Information Access for Youth: Issues and Concerns

Abstract

ALTHOUGHTHE LIBRARY COMMUNITY advocates unrestricted access to resources for all, professional practices illustrate that librarians restrict access for youth. Librarians justify these restrictions based on assumptions about youth and information. Some librarians assume that youth do not have the same need for information that adults have. Children and youth are not assumed to be a valid part of the community of scholars with legitimate research needs. School library media centers are not viewed as institutions of serious research. These assumptions lead librarians to apply different standards of information access to youth and youth services. Consequently, youth information needs do not receive the same serious consideration that adult information needs receive and librarians impose restrictions on youth in conflict with their professional ethics. Age restrictions exist in libraries in spite of the clear statement in the Library Bill of Rights that: “A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views (American Library Association 1983, p. 14). ” Although not actually denying library use, librarians abridge youth access in a variety of ways including, but not limited to, restrictions on borrowing certain types of materials; requiring parental permission to use certain materials; limiting use of audiovisual materials by young adults; denying interlibrary loan service to youth; charging fees for the use of some library services and resources; setting up restricted shelves in school library media centers; and assigning subject headings that inhibit the informationseeking behavior of youth. Limitations imposed by budgetary constraints, lack of professional staff serving youth in public libraries and schools, and, in some cases, lack of library service also contribute to restricted access.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.