Fertile Ground: Assessing the Public Library as a Context for Preparing Youth for Community Engagement

Abstract

Libraries provide settings where youth can experience positive development. However, many young people and their families do not access the potential these institutions afford their communities. In addition, library staff are seldom presented with opportunities to work more intimately with young people visiting the library. This article provides data on library staff and their feelings toward youth and their experiences interacting with young people in their local libraries. The findings of the study reveal that library staff members have an array of perceptions toward young people and how youth can be affected.

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 — 1 citations exist upstream.

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