richer investigation of text and images within the context of advertising.

Visual Analysis of The Beat Goes On Book Jacket

Compositional analysis begins with provenance. For a traditional work of art such as a painting, the provenance would trace ownership. Here it is the edition, not the unique copy, which is the unit of analysis. The US edition of the book published by Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers features a jacket photograph by Christina Stanley and jacket design by Russell Gordon. The hardcover price in the US ($15.95) and Canada ($23.95) and age level (“Ages 12 up”) are stated on the front flap. The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) barcode appears on the back cover. From a semiotics standpoint, the book jacket itself is a sign consisting of the signified and the signifier. The signified (the material object) is part of a book published by a large, well-known US imprint that targets young readers. It is a commodity for sale and the book jacket is advertising designed to interest the potential buyer/reader. One signifier (the concept) is reading. The book jacket is a persuasive invitation to read the book within, to choose it from amongst the many other young adult novels on the shelf.

The jacket photograph is an extreme cropped close-up, a detail of a teen girl’s face, with the right side of her face on the front cover and the left side of her face on the back cover. One side is the mirror image of the other rather than a single image of both sides of the teen’s face, which implies that the photo has been manipulated. That her eyes appear larger than normal, with a shortened distance from eye to mouth, also suggests photographic manipulation. The close-up connotes intimacy. Dyer points out that close-ups are often used in advertising to show appealing detail or to make the image larger than life.⁵⁵ Certainly this type of cover image draws the viewer in. Dyer also notes that women in particular tend to be represented in pieces, for example, focusing on the eye. ⁵⁶ Though this particular image does not seem to denigrate women by reducing the teen to body parts, it must be considered within the broader gender context of how women are represented in advertising.

Figure 1 (Click for Full-Size)

As a symbolic sign, the eye can represent “vigilance, moral conscience, and truth.”⁵⁷ Leyla is watchful and very protective of Emma, even getting involved in Emma’s regimen to make sure that her cousin takes her medication, eats well, etc. Certainly Leyla is the moral center of the novel, quickly accepting Emma’s new situation without judging her. When she learns the degree to which society is affected by HIV/AIDS, she is outraged that others are not outraged.

The teen on the cover is wide-eyed and wearing makeup; her lip gloss and eye shadow shimmer in the matte photo. To some potential buyers, it might resemble an alluring fashion magazine ad for cosmetics. The eye makeup is quite heavy, or perhaps seems so because of the extreme close-up, but then teens are likely to experiment with cosmetics at an ever younger age and are certainly encouraged to do so by girls’ magazines.⁵⁸ Since young readers generally prefer to read about characters a little older than themselves, this type of cover and flap copy is probably designed to attract readers younger than fifteen, Leyla’s age. (The printed age range of 12 and up is a standard designation for a young adult book.)

There are two aspects to spatial organization: the space within the image, called geometrical perspective; and the viewing position created between the image and the viewer, what Michael Ann Holly calls the “logic of figuration.”⁵⁹ Here, the face is a tight close-up. The teen on the cover is literally in the viewer’s face; there is no personal space. Since the photo has been manipulated, the relative size and spacing of the eye, nose, and lips to one another is disconcerting. The eye is the largest and most arresting visual element. The viewer faces the image of the teen at approximately eye level. She appears to be looking up and out, perhaps over the shoulder of the viewer, at something surprising or dangerous. If the teen pictured represents the protagonist, as is often the case with young adult book covers, there might also be a reference to Leyla looking up to her cousin Emma which is described in the jacket copy (see Figure 2).

Real or implied light sources can influence the viewer’s reaction to the image. The photo appears to have been taken in daylight. There are no shadowy or obscured parts of the image. The teen’s face seems open and exposed, even to her pores. So too is Leyla open to both her cousin’s new situation and the importance of being honest about HIV/AIDS and not hiding it. This vulnerability is in keeping with the tone of the narrative, expressing Leyla’s initial fear and shock on hearing her cousin’s diagnosis but also her own uncertainty about negotiating a first sexual relationship.

The jacket hues (colors) are mostly on the red spectrum with some yellow and blue mixed in. Red is the color of danger (as in stop signs) and blood, as typified in the symbols of the AIDS ribbon and the (Red) campaign.⁶⁰ Liungman talks about “the deep ambivalence of blood-red—when hidden, it is what conditions life: when exposed, it means death.” ⁶¹ The Caucasian face has a pinkish flesh tone. The iris, eyeliner, and mascara are all strong black, as are the nostrils. Symbolically, the nose, like the eyes, can refer to “clairvoyance, perspicacity and discernment” but with an intuitive rather than a rational focus.”⁶² The eyebrows are a light brown/blonde mix, suggesting that the teen has light hair, though it is not visible in the photo. The decision not to show her hair is intriguing because, as Dyer points out, female hair “is one of the most potent symbols in cultural communication.”⁶³ This increases the feeling of vulnerability that the photo expresses.

The blue of the teen’s eyes, her silvery eye makeup, and the blue-gray of the author’s name on the front cover are cool colors, a contrast to the warm yellow, pink, purple, red, and orange of the title and the flesh-colored background. The title’s candy-colored hues are reminiscent of the cosmetics young teens use. The same effect of contrast occurs on the back cover, with the cool blue eye above the warm colors of the quote. The tension between the warm and cool colors emphasizes the eye to an even greater degree. Blue eyes can connote innocence and being in love, both of which are true of Leyla, who falls in love with heartthrob Darren and at the outset is quite naïve, though not enough to follow Emma’s example of having unprotected sex when she has the opportunity.⁶⁴ Leyla learns from her cousin’s experience and from her own involvement playing drums with young people with HIV/AIDS. In accordance with the qualities that Liungman attributes to eyes, Leyla is insightful and generally shows good judgment.⁶⁵

Apart from the colors themselves, saturation and value should be considered. Saturation refers to a color’s purity; high saturation is very vivid and low saturation almost neutral. Value refers to the degree of lightness or darkness of a color. If there is a lot of white in the color, it has a high value; if a lot of black, a low value. In this example, the jacket colors are not highly saturated and they have high value; the effect is light and bright. The black iris, eyeliner, mascara, and nostrils again provide an intense contrast, focusing primarily on the eye. The overriding message here is that there is something important that the teen sees and that the viewer should want to see, too. The enormity of what has happened to Emma at first frightens but does not overwhelm Leyla; rather, it spurs her to action, making her an advocate not just for her cousin but for all people with HIV/AIDS.

The jacket typography has an immediate impact. On the front cover, the title, in very large capitals and on an angle, and the author’s name, also in capital letters but much smaller, have an eye-catching glossy finish. The partly translucent letters of the title appear to bob up and down and overlap in some places, creating movement that echoes the title’s musical connotation. Even if the viewer is not familiar with the song lyrics written by Sonny Bono, the concept of popular music comes through. The narrative ends on an upbeat note with the eponymous lyrics from a song written by Ellie and played by Leyla’s band: You can’t run away, it’s here to stay. / The die is cast and you won’t be the last, / But the beat goes on….⁶⁶

The back cover features a quote from the book in large caps taking up most of the space not occupied by the teen’s features:

PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT. THEY’RE SCARED THEY MIGHT CATCH IT….NOBODY REALIZES THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE LIKE EMMA OUT THERE WHO HAVE JUST HAD A BIT OF BAD LUCK FROM ONE CARELESS MISTAKE. —FROM THE BEAT GOES ON

At this point, it is still not clear that this book deals with HIV/AIDS.

Only once the reader has opened the book is there any mention of HIV/AIDS in the jacket copy. The front flap lists the price and age level, below which appears the teen’s eye within a circle—a clever reminder of the jacket’s most important design element. The circle is generally known as a symbol of perfection and completeness, but Liungman also notes that it refers to the turning wheel of time.⁶⁷ Certainly the passage of time is relevant to a book about HIV/AIDS. There is some suspense as to how long it will take for Emma to become seriously ill (the answer, unfortunately, is “not long”) and, more generally, how long it will take to find a cure.

Figure 2

Figure 3

The first sentence of the front flap jacket copy is in large capital letters: “AT FIFTEEN, SHY LEYLA LOOKS UP TO HER SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD COUSIN, EMMA.” The copy continues in an Arial-like sans serif face and introduces the plot with overt mention of HIV/AIDS. The back flap begins at the top with the author’s name in large, glossy capital letters and continues with a brief biographical note. Below this copy the logo, KNOW HIV/AIDS, appears within a circle, balancing and echoing the eye detail at the top of the front flap. Liungman also notes that the circle is a symbol of protection, and indeed the message of the logo is that only through knowledge can HIV/AIDS be eradicated.⁶⁸ In the context of HIV/AIDS protection, a circle may also refer to an unopened condom. The logo uses color and bolding to present two uncompromising messages in black and red: KNOW HIV/AIDS and NO HIV/AIDS. The back flap concludes with publisher and imprint information at the bottom. The jacket coyly hints at HIV/AIDS content on the back cover, but presents it in a more forthright fashion on the back flap.

Discussion

The above analysis uses compositional analysis and a semiotics approach to respond to the two research questions:

1. How does the book jacket reflect the HIV/AIDS content of a novel in which the disease is central to the plot?
2. What picture of HIV/AIDS is presented by the book jacket?

As a whole, the book jacket of The Beat Goes On presents the narrative in an accurate way, but it is not until one physically opens the book to read the flaps that any hint of manifest HIV/AIDS content appears. Both copy and image (the logo) on the front and back flaps explain the role that HIV/AIDS plays in the story and promotes HIV/AIDS education and even activism. Leyla’s empathetic reaction to Emma’s HIV positive status and understanding that it must not be kept secret are clearly stated. As Yampbell explains, it is not unusual for young adult book covers to misrepresent the book with, for example, a sensationalized cover, but this is not the case with The Beat Goes On.⁶⁹

The overall picture of HIV/AIDS depicted by the book jacket is represented by images that signify intimacy, vulnerability, and danger, but also hope through education and activism. The logo on the inside back flap may be the only graphical representation of HIV/AIDS, but it connotes connection to a broad community of people, including the publisher, who are involved in a public awareness campaign. The symbolic sign of the eye brings in the component of vigilance, moral conscience, and truth while the lighting emphasizes honesty and vulnerability. The sign of the circle adds the dimensions of time and protection. Even the title is hopeful. With the predominantly candy-colored palette and bouncy typography that brings to mind girls’ teen magazines, this jacket is designed to attract female young teens and so provides images that will be meaningful to them and draw them in.

Readers may expect book jackets to reflect the subject matter within, but even the jackets of the 40 books listed by Gross, Goldsmith, and Carruth in which HIV/AIDS is central to the plot do not necessarily meet this standard.⁷⁰ Thirty-two of the books (80%) refer to HIV/AIDS in the jacket copy. This seems like a respectable number until the year of publication is also considered: 29 of the books (73%) that mention HIV/AIDS on the book jacket were published from 1986–1996. Of the 11 remaining books, five (23%) were published in a single year, 2004. The remaining six books (15%) with jacket copy that mention HIV/AIDS were published in 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005 (two titles), and 2007, suggesting that there is no trend towards better publicizing HIV/AIDS content in this manner.

In addition to jacket copy, the images and color of book jackets were considered. Only five books (13%) feature both text and images relevant to the disease. Eight of the 40 books (20%) display no HIV/AIDS content whatsoever on the jacket and none announce the HIV/AIDS subject matter purely through images. If indications of death and loss are counted, 19 books (48%) present this information in the jacket copy, four books (10%) in both text and images, and one (.3%) in images alone. As described above, the color red, though not a direct representation of HIV/AIDS, can symbolize blood and danger and has been associated with the AIDS ribbon and the (Red) Campaign. Thirteen of the books (33%) have text in red while twenty (50%) of the books feature red in the background or otherwise as part of the jacket.

One might speculate that book jackets do not consistently mention HIV/AIDS up front because it is a controversial subject, but contemporary young adult novels hardly shy away from controversy. Rather, controversy can fuel sales. However, there are many ways to sell a book, and the publisher can try to hook the reader by focusing on a different aspect of the story. Or perhaps the publisher surmises that teens would just not be interested in seeing HIV/AIDS, which is, after all, a school subject, emblazoned on the cover of their recreational reading. As reported above, many teens do not seem personally concerned about HIV/AIDS. It is surprising, though, that when HIV/AIDS is central to the plot, it is not necessarily referenced in the jacket cover art or copy.

Since The Beat Goes On is targeted to a female young teen audience, the issue of gender arises. The cover photo and typography cater to girls who are familiar with teen magazines and might be intrigued by the book jacket for that reason. The feelings of vulnerability and perceived danger that emanate from the photo fit the stereotypical construct of female weakness and passivity. If teenage boys were the intended readers, the cover would almost certainly be different. For a start, it would likely feature a male teen.⁷¹

Examining Book Covers with Teens

Teachers and librarians can invite teens to look critically at the jackets of books with HIV/AIDS content or any other issue that is important to them and might be controversial. Ideally, the analysis could take place before reading the book and revisited afterwards to see if, having read the book, the meaning of the jacket material has changed. The following questions are inspired by compositional analysis and semiotics as discussion prompts:

• Consider the purpose of the book jacket. Is it advertising? Is it art? Is there any tension between the two?
• Describe what is on the cover and flaps. What do the art and text tell you? How do they work together? What is obvious? Might there be underlying meanings as well?
• What are the dominant colors? How do they make you feel?
• Can you tell which medium the artist has used? Was this a good choice? How does the medium help communicate the message?
• Do you recognize any symbols? Do you know what they mean? How do they affect the overall message of the book jacket?
• Do you think the cover accurately represents the content? If it does not, is this a problem? Do you think the jacket should reflect the story? What, if anything, did you learn about the relevant issue (HIV/AIDS, etc.) from the jacket?

Analysis could be conducted by the whole class if the jacket is scanned and projected onto a large screen. Alternatively, small groups could work on jackets from different novels on a similar theme and present their analysis to the class. Teens may look with new appreciation and care at book jackets. Another follow-up activity could be for teens to design their own book jackets

Conclusion

Together, the text and images of The Beat Goes On book jacket convey a strong and accurate sense of the narrative, and demonstrate ways that HIV/AIDS content might be imparted to the potential reader. Yet even with a book that focuses on HIV/AIDS and its effect on the lives of Leyla, Emma, and their friends and family, this content is not immediately apparent. The front and back covers do not mention the disease, and it is not until the reader actually opens the book to the inside flaps that the subject matter becomes clear. It is difficult in general to identify fiction with HIV/AIDS content; an indication on the front or back of the book would help.

This study uses compositional analysis and semiotics to interpret the messages being communicated in book jackets. While such an analysis is largely qualitative and therefore subjective, it is nevertheless valuable in exposing relevant compositional and cultural messages embedded in visual content. With a little help from their teachers and librarians, teens too can use this approach to take a closer look at the material that is marketed to them. Follow-up research will continue this investigation by examining other young adult novel book jackets with HIV/AIDS content in which the disease is central to the story. A companion study of teens’ reader responses to these book jackets is also anticipated.

Many teens do not think that HIV/AIDS is of personal concern to them. Through reading fiction that explores the social and emotional as well as the purely medical aspects of the disease, they may decide otherwise. Quality young adult fiction that discusses HIV/AIDS provides educational as well as recreational reading in a non-didactic way. Encountering fictional characters with HIV/AIDS is an excellent way for teens to engage with the subject and learn vicariously (and safely) from their experiences. First, though, it is necessary to locate the books, which can be a difficult task when subject access is limited and finding aids are specialized. The more information about the HIV/AIDS content within that appears on the book jacket, the more easily young adults and the adults who work with them will be able to identify and recommend these important books.

References and Notes

1. M.E. Kerr, Night Kites (New York: Harper, 1986).
2. Melissa Gross, “What Do Young Adult Novels Say About HIV/AIDS?” Library Quarterly 68, no. 1 (1998): 1-32.
3. Melissa Gross, Annette Goldsmith, and Debi Carruth, “What Do Young Adult Novels Say About HIV/AIDS? A Second Look.” Library Quarterly 78, no. 4 (2008): 397-418.
4. Adele Minchin, The Beat Goes On (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
5. Gross, “What Do Young Adult Novels”; Gross, Goldsmith, and Carruth, “What Do Young Adult Novels.”
6. Melissa Gross, Annette Y. Goldsmith, and Debi Carruth, HIV/AIDS in Young Adult Novels: An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, MD.: Scarecrow Press, 2010).
7. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Questions and Answers: The 15% Increase in HIV Diagnoses from 2004–2007 in 34 States and General Surveillance Report Questions,” HIV/AIDS Statistics and Surveillance (February 26, 2009). http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5905a1.htm?s_cid=ss5905a1_e (accessed Feb. 5, 2012); Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “HIV/AIDS Among Youth,” HIV/AIDS Fact Sheets (Aug. 3, 2008). http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/youth/index.htm (accessed Feb. 5, 2012).
8. Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, “Less Than a Year After CDC Announced That U.S. HIV Epidemic is Much Larger Than Previously Thought, Public’s Sense of Urgency is Down, Even Among Some Higher Risk Groups,” news release, April 28, 2009. http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/posr042809nr.cfm (accessed Feb. 5, 2012).
9. Brenda Wilson, “HIV Education Lacking at Many College Orientations,” Weekend Edition Sunday (Oct. 7, 2007), National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15080041 (accessed Feb. 5, 2012).
10. Gross, Goldsmith, and Carruth, HIV/AIDS in Young Adult Novels, 8.
11. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 27.
12. Angus Phillips, “How Books are Positioned in the Market: Reading the Cover,” in Judging a Book by its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction, eds. Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007): 20-30.
13. Nicole Matthews, “Introduction,” in Judging a Book by its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction, eds. Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007): xi.
14. Ibid., xi-xxi.
15. Corinne A. Kratz, “On Telling/Selling a Book by its Cover,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 2 (1994): 179-200; Alain D’Astous, Francois Colbert, and Imene Mbarek, “Factors Influencing Readers’ Interest in New Book Releases: An Experimental Study,” Poetics 34 (2006): 134-47.
16. Cat Yampbell, “Judging a Book by its Cover: Publishing Trends in Young Adult Literature,” The Lion and the Unicorn 29, no. 3 (2005): 356; Cat Yampbell’s last name is really Yampell; there was a misprint in the journal article.
17. Jim Krause, Design Basics Index (Cincinnati: How Design Books, 2004); Jane Stokes, How To Do Media and Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2003).
18.  John Morgan and Peter Welton, See What I Mean? An Introduction to Visual Communication, 3rd ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1992); Phillips, “How Books are Positioned.”
19. Yampbell, “Judging a Book,” 359.
20. Harold Darling, From Mother Goose to Dr. Seuss: Children’s Book Covers, 1860–1960 (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1999); Alan Powers, Children’s Book Covers: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2003); Nanette Stevenson, “Hipper, Brighter and Bolder: Publishers Struggle to Make Book Jackets Stand Out on Ever More Crowded Shelves,” Publishers Weekly (Feb. 17, 1997): 139-41; Yampbell, “Judging a Book.”
21. Gillian Dyer, Advertising as Communication (London: Routledge, 1982).
22. Phillips, “How Books are Positioned,”; Christine Jenkins, “Annie on Her Mind,” School Library Journal 49, no. 6 (2003): 48-50; Genette, Paratexts.
23. Aaron Betsky, “An Emblem of Crisis Made the World See the Body Anew: AIDS has Pushed the Sensual, and Dangerous, Human Form Back into Art and Design,” New York Times (Nov. 30, 1997): AR1, 44.
24. Betsky, “An Emblem of Crisis,”; Marc Peyser, “Tyranny of the Red Ribbon,” Newsweek (June 28, 1993): 61.
25. David Seidner, “The Red Ribbon,” New Yorker (Feb. 15, 1993): 31.
26. Peyser, “Tyranny.”
27. Alice Thorson, “Visual AIDS II,” Afterimage 18 (1990): 24; Douglas Utter, “Creating in Crisis: Making Art in the Age of AIDS,” New Art Examiner 22 (1995): 41.
28. Thorson, “Visual AIDS II.”
29.  Utter, “Creating in Crisis.”
30. Betsky, “An Emblem of Crisis.”
31. Gabriele Griffin, Representations of HIV and AIDS: Visibility Blue/s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
32. The Persuaders, (Red), http://www.joinred.com/red/ (accessed Feb. 5, 2012).
33. Mireille Rosello, “Pictures of a Virus: Ideological Choices and the Representation of HIV,” French Cultural Studies 9, pt. 3 (1998): 337-349.
34. Betsky, “An Emblem of Crisis.”
35. Douglas Crimp, ed. AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (Cambridge: MIT, 1988): 7.
36. Brands of the World, “Know HIV AIDS,” http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/logo/know-hiv-aids (accessed Feb. 5, 2012).
37. Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, “Know HIV/AIDS Launches Four New PSAs and Premieres Short Film in Support of World AIDS Day,” news release, Dec.1, 2006. http://www.kff.org/entpartnerships/viacom/phip120106bnr.cfm (accessed Feb. 5, 2012).
38. The publisher checked but was not able to confirm that The Beat Goes On was intended as part of the KNOW AIDS campaign.
39. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2001).
40. Irit Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002): 27-28.
41. Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture,” 28.
42. Dyer, Advertising.
43. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
44. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 5-17; Dyer, Advertising, 94.
45. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Peter Owen, 1959).
46. Rose, Visual Methodologies; Dyer, Advertising.
47. Charles Sanders Peirce, Pierce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991): 251.
48. Rose, Visual Methodologies, 83.
49. Genette, Paratexts, 1.
50. Ibid., 16.
51. Lawrence R. Sipe, “Learning the Language of Picturebooks,” Journal of Children’s Literature 24, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 66-75; Margaret R. Higonnet, “The Playground of the Peritext,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 15 (1990): 47-49.
52. Yampbell, “Judging a Book.”
53. Rose, Visual Methodologies.
54. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
55. Dyer, Advertising.
56. Ibid.
57. Dictionary of Symbolism, “Eyes,” http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/symbolismproject/symbolism.html/E/eyes.html University of Michigan Fantasy and Science Fiction website (accessed Feb. 5, 2012).
58. Alex Clark, “Women: The Beauty Myth Gets Younger: New Research Shows That More Pre-teen Girls than Ever Before are Wearing Makeup. Is it Just Harmless Fun–or Too Much, Too Soon? Alex Clark Flicks Through the Teen Magazines,” The Guardian (Sept. 8, 2004): 8.
59. Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996): 24-25.
60. The Persuaders, (Red).
61. C. G. Liungman, Dictionary of Symbols (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1991): 793.
62. Ibid., 706.
63. Dyer, Advertising, 98.
64. Dictionary of Symbolism, “Eyes.”
65. Ibid.
66. Minchin, The Beat Goes On, 208.
67. C. G. Liungman, Dictionary of Symbols.
68. Ibid.
69. Yampbell, “Judging a Book.”
70. Gross, Goldsmith, and Carruth, HIV/AIDS in Young Adult Novels.
71. Yampbell, “Judging a Book.”

By Virginia A. Walter, Professor Emerita, University of California, Los Angeles

The YALSA National Research Agenda on Libraries, Teens, and Young Adults is an informative and inspirational document: informative because it succeeds in mapping the landscape of research in this broadly defined, expansive field; and inspirational because it teases any intellectually curious researcher with gaps in the research terrain that beg to be filled.

As an academic who has done research that could fit into all four priority areas identified in the research agenda, I found myself looking for ways that I might do some crossover work that integrated issues from one or more of these. Two approaches occurred to me, both with implications for methodology. First, feeling a little like the woman with a hammer for whom the whole world is a nail, I returned again and again to outcome evaluation as my preferred tool for tackling these questions. Second, I was reminded again of the value of involving young adults directly in the research process as participants and not just as subjects. I will discuss each of these issues briefly and then conclude by speculating about who might implement this research agenda most productively.

Outcome Evaluation

Outcome evaluation seeks to determine the change in skill, attitude, behavior, or status as a result on the participants as a result of a particular library program or service. We owe a big debt of gratitude to Eliza Dresang, Melissa Gross, and Leslie Edmonds Holt for their handbook, Dynamic Youth Services through Outcome-Based Planning and Evaluation, that explains so clearly how and why to use this tool in developing and assessing library services for young people.¹

Let’s take a moment and look at each of the four priority areas from the research agenda and see how outcome evaluation might be applied.

The very title for Priority Area 1, “Impact of Libraries on Young Adults,” signals the need for better understanding of the outcomes of our work with teens. Research questions 2 and 4 in this priority area are particularly suitable for outcome evaluation. These questions ask us to identify and then document the ways that individual libraries and national initiatives such as YALSA’s Teen Read Week positively affect adolescent development, including literacy, work readiness, and twenty-first century learning skills.

An outcome-based approach to such a task would require that we first gather information that would enable us to do a kind of needs assessment. Call it market research. What are the gaps in adolescent development that libraries might reasonably address? What is an individual library or YALSA’s capacity for meeting the gap? My own experience working as a consultant is that the more time and effort spent on this phase of the process, the better the final result. However, any effort to do this kind of advance work pays off.

The second stage of the process is to use what has been learned in the information-gathering process to identify the desired outcomes for teens of some potential program or service. It is helpful to have some benchmark data as a starting point. Say we’ve decided, based on the high school’s current college admission rates and input from our Young Adult Advisory Council, that the desired outcome of a public library program would be something related to helping local teens prepare for college. We identify as a desired output that at least fifty students will participate in a college-readiness program and that at least forty of them (80%) will be admitted to one or more colleges.

Now we need to design the program that will achieve our outcome objective. We may have learned from talking to guidance counselors at the high school and to teens themselves that a big barrier for students in our community is knowing what financial aid is available. A second obstacle is the need to write a good application essay. To try to address these two issues, we create a pathfinder that leads students to both print and online resources about financial aid. The Youth Advisory Council helps us recruit several teens to be peer counselors, and the school’s guidance counselor gives them some training in using the various resources. We arrange times for the peer counselors to be available to work with high school juniors or beginning seniors. If we have funding, we hire tutors to work with students one-on-one with their admission essays. If we have no money, we beat the bushes of local colleges for work-study students or those wanting to do community service and do a little screening and training to be sure they can be helpful.

Evaluating a program such as the one I described would be straightforward. Keep track of the students who take part, set up a mechanism to learn whether or not they have been admitted to college, and then tabulate the results. If forty students are admitted, we have achieved our objectives. If the program did not result in forty students being admitted to college, we need to ask ourselves if that target was reasonable or if our program design needs to be retooled.

The same process can be followed for each of the other three priority areas. For Priority Area 2, “Young Adult Reading and Resources,” research question 3 addresses the need to identify best practices in developing collections, promoting reading, and defending teens’ access to a wide range of information. Outcome evaluation would enable librarians to measure the impact of their actions on their young adult users. Outcome evaluation could help to determine how book talks or graphic novel collections promote teen reading, for example.

Many of the research questions in Priority Area 3, “Information-Seeking Behaviors and Needs of Young Adults,” are already framed as quests for outcomes with their use of terms such as information needs, behaviors, and barriers. Many academics have already found this to be fertile ground for their research, and the results have been well-documented in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Techology, as well as the two volumes on youth information-seeking behavior edited by Mary K. Chelton and Colleen Cool.² The YALSA research agenda suggests many ways that this existing work can be expanded.

Priority Area 4 looks at the informal and formal learning environments in which young adults base their reading and information-seeking experiences. As with Priority Area 3, some good foundational scholarship has already been done. Twenty-first century learning skills have already been well-documented as desirable outcomes for young adults. The work that remains to be done is to identify the library services and programs that will help teens acquire those skills, and an outcome-based planning and evaluation process could begin to accomplish this.

Teens as Research Partners

Robin Moeller, Amy Pattee, and Angela Leeper posted a provocative response to the YALSA Research Agenda 2012–2016 in The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults.³ They ask researchers to consider the role that teens can play in the research process. A similar issue is raised by Kafi D. Kumasi in her response in the same issue of JRLYA. She encourages scholars to frame their research within the context of critical theory, engaging teens as participants in critical inquiry.⁴ She suggests that teens, librarians, and scholars engage in action research, a kind of collaborative effort to uncover knowledge that is meaningful to all parties.

A book that I have found useful in addressing the concerns of Moeller, Pattee, Leeper, and Kumasi is Representing Youth: Methodological Issues in Critical Youth Sudies, edited by Amy L. Best.⁵ The contributors to this volume represent a variety of academic disciplines, but they all share a commitment to understanding the social construction of adolescence, to respecting the competency of young people, and to seeing them as active participants in their own lives. It is a perspective that could positively inform young adult librarianship as well as the scholarship that the YALSA research agenda seeks to encourage.

Who Will Do the Research?

My final words address the question of who will do this research. Even if every graduate program in library and information science harbored a professor devoted to the kind of work described in the YALSA research agenda, there would still be too few scholars to accomplish it all. Partnerships between academics and practitioners are essential. If nothing else, academics need practitioners to open the doors to those formal and informal learning environments in which they could conduct their research. Hopefully, some practitioners will take up the research cause and conduct their own studies, motivated by intellectual curiosity and the desire to improve their own services through approaches like outcome-based planning and evaluation.

Even as we increase the ranks of those engaged in research about young adults and libraries, we must also encourage those who do this work to publish their results. The findings from an outcome evaluation study that determined that teen book talkers were effective in promoting reading among their peers could be relevant to many other libraries. We tend to share these stories of “how we did it good” in conference programs or electronic discussion lists. Let’s think about how we can be more proactive about disseminating our good research stories in print (electronic and paper-based) as well.

References

1. Eliza T. Dresang, Melissa Gross, and Leslie Edmonds Holt, Dynamic Youth Services through Outcome-Based Planning and Evaluation (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006).
2. Mary K. Chelton and Colleen Cool, Youth Information-Seeking Behavior: Theories, Models, and Issues (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004); Mary K. Chelton and Colleen Cool, Youth Information-Seeking Behavior II: Context, Theories, Models, and Issues (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2007).
3. Robin Moeller, Amy Pattee, and Angela Leeper, “The Young Adult Voice in Research About Young Adults,” Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults (November 15, 2011).
4. Kafi D. Kumasi, “The Impact of Libraries on Young Adults: Toward a Critical Research Agenda,” Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults (November 15, 2011).
5. Amy L. Best, ed., Representing Youth: Methodological Issues in Critical Youth Studies (New York: New York Univ. Pr., 2007).

Virginia A. Walter holds a BA in world literature, an MLIS from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in public administration from the University of Southern California. Before joining the faculty in what is now the Information Studies Department at UCLA in 1990, she had worked for more than twenty years in public libraries, most recently as children’s services coordinator at Los Angeles Public Library. She retired in June 2008 with the rank of professor emerita. She is the author of two books for young people, nine monographs, and more than thirty-five articles in scholarly and professional journals.

By Carol C. Kuhlthau, Professor Emerita, Library and Information Science, Rutgers University, The Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries (CISSL)

Youth services in public and school libraries are grounded in a long tradition of best practice and the continuing innovation of experienced practitioners, but research matters. Research provides insight into problems that are not apparent through the lens of tradition or experience. The triad of tradition, experience, and research work together to build, sustain, and deepen the field. Where research has been combined with tradition and experience, services for youth have benefited significantly. The model of the information search process is an example of how research can impact practice in important and long-lasting ways. Through this research, I discovered five steps to conducting research that matters.

• Start with a real problem.
• Stay with the problem to verify and test the findings in a variety of contexts.
• Develop concepts from the findings.
• Design applications for implementation.
• Look to the future

Start With a Real Problem

It all began a number of years ago when I was the library director in a large high school in central New Jersey that was an active, vital part of everyday life of the school. The library was a gathering place before and after school with a good mix of social and academic activity. During the school day, teachers brought their classes in for research sessions and students came in to look for information on class assignments, read, and do homework. I was busily involved with assisting teachers coordinating their research assignments with the curriculum, and with teaching students to locate sources and helping them find information. I should have felt pretty good about it all. But I had a lingering sense that something was missing. After students found some information, the real learning was ahead of them. How could they manage that on their own? How could I help? I didn’t really know what went on between the time they left the library with some sources of information and the time they handed in the research paper, except for the few that came in for extra help. Even when a class was scheduled for several days in the library, I didn’t seem to get much beyond information location and into the ideas they needed to grapple with to actually learn something.

My research on the information search process was grounded in this lingering sense that something important was going on that I just couldn’t get at in my everyday library practice. The qualitative ethnographic study that opened up the students’ thoughts, actions, and feelings in the process of learning from a variety of sources of information changed my approach to librarianship. Many other librarians and teachers were also able to see that information seeking and use is a complex, constructive process of learning that requires guidance and support.

In that initial study, I found that I could chart students’ thoughts, feelings, and actions in a series of six stages. One of my data collection methods was a timeline in which students described their thoughts, actions, and feelings. I adopted the timeline to display three layers of experience, with thoughts shifting from vagueness to clarity, and feelings changing from anxiety to increasing confidence as the action of the search progresses. The stages were named for the main tasks undertaken to move on to the next stage: task initiation, topic selection, focus exploration, focus formulation, information collection, and search closure. These were later simplified to initiation, selection, exploration, formulation, collection, and presentation (Figure 1).

Stay With the Problem to Verify and Test the Findings in a Variety of Contexts

I had found something important and interesting about my group of students. There was more research to be done to see if the model applied to other students or even to these students at another time and in different context. I decided to stay with the problem to verify and test the model with these same students at a later time and with a variety of other students. I was able to verify the model in longitudinal case studies of this group of students and in large-scale studies of diverse samples of students. I ended up staying with the problem for over two decades and I am still working on it. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods has been an important component of this research, further amplified by incorporating a longitudinal perspective. Initially, I had used qualitative methods to open the process for examination. When quantitative methods enabled verification of the initial model in a large sample of diverse users, I realized the power of using the combination of methodologies.

Develop Concepts from the Findings

The next important part of my research journey was to draw out the main ideas in the findings and to develop concepts from the results. What are the most important core ideas? One important core idea that came from the ISP studies is that students’ thoughts are charged with emotions that influence their actions. Feelings are important and indicate when students are having difficulty and when they are doing well on their own. Students often expected to be able to simply collect information and complete their task. This simplified view of the research process sets up stumbling blocks in the Exploration and Formulation stages. When their expectations do not match what they are experiencing, they become confused, anxious, and frustrated. Students commonly experience a dip in confidence and an increase in uncertainty in the Exploration stage when they least expect it, and a turning point of increased confidence in the Formulation stage. Based on the model of the ISP, I developed the concept of a zone of intervention for applying a process approach in youth services. The core idea in the zone of intervention is that increased uncertainty indicates a need for assistance and guidance. The zone of intervention is that area in which a student can do with advice and assistance what he or she cannot do alone or can do only with difficulty. Intervention within this zone enables students to progress in their learning. Intervention outside this zone is inefficient and unnecessary, experienced by students as intrusive on the one hand or overwhelming on the other. These concepts formed the foundation for implementing a process approach to youth services for guiding students through the stages of inquiry learning.

Design Application for Implementation

My research is based in youth services that enable students to seek meaning in complex information environments and to continue to learn throughout their lives. Application for implementation of the ISP can be tracked in my publications and is particularly obvious in the books I have written. The findings of the initial study and application with middle and secondary school students were developed in my book Teaching the Library Research Process, first published in 1985 with the second edition still in print.² My book Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services, first edition in 1993 and second edition in 2004, focused on explaining the research underlying the ISP and recommending strategies for implementation in practice.³ My latest work on Guided Inquiry applies the model of the ISP to rethink youth services for improving learning in the information intensive environment. The foundational text in this series is Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century, written with Leslie Maniotes and Ann Caspari and published in 2007.⁴ A new book, Guided Inquiry Design: A Framework for Inquiry in Your School ⁵, explains a collaborative team approach to design and implement Guided Inquiry in youth services grounded in the ISP research.

Look to the Future

These studies were among the first to investigate either the affective aspects or the feelings of students in the process of learning from a variety of sources of information, along with the cognitive and physical aspects. Advances in information technology that opened access to a vast assortment of sources have not eased the student’s dilemma and may have intensified the sense of confusion and uncertainty until a focus is formed to provide a path for seeking meaning. Information systems may intensify the problem particularly in the early stages by overwhelming the user with everything all at once.

Recent developments in brain science have confirmed the close relation between emotion and cognition. The future holds interesting prospects for research into the student’s experience in the process of learning from multiple sources of information. The work on the ISP has opened paths to understanding learning and creativity in rich information environments. This is only the beginning of our research journey into the challenging field of library and information services for youth in the twenty-first century. In order to continue to provide the most relevant, meaningful service for young people, research will need to be fully recognized and established as an essential component. Research matters.

References

1. Carol C. Kuhlthau, Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services (Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2004), 2nd ed., 82.
2. Carol C. Kuhlthau, Teaching the Library Research Process (Latham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1994), 2nd ed.
3. Carol C. Kuhlthau, Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services (Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2004), 2nd ed.
4. Carol C. Kuhlthau, Leslie K. Maniotes, and Ann K. Caspari, Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century (Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2007).
5. Carol C. Kuhlthau, Leslie K. Maniotes, and Ann K. Caspari, Guided Inquiry Design: A Framework for Inquiry in Your School (Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2012).

Carol Collier Kuhlthau is Professor Emerita of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University where she directed the graduate program in school librarianship that has been rated number one in the country by U.S. News.  She achieved the rank of Professor II, a special rank at Rutgers requiring additional review beyond that for full professor. She also chaired the Department of Library and Information Science and was the founding director of the Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries (CISSL). She is internationally known for her groundbreaking research on the Information Search Process and for the ISP model of affective, cognitive and physical aspects in six stages of information seeking and use.  She has authored Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services and Teaching the Library Research Process and published widely in referred journals and edited volumes. A new book, Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century, authored with her daughters Leslie K. Maniotes and Ann K. Caspari is now available through Libraries Unlimited.

By Anthony Bernier, Associate Professor, San Jose State University

Praxis Is Where I’m Headed

All research seeks to impact the world. Library and Information Science (LIS) desires it no less than the “hard” sciences. So I am gratified to see JRYLA promoting young adult (YA) research, and appreciate YALSA Research Committee’s efforts in articulating a list of research needs. The new National Research Agenda represents a welcome, if qualified, addition to YALSA’s portfolio of service.

I am frequently puzzled by not seeing more consistent connections between research and daily practice. Because beyond the tired clichés about library school being “too theoretical,” there nevertheless exists a need for researchers, and the YA practitioners who influence them, to better link the theoretical/conceptual with daily practice. Theory calls this linkage “praxis.” Continually studying obscure topics does not, in my estimation, help librarians improve service. Nor does it tend to attract new YA library school students to become scholars or even to participate in research. My last research grant required hiring four graduate students not interested in YA work because (after fifty-two interviews) those who are do not qualify for or value contributing to new scholarship. That speaks volumes.

My recent research publications were influenced by work I know librarians do and information they need. Since joining the faculty at San Jose State University, I have surveyed how libraries support YA professionalism. I demonstrated the negative media misrepresentations about youth and assessed their implications for library service. I studied library YA volunteers—a perennial concern for practice—to discover that we have yet to think systematically about this experience and what it holds for young people and their communities. I intended to give beleaguered librarians data and analysis for their advocacy efforts, and to give students a sense of the field’s growth and dynamism. I continue to research the still-budding topic of YA space equity. And way back in 2007, I published the lead essay in Youth Information-Seeking Behavior II in which I argue not only that LIS had largely ignored YA research but that a forward-looking research agenda should start asking its own questions about young people rather than relying on paradigms emanating from other disciplines.¹

The Research Challenge

A key research challenge remains LIS’s allergy to social theory. Predictably, the National Research Agenda avoids social theory. Today, if libraries take YA service data seriously at all, they do so still almost entirely rooted in institutionally-defined output measures: How many YAs came to a program? How many joined the club? At least two consequences for LIS issue from this lack of praxis. The first consequence yields a conceptually banal approach encouraging and reproducing success bias: “Success” occurred simply because something happened.

The same holds true for “best practices.” Mere accomplishment does not necessarily qualify as a model. Simply counting heads or circulation statistics (though useful) is not a persuasive value proposition during the present neo-conservative onslaught on the very notion of public service itself.

Success bias and unsubstantiated best practice claims persist, however, despite our colleague Eliza Dresang’s urgings to systematically evaluate by measuring outcomes—things that actually change as a consequence of service interventions—not simply what we report doing.² Granted, we have done a good job of incorporating technology into YA service discourse. But technology offers a delivery system, not a service vision. LIS discourse concentrates chiefly on youth in the life of the library. Thus, we continue on, blind to the more urgent and theoretically challenging questions of praxis about the library’s vision and role in the life of youth.³

My 2007 YA information seeking article highlights a second consequence of our LIS allergy to praxis. As apparent in YALSA’s new research agenda, as in practically every book, article, essay, conference talk, course syllabus, and in-service training workshops and webinars, LIS remains devoted to the notion of “youth development” as a congregation to a liturgy. Space and time do not allow a thorough unpacking of this observation here. But suffice it to say that LIS institutionally participates in what I have coined the “Youth Development-Industrial Complex.” It has done so without careful study or examination of neither its legacy nor its relationship to our mission. Apparently we simply walked over to the psychology department one day, picked up the youth development paradigm, and stapled it to our curricula, research, and practice.

Critical social theory terms this response “normalization”—a process by which certain ideas become concretized and exist beyond question, context, or alternative. And we continue to reproduce it not as a particular approach among other possibilities, not noting its historical contexts within youth studies, not even evaluating its all-encompassing and universal conceits about social class, individualism, or racial and gender biases (including reproductive rights).⁴

Psychological insights might well belong in our work. Psychology’s influence on the apparatus of youth development certainly helped cohere a degree of YA practice since at least the mid-1980s.⁵ As a discipline, however, psychology has propounded a deficit-driven view of youth since its invention in the late nineteenth century. Youth are constructed as sub-par “others,” manchurian subjects liable to snap at a moment’s notice, and compared only to mythic self-actualized uber-adults who presumably benefitted from all forty so-called “developmental assets.” This is not a discussion about youth at all; it is a debate about what adults should be. LIS accepted it as gospel.

Furthermore, this deficit legacy purports to hold true for all “youth” in all cultures, all nations, and all historical periods. What discipline gets away with arguing that its foundational concepts of universal applicability remain unchanged for over a century? That legacy remains with us today no matter what we call it.⁶ Thus, LIS adopted a definition of its YA users by what they lack. Psychology produces youth as patients and research subjects. Education envisions youth as students and pupils. Criminal justice imagines youth as suspects and perpetrators. Even the Physical Education department envisions youth as athletes. Yet, uninformed by more recent critical social theory, LIS allows others to perform our intellectual labor and define our users. We need our own vision of what libraries should be in the life of YAs, not what needy YAs are in the life of libraries.

A New Trajectory

My most current research, a Federal National Leadership Grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), explores praxis through the notion of YA space equity in libraries. This project employs quantitative data gathering methods, innovative approaches in virtual environments, and ethnographic data (narrated video footage) in seeking to establish verifiable best practice.⁷

My future research will continue along the praxis trajectory in pursing the causes and implications of our LIS allergy to critical social theory. I plan a return to my role as a historian (from my Ph.D. training) and begin a project I feel YA librarianship needs desperately: a history of itself.⁸ Neither researchers, practitioners, nor our LIS students can grasp the changing dynamics of our views of YAs, our profession, or institutional interventions without an identity of who we have been, the roles we played, the challenges we faced, and the meanings YAs have made of it all. Our recently departed Dorothy M. Broderick (1929–2011),for instance, did not argue for YA services in the same way Margaret Alexander Edwards (1902–1988) did before her. ⁹ Neither of them advocated entirely in ways we need today. Thus, while YA librarians have always cared about young people, we have done so differently throughout history. These differences come freighted with reasons and implications. Professionals need to know them.

Both of these projects engage critical youth studies and post-modern theory and thus produce more modest truth claims.10 This is a modesty that hegemonic youth development, and its universal truth claims, lack. We design YA spaces one way when we view youth as “at-risk,” for instance, slightly another way when we view them through “youth development,” and yet another way if we envision them as citizens. The same maintains for all components in our professional profile. YA service truths percolate up from the local and situated, under particular circumstances, in specific places, and at specific times. Grand truths do not simply flow down wholly conceived from on high.

The confluence of these intellectual paradigms brings LIS to a conceptual, and, yes, a theoretical crossroads. But the crossroads we approach now cannot sustain being ignored, a gentle evolution, or a simple adaptation. What is required now is reimagining the library in today’s diverse and postmodern world. Unlike our research and practice for well over the past quarter century (rooted in privileging collections), today’s LIS challenge is broader and more urgent. YA service must expand beyond current national and historical conceits if we are to thrive professionally. We can’t do that stuck in the nineteenth century. In particular, LIS must drive toward a more LIS-specific vision of young adults, rooted in praxis, while simultaneously facing the existing challenges of content creation, curation, social context, and the meanings that young people can make of libraries and information.

References and Notes

1. Anthony Bernier, “Not Broken by Someone Else’s Schedule: On Joy and Young Adult Information-Seeking,” in Mary K. Chelton and Coleen Cool (eds.), Youth Information-Seeking Behavior: Theories, Models, and Issues (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007, pages xiii-xxvii); the still-seminal assessment of youth services research remains Christine A. Jenkins, “The History of Youth Services Librarianship: A Review of the Research Literature,” Libraries and Culture 35 (2001): 103-139.
2. Eliza T. Dresang, Melissa Gross, and Leslie Edmonds Hold, Dynamic Youth Services through Outcome-Based Planning and Evaluation (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006).
3. And thus we continually read about how our putative patrons find our service lacking: Vivian Howard, “What Do Young Teens Think About the Public Library?” Library Quarterly 81, no. 3 (2011): 321-344; Sherry J. Cook, Stephen, Parker, and Charles E. Pettijohn, “The Public Library: An Early Teen’s Perspective,” Public Libraries 44, no. 3 (2005): 157-161; Heather Fisher, “A Teenage View of the Public Library: What Are the Students Saying?” Australasian Public Libraries and Information Services 16, no. 1 (2003): 4-16; Linda Hill and Helen Pain, “Young People and Public Libraries: Use, Attitudes, and Reading Habits: A Survey of 13-16 Year-Olds in Nottinghamshire,” International Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship 3, no. 1 (1988): 26-40.
4. Here I might recommend several important monographs demonstrating how youth studies is advancing theoretical interventions and leaving LIS research behind: Jessica K. Taft, Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Mary E. Thomas, Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality, and the Conflicted Spaces of American Education (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2011).
5. Julie Spielberger, Carol Horton, and Lisa Michels, New on the Shelf: Teens in the Library; Summary of Key Findings from the Evaluation of Public Libraries as Partners in Youth Development, a Wallace Foundation Initiative (Chicago: University of Chicago, Chapin Hall Center for Children, 2004); Virginia Walter, “Public Library Service to Children and Teens: A Research Agenda,” Library Trends 51 (2003): 571-589.
6. The most recent “positive youth development” is reminiscent of the manufacturing process called “gold plating” in which slight modification of a standardized form is marketed as “new,” such as the small body or performance changes made to the latest model car or computer. Further, if we are to accept “positive” youth development now, what have we been practicing for the past quarter century or more? See William Damon, “What is Positive Youth Development?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 591 (2004): 13-24.
7. I would like to acknowledge and thank the members of the research team supported by an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership grant: Research assistants Antonia Krupicka-Smith, Pam Okosun, Joy Rodriguez, Collin Rickman, Julia Whitehead, and Jonathan Pacheco Bell; and researchers Dr. Mike Males, Dr. Jeremy Kemp, and Dr. Denise Agosto.
8. The first and only attempt at this to date is thirty-three years old: Miriam Braverman, Youth, Society and the Public Library (Chicago: American Library Association, 1979).
9. Broderick is most widely known as cofounder (along with Dr. Mary K. Chelton, Queens College) of the magazine Voice of Youth Advocates in 1978.
10. I have just completed editing a collection of essays addressing this very topic with publisher Neal-Schuman that is due out in spring 2012.

Dr. Anthony Bernier served as a professional field practitioner for 18 years (Director of Young Adult Services for Oakland Public Library; 10 years as YA Specialist for L.A. Public Library). He has designed a variety of innovative outreach and programming models, including the original service and space plan for the first purpose-built library YA space: LAPL’s acclaimed TeenS’cape. He has received IMLS National Leadership Grants to advance research on developmentally-appropriate YA spaces and he continues to speak on and consult with architects and public agencies on library space design.

By Sandra Hughes-Hassell

To advance YALSA’s National Research Agenda, to celebrate the foundational work that informed the development of the agenda and of the Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults (JRLYA), and in recognition of their influential contributions to the field, the JRLYA advisory board invited several scholars to contribute short statements of research interest and direction. In this issue, we are pleased to feature essays from Anthony Bernier, Carol C. Kuhlthau, and Virginia A. Walter.

In their essays, which serve as calls to action for the LIS community, Bernier, Kulhthau, and Walter challenge LIS researchers to investigate problems that really matter, to question how their research informs both theory and practice, and to view teens as research partners, not just as subjects. We hope their essays inspire you in your research-related pursuits.

JRLYA seeks papers for its Spring 2012 issue on the theme of Twenty-First Century Literacies.

The issue will feature articles focusing on different twenty-first century literacies. Possibilities include information literacy, traditional literacy, multicultural literacy, transliteracy, visual literacy, media literacy, civic literacy, or economic literacy, to name a few.

Contributors are invited to submit articles that focus on literacies from different theoretical, pedagogical, practical, policy and research perspectives. Guidance can also be found in YALSA’s National Research Agenda.

Please contact Sandra Hughes-Hassell, editor, at yalsaresearch@gmail.com to discuss submissions and use the author guidelines.

Submission Deadline: February 13, 2012

By Sandra Hughes-Hassell

This issue of the Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults (JRLYA) marks the beginning of our second year of publication. Over the past year, we have published articles on research topics such as the reading interests and modalities of teens, the representation of minority communities in young adult literature, and the information seeking behaviors of young adults with Asperger’s Syndrome—to name just a few. We have also expanded the types of research we publish to include juried conference papers and juried posters. In this issue, we turn our focus to the YALSA National Research Agenda, 2012–2016.

To provide a context for the agenda, we’ve asked the chair of the YALSA research committee and the members of the JRLYA advisory board to contribute to this issue. Each has written a thought-provoking piece aimed at expanding our understanding of the agenda and challenging us to use the agenda to “help guarantee that librarians serving young adults are able to provide the best service possible as well as advocate for funding and support in order to ensure that teens are served effectively by their libraries.”¹

Don Latham, Chair of the YALSA Research Committee gets us started by discussing how the agenda fits into YALSA’s strategic plan and introducing the agenda’s four priority areas. Focusing on Priority Area 1, Impact of Libraries on Young Adults, Kafi D. Kumasi challenges researchers to apply the principles and methodologies associated with critical research to the questions posed by the agenda. She argues that a critical research stance “positions young adults as capable researchers who can use their real-world experiences as a place to generate powerful and purposeful learning experiences where they serve as the professional researcher who poses the question, gathers resources, analyzes data, and educates their communities.”² Similarly, in their discussion of Young Adult Reading and Resources, Priority Area 1, Robin Moeller, Amy Pattee, and Angela Leeper encourage researchers “to consider the role of young adults in the research process, marketing efforts, and personal choice in reading assignments tied to the curriculum.”³ They argue that the only way we can really understand and meet the reading interests and needs of teenagers is to include their perspectives and voices in our research.

In her essay, Denise E. Agosto provides an overview of what we have learned so far about young adults’ information behaviors and practices (the focus of Priority Area 3) and suggests guiding questions for advancing this important line of research. She too emphasizes the need to learn from young adults about their information behaviors and practices, writing that “it is only through a deeper understanding of young adults’ information needs, perceptions, and preferences that we can make young adult library services truly youth-centered and designed to meet youths’ ever-evolving information needs.”⁴ Finally, Frances Jacobson Harris, in her discussion of Priority Area 4, Formal and Informal Learning Environments, reminds us that in our increasingly digital world, learning is no longer limited to formal settings such as the school or classroom. She challenges the research community to consider the impact technology is having on young adult learning and to look at how the library community is responding in terms of our understanding and design of library spaces and programs “particularly in terms of the core values that define YA services, such as intellectual freedom and privacy.”⁵

In addition to presenting the National Research Agenda, YALSA is also providing support for researchers to implement the agenda. The Frances Henne/YALSA/ VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) Research Grant annually provides $1,000 in seed money for small-scale research projects that respond to the YALSA Research Agenda. Applications for the 2012 award are due December 1, 2011. The Young Adult Literature Symposium provides a venue for researchers to share the results of their work with other researchers and with library practitioners. The theme of the 2012 symposium is “The Future of Young Adult Literature: Hit Me with the Next Big Thing.” Located on the YALSA wiki, the Research Resources Clearinghouse is YALSA’s primary source for information about conducting research involving libraries and young adults. The Research Resources Clearinghouse Taskforce put together a set of page links of information to make developing a research project easier for YALSA members. Recently YALSA launched the Network for Research on Libraries and Teens, a community and space “for those interested in and performing teen research to connect with each other” (http://yaresearch.ning.com/). Finally, JRLYA is published four times a year with the purpose of enhancing the development of theory, research, and practices to support young adult library services.

We hope you are inspired by the YALSA National Research Agenda and look forward to receiving your manuscript submissions to JRLYA.

 References

1. Young Adult Library Services Association, YALSA Research Agenda 2012–2016 (2011), http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/guidelines/research/researchagenda.cfm.
2. Kafi D. Kumasi, “The Impact of Libraries on Young Adults: Toward a Critical Research Agenda, “Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults 2, no. 1 (2011).
3. Robin Moeller, Amy Pattee, and Angela Leeper, “The Young Adult Voice in Research about Young Adults,” Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults 2, no. 1 (2011).
4. Denise E. Agosto, “Young Adults’ Information Behavior: What We Know So Far and Where We Need to Go From Here,” Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults 2, no. 1 (2011).
5. Frances Jacobson Harris, “Gimme Shelter: Informal and Formal Learning Environments in Library Land,” Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults 2, no. 1 (2011).

By Don Latham, Chair of the YALSA Research Committee

The YALSA Research Agenda 2012–2016, adopted in October 2011 by YALSA’s Board of Directors, supports the organization’s mission to “build the capacity of libraries and librarians to engage, serve and empower teens.”¹ Specifically, the new research agenda helps facilitate Goal 2 of the Strategic Plan, which states, “YALSA is the recognized source for access to targeted research and best practices relating to teen and young adult library services.”²

Developed over a two-year period by the YALSA Research Committee, with input from YALSA members and constituencies, the research agenda identifies key areas of research on the information needs and preferences of young adults, both for today and for the next generation. The previous research agenda was published in 1994, so it was felt that the time for revisiting and re-envisioning was long overdue, this time with an eye toward developing a robust research agenda for the 21st century.

The Research Committee was charged with “survey[ing] the field to determine gaps in research and determine the questions that needed to be answered in order to fill those gaps” (emphasis in original).³ After collecting data and engaging in much thought and deliberation, the committee decided to organize the new agenda around four priority areas:

1. Impact of Libraries on Young Adults
2. Young Adult Reading and Resources
3. Information Seeking Behaviors and Needs of Young Adults
4. Informal and Formal Learning Environments and Young Adults

Few people would argue with the importance of these priority areas, but some might wonder why other key issues are not addressed—such as technology and young adults; intellectual freedom; cognitive, emotional, and physical development; information, media, and technology literacies; and the history of young adult services.  In fact, these issues are addressed within specific research questions associated with the various priority areas. The committee felt that these admittedly important aspects of young adult services are present in all areas to a certain extent, so the decision was made to incorporate these across areas rather than “isolate” them by placing them in their own areas. Similarly, the committee developed the priority areas so as not to emphasize particular library types and/or age groups. Of course, some research questions may apply more directly to certain kinds of libraries or certain age groups, but the goal was to achieve maximum applicability and adaptability in the wording of the research questions associated with each priority area.  In addition, the research areas and research questions reflect the inherently interdisciplinary nature of research on young adults, their information needs, and their information seeking behaviors. It is the hope of the Research Committee that the new agenda will inspire researchers in a variety of disciplines and settings—certainly practitioners and academics in the field of library and information science, but also researchers in education, psychology, sociology, public policy, information technology, and more.

The YALSA Research Agenda 2012–2016 is one of three initiatives that serve as the foundation for YALSA’s emphasis on research, the other two being the YALSA/VOYA/Henne Research Grant and the newly established Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults. The Research Committee will use the new agenda in updating the YALSA Research Bibliographies. Clearly, opportunities abound for using the new research agenda, and no doubt the agenda will be reviewed and modified as needed. As such, it should be seen as the “latest word” rather than the “last word” in YALSA’s ongoing effort to promote research as a crucial component in developing and providing effective information services for today’s young adults, as well as those of the next generation.

References

1. Young Adult Library Services Association, YALSA Research Agenda 2012–2016, (2011).

2. Young Adult Library Services Association. YALSA 2012–2014 Strategic Plan, (2011)/

3. Young Adult Library Services Association, YALSA Research Agenda 2012–2016, (2011).

Don Latham, Ph.D., is associate professor of library and information studies at Florida State University. He has been active in YALSA since 2004, has served as chair and/or member of the Research Committee, Legislation Committee, Organization and Bylaws Committee, and the Continuing Education Task Force, and is the author of “The Importance of Young Adult Services in LIS Curricula: A YALSA White Paper.”