Teen-Centered Library Service

This book's subtitle nicely sums up its aim: offering guidelines to YA librarians for getting teens to play a part in their libraries. The author believes that library involvement is vitally important in creating resilient teens who are able to "overcome adversity and challenges." The book begins with a description of this philosophy and places it into context within the history of YA librarianship. Each chapter then deals with specifics: teen advisory groups, writing and performance ideas, ways to meld teens and technology, ideas for community outreach, ways to combine teen and adult library groups, ideas to involve teens who are only around for limited time, and a chapter on assessing your YA participation. Tuccillo writes clearly, but drily, livening up only when citing examples. Thankfully, the book is filled with them. The pages are broken up with text boxes of letters from librarians who share success stories. There are also many forms, fliers, and brochures reproduced from various libraries. While some of the advice seems obvious and dated (hang up fliers to recruit teens, be sure to use MySpace and Facebook), the wealth of successful examples is handy to pull ideas from. This material was covered in a chapter of Connecting Young Adults and Libraries (Neal-Schuman), but the author greatly expands upon it here. This well-organized title is aimed at public librarians and might also be useful to show administrators how important YA services are to the library as a whole.—Geri Diorio, The Ridgefield Library, CT