Thursday, November 29, 2007
Editorial: Hanging at the library
Check it out. Libraries are no longer old school. Teens discover their world at the local hangout.
From the RoundTable blog
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Your teens say they're hanging at the library. A typical cover story that you used back in the day. You'd tell the folks you were off to the library, then ditch the reference room for a cooler hangout a few blocks away.
It's not that you don't trust your kid, but you might want to check out this library thing. You could discover what they have: These are the coolest hangouts in Salem and Roanoke.
Hard to say exactly which came first, the kids or the cool. At first, the kids probably thought it cool that so many of them were squeezing into the libraries, disrupting the hush-hush serenity and drawing the timeless steely looks and shushing that have greeted generations of boisterous teens.
But something happened along about last year when the numbers of teens were considered a "problem." The plot took a turn; the libraries changed.
Instead of fretting about how much security to add, librarians invited the kids in. Gave them their own rooms. With their own types of media -- video games, computers, TVs and the like. And their own librarians -- people like Dave Butler, a senior library assistant, who described Salem's teen center: "This place, to me, is to give them some place to thrive."
To thrive. Libraries have long been great community gathering places and a terrific educational equalizer that allowed the cracking open of books to expand the world for even the most impoverished of kids. Yet, thrive, they haven't of late.
Instead, the debate has centered on the relevancy of libraries in today's connected culture and whether any more tax dollars ought to support these aging brick-and-mortar institutions of shelved tomes.
In Roanoke and in Salem, the kids and the librarians are weighing in. Libraries remain the best place for people of all dimensions, classes and neighborhoods to drop by, socialize and learn together. The place where worlds -- whether bound in pages between hard covers or suspended in cyberspace -- still await discovery.
Hangouts don't come much cooler than that.
