The Teens Speak Out: What Teens in a Tech High School Really Think About Libraries...and What You Can Do to Improve Their Perceptions

With the goal of understanding how today's teens view public and school libraries, we undertook a three-year Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded study that examined teens' technology use practices, their social searching practices, and their use and nonuse of public and school libraries. In this article, the authors will briefly describe part of that project, share what we learned about teens' views of libraries, and detail the best practices that can be drawn from this research. As a part of a larger study, the authors conducted surveys and interviews with 25 students at a grade nine to twelve technology magnet high school in a large US city. During the interviews, they asked the students to think about the last time they had been to a library and to discuss the kinds of activities they had conducted there. In general, they were infrequent school and public library users, although most were able to recall experiences using their school and public libraries at some point in the past.