In my long and illustrious career as a children's librarian (i.e. all of three years) I've worked in a variety of different library branches through the New York Public Library system (i.e. two). In my first branch I was housed at a lovely location, taking up one full city block. It was heavenly. The sole problem with the job, as I saw it, was that our late 19th century jewel of a building was falling apart at the seams. In the course of discussing various types of renovations, the good people of the NYPL system decided to turn the lowest level (at that time a Reference Room) into a teen center. There'd be computers and comfortable chairs, and a place to put all the Young Adult (YA) books and novels like there had never been before.

Looking at the public response to the plan, however, you would have thought the proposal was to gut the library and fill it with jello. Local residents were not pleased for a variety of reasons. Some of these I sympathized with. Others I did not. Perhaps the most telling objection would come from some of our oldest residents. I remember quite clearly filling in at the Adult Reference Desk and finding myself facing a livid member of "the greatest generation." In no uncertain terms she looked me straight in the eye and said, "teenagers have no place in the library."
 

Teenagers have no place in the library. A hard statement to argue with since it works on the premise that teens are somehow less than human. Dogs have no place in the library. Rats have no place in the library (though they often seem to forget the fact). Pigeons and monkeys and small wide-eyed bush babies have no place in the library, but teens? With all the respect due my elders that I can muster, I say that teens most certainly do have a place in the library, if the library is willing to accommodate them.
 

Fast forward in time and I now I am working in the Donnell Branch of the NYPL system. This is a significant move in part because now I am in the Central Children's Room, the loveliest collection of children's books available free and to the public that I know of. And what is located just a floor below me on the Mezzanine of the same building? None other than Teen Central, a hotspot for teenagers right in the heart of Midtown Manhattan.
 

The idea behind Teen Central is simple. If you create a space for young adults, they will come. Particularly if you're able to offer them some incentives for their visit. So it is that Teen Central is the coolest place in the library, no question. More than 15 computers are attended at all times by a variety of different patrons. Music (teen choice) plays throughout the room and there are huge selections of DVDs, CDs, graphic novels, books, and more. A teen advisory board meets regularly to discuss additions to the collection and what the kids want to see more of. Tuesday and Thursday nights are game nights with Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution in constant rotation. And this being New York, authors will come in all the time to talk up their books and meet with the kids about one title or another.
 

The best part? It's for teens ONLY. Oh, adults can walk around and get a feel for the space, but no sitting down. Though grown-ups might want to relax and take a load off, this area is strictly adolescent based, and that goes double for little kids. Sure, they can rifle through the Manga literature if they want, but don't get comfortable. Give the teens their space.
 

Being that this is Midtown we're talking about, there are not a lot of local kids who come in. Instead, these young adults travel from various parts of Manhattan and the Bronx to hang out in the Donnell room. You might think this could lead to difficulties. Turf wars are bound to break out once in a while, but on the whole the Nathan Strauss Center is relatively calm. There is a downside. As of right now NYPL hasn't quite figured out what to do with the room during the day. Do you close your doors until noon, thereby denying access to the adults and homeschoolers who need your space? Do you intrude on your patrons’ privacy and call the truant officers of their respective schools if kids are there during school days? There are no easy answers.
 

In spite of these questions, Teen Central is a model for other library systems. All over the country libraries are creating infinitely cool rooms of their own. If you consider what the old patron at my former library said, it is true in a way. For a lot of teens there isn't a space for them in the library. Maybe it's about time we gave it to them. After all, if you lose them when they're adolescent, how on earth will you ever lure them back? 

Posted by: Elizabeth Bird, New York Public Library

Cast your mind back in time to the release of the last Harry Potter book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. There is nothing in this world that American media loves more than a phenomenon. The problem, though, is that there’s only so much news you can drain from a book series. Reporters feel the squeeze from the powers that be demanding more and more Harry Potter-related pieces and eventually they start making loose connections like it’s nobody’s business. That’s my theory as to what happened when fact met fantasy in the New York Times. In July a New York Times article was published that claimed that the Harry Potter series had little to no effect on whether or not kids read for fun more now than before the series started. You remember this, do you not? A reporter by the name of Motoko Rich decided to derail the popular theory that Harry Potter has any kind of a positive effect upon the young ones. What a scoop! The theory was based (as far as I could ascertain) on federal statistics found via the NAEP 2004 Trends in Academic Progress report.

Rewind the tape to the height of my library’s Harry Potter preparations. We were gearing up to throw one heckuva release party with costumes, food, music, etc. On the day of the party in question I learned at the very last minute that ABC News (local edition) would be present to talk to someone about this very NYT article. So I boned up on my thoughts. To my chagrin, I couldn’t find anyone on the Internet arguing against Rich’s theory. Of course, in the end I wasn’t asked anything about it anyway. Consarn it.

So instead of letting this info go to waste, I will instead dump what I figured out all over your pretty little heads and let you deal with the consequences.

First things first. The article by Rich (sadly no longer available to view for free online) contained the following statement:

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of federal tests administered every few years to a sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998, the year “Sorcerer’s Stone” was published in the United States. In 2005, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth book, was published, the results were identical.

Pretty damning stuff, right?

Yeah, maybe not so much.

Here’s the deal. Some searching yielded me the online standards I desired. And sure as shooting it did indeed have a section entitled Reading for Fun that contained the following:

There were no measurable changes between 1984 and 2004 in the percentage of 9-year-olds indicating that they read for fun almost every day. At ages 13 and 17, the percentage saying they read for fun every day was lower in 2004 than in 1984. This trend was accompanied by an increase over the same 20-year-time period in the percentage indicating that they never or hardly ever read for fun.

This is like looking through a Highlights Magazine in the dentist’s office. Can you spot the two things missing from the above statement?

The first, to my mind, is the conspicuous absence of Harry Potter. Of course the NAEP isn’t going to do specific tests on Harry. Rich obviously extrapolated from this study, adding in Harry and his supposed lack of help. The other thing missing? Numbers. How many kids exactly are reading today as opposed to 1984? We know that the drop off rate stays the same. Sure. Anyone who has ever met a teenager isn’t going to be too shocked by that. But how many kids in total are reading today for fun as opposed to kids of the past? The study, as I saw it, did not say. I couldn’t find any numbers stating nitty gritty details of this sort, and it chapped my hide. If you’re going to say that Harry doesn’t have an influence, then you need to make it clear that even with the drop off, you continue to have the same number of kids reading for fun now as there were in the past.

In fact, if I wanted to do what Rich did, I could slap Harry’s name all over this report in other areas. Let’s look at the Average Scores section. According to this, “Between 1999 and 2004, average reading scores increased at age 9”, and under Percentiles, “The reading score of 9-year-olds at the median (50th percentile) as higher in 2004 than the median score in every other year.” If I were to take a page out of Rich’s book I could make the claim that Harry was responsible for this. Why not? If, as Rich says, Sorcerer’s Stone came out in 1998, then why can’t I claim that reading levels were higher as a result of his presence on our nation’s bookshelves?

I can’t because it would be silly. Just as it was silly for Rich to go slapping Harry’s name over a national report and expect us to buy that Mr. Potter has never made a difference in the reading lives of our children. Obviously it’s not like we should expect Rowling to single-handedly raise our mewling entlings from their anti-literacy state. It’s just a book series. Let’s all take it down a notch without slapping together loose facts.

Posted by: Elizabeth Bird, New York Public Library

As a children’s librarian who gets to look at all the new books as they roll into my library, I like to keep an eye peeled for the trends of a given year. There are the usual trends, like 500+ page fantasy novels, dragons, dead moms, dead dogs, dead dog mothers, etc. There are also the unusual trends like sentient cheese (very big in 2006) and historical fiction titles where kids get their hands and arms mangled in a gruesome historically accurate fashion (ibid). In 2007, however, there has been a trend that will make for quite a lot of confusion and contention this upcoming award season: Books Beyond Categories.

What I mean by that is that there are certain books that refuse to be neatly arranged under a single category. They straddle the genres. When an author or an illustrator draws upon their own innate creativity to the fullest, their books become richer. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this will hurt them severely come the 2007 awards. Take a gander at some of the books I’m talking about and see if I’m not at all correct.

First of all there is The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick from the Arthur A. Levine imprint of Scholastic (the one that brought you Harry Potter, actually). It is undoubtedly the best known of these books of 2006. Selznick’s tale of a boy who lives in a Parisian train station while attempting to repair his father’s mechanical automaton rocketing up the New York Times Bestseller List and was featured on Al Roker’s Book Club for Kids. The title is remarkable since at a 500+ page count, more than half the book consists of illustrations. The result is more silent movie than graphic novel. When an exciting scene or bit of action comes up, the pages suddenly revert to black and white images. Hugo is sometimes seen running through a crowded station or disappearing behind a telltale gate. Much of the story is based on the real life of filmmaker George Melies, so photographs and stills from early or lost silent films also appear throughout the tale. It makes for an eclectic bit of storytelling but because it doesn’t slot neatly into fiction, non-fiction, or graphic novel categories, awards will be few and far between for Selznick’s masterpiece.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is yet another Arthur A. Levine book (the man knows how to pick ‘em) and with its October release date this title is poised to be the most impressive children’s novel of the year. I am not kidding. Originally released in Australia, Tan’s tale takes the Hugo Cabret idea one step further. It’s entirely wordless. Telling through pictures the tale of a man as he immigrates to a foreign land, the book sounds like something you may have seen before. Cleverly, Tan ups the ante, as it were, by putting you directly into his hero’s shoes. Not only is everything foreign to the hero, but it’s also foreign to you. You can’t understand the language, the animals, the foods, or the customs. The simple act of looking through a small apartment’s appliances becomes frightening and strange. As our hero attempts to find lodging, food, and a place to work he meets other immigrants from different countries who convey their own stories of escape and survival. Without a single word this is the most moving, intelligent, thoughtful book I have seen in years and years. Designed like an old photo album and containing mostly sepia-toned images, you cannot read this thing cover to cover and not be struck by its superior storytelling. Of course, there is no award for wordless books out there. Worse still, because it was originally published in Australia, “The Arrival” is not eligible for many American prizes. A pity as it is a must read and a real shining gem.

Switching gears, here is a title that will have many a library cataloger scratching their heads. Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz is not quite non-fiction but certainly not entirely fictional. Yet Schlitz has created a book that turns out to be an answer to more than few prayers. As a children’s librarian, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dealt with patrons who have begged me for plays for children. Of course, no play written has ever had equal parts for all characters since it normally cannot be done. Enter, Schlitz’s book. The title contains 18 different voices of kids, tweens, and teens living in an average everyday English village. A map at the beginning shows where they live, but it’s their monologues that really tell their tales. Schlitz is gifted in her characterizations, but she never neglects to add real world facts when she can. Footnotes and factual inserts inform her audience while her characters talk about their lives. Because the Newbery Award can be given to both fiction and non-fiction, Schlitz’s book is my number one pick for that award this year. Yet because most awards like to relegate titles like this to a single category, I think that many people will fail to notice Schlitz’s effort or, worse, squirrel it away rather than deal with a book this original and eclectic.

Moving beyond the usual categories can certainly be informative, but kids are sometimes even more willing to try out new formats than their adult counterparts. Here’s a classic example. Though it may not be the first book of its kind, it’s certainly one of the more interesting ideas out there. In Middle School is Worse Than Meatloaf, two time Newbery Honor winner Jennifer L. Holm tells the tale of Ginny as she enters seventh grade. The catch? The novel is told entirely through her stuff. Notes passed in class, refrigerator reminders, receipts, detention slips, and other ephemera tell us the story of Ginny and her various travails. In a book such as this the illustrator is just as important as the author and artist Elicia Castaldi is more than up to the job. Her pages just overflow with junk and clues as to why Ginny grows so depressed as her year continues. This is the story of an everygirl told through the most minute of cast-offs. That makes for great storytelling, but no award for writing or illustration is going to claim it as its own. More’s the pity since this is one book kids will have a ball reading.

Kids also have a sweet spot for comics, and as a children’s librarian I say loud and proud that I do not mind one little bit. Now anyone with a passing familiarity with underground comics knows that they don’t naturally lend themselves to the picture book format. Plus the fact that artist Mark Newgarden’s last book was titled, “We All Die Alone”…. well, it doesn’t inspire much in the way of confidence. Yet when it comes to great picture books of the year place, Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug, on the top of the heap for me. Part picture book, part graphic novel, the book is entirely wordless and utterly sublime. The premise is remarkably simple too. Bow-Wow, the pup, follows a bug out of the house with a single-minded intensity. As he walks around the block his experiences become increasingly bizarre. Funnier than it has any right to be, “Bow-Wow” is one of those books created on the computer that work. Too nice to be a cartoon and too cartoony to be seriously considered for an award, this is a worthwhile purchase flying just below the radar.

Speaking of computer work, when I say, “web comic” to you, is your first instinct, “Great book concept!” No? Yeah, it’s not mine either. Yet somebody at Abrams had the wherewithal to look at Jeff Kinney’s online saga of an average kid and his adventures in the strip Diary of a Wimpy Kid and put it between two shiny red covers. The result? A New York Times Bestseller and one of the funniest books of the year. Part journal and part comic, Kinney hones in on a kid’s school year and the various troubles he runs across. The design of the book is extraordinary and the storyline far better than you’d expect from an online site. It may be one of the first successful leaps from the electronic to the physical page (rather than the other way around).

I appreciate that you can’t make an award for every kind of book out there, but should the current standards be relaxed? Should the Caldecott go to any book that uses illustration in some way? Should the Newbery consider pictures? It’s a brave new world, and I hope our awards change to embrace the delightful changes we’re seeing each and every day. Otherwise artists are going to be inclined to be less creative so as to get some awards and push some paper. I can only hope that these books make one heckuva impact in the meantime.

Posted by: Elizabeth Bird, New York Public Library