Tag Archives: libraries

The New Precarity of Teen Librarianship

Anthony Bernier, Project Director, YouthFacts.org | June 2026

Young adult (YA) librarianship emerged as an act of defiance – unapologetically asserting that professional service required distinct skills and focus. In 1978, Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA), founded in response to prevailing dismissive attitudes about teenagers and librarianship, advocated how the field offered important insights and contributions.

Yet decades later, and despite its highly productive record, the marginalization of YA services has reemerged. Recently, the American Library Association’s announced an institutional retrenchment of its YA division (YALSA) back under a diffuse and broader “youth services” designation it outgrew in 1957. These, and other developments raise two key concerns about how libraries conceptualize young people and the degree to which the profession values specialized YA work.

The first key issue concerns the persistent “deficit model” of youth libraries maintain in envisioning young people. It frames YAs as incomplete adults, skill-deficient, and merely transitional. This perspective contorts services, programs, staffing, and collections, rendering YA librarianship vulnerable during financial strain. It reduces teens to passive information consumers and service recipients.

Historically, one of the most innovative areas of the field, YA librarianship introduced new approaches to library space, including intentionally designed teen spaces. It transformed collections by elevating diverse and marginalized forms of expression (comics, zines, and youth-produced media) while defending intellectual freedom amid censorship campaigns. YA librarians also pioneered participatory service models like Teen Advisory Groups and positioning teens as program co-designers. YA librarians often led the way in helping libraries adapt to new digital tools and practices. These contributions significantly expanded circulation, engagement, and the scope of library services.

Despite these achievements, the field also recently experienced notable losses. It marked the loss of a generation of leaders that shaped YA librarianship such as Mary K. Chelton, Michael Cart, and Patty Campbell. The cessation of VOYA in 2022 silenced a vital professional platform, as did the lapsing of key YALSA publications. At the same time, broader social conditions, like youth isolation, economic precarity, domestic abuse, and systemic disinvestment—only heighten the need for YA services. These institutional retrenchments risk eroding professional knowledge, reduce job opportunities and leadership development, and weaken commitments to YA services both nationally and internationally.

In looking forward, YA librarianship must address a second key concern. In addition to reimagining youth as creators, contributors, and as culturally productive community members, it must also pursue questions about how this new vision impacts professional practice.

In terms of materials, when libraries envision YAs productive members of the culture, they come to respect what I refer to as their “fugitive literacies”— informal and self-directed creative forms—reflecting how teens contribute to and produce culture, not simply consume it. These cultural forms envision YAs as poets, authors and journalists, care givers, actors, athletes, and program presenters.

Interdisciplinary perspectives from sociology, anthropology, and youth studies can further enrich how libraries envision young people. This vision also encourages shifting evaluation methods from simple usage statistics to meaningful outcomes demonstrating service impacts. Further, libraries should deepen the practice of youth participation by integrating teens into decision-making, not confining them to token advisory roles.

Ultimately, the future of YA librarianship depends on whether the profession can defy its legacy view of teens as deficient and recognize them as community contributors. Libraries embracing a more complex, present-focused vision of youth—supported by approaches like Youth Participatory Action Research and civic initiatives such as Vote16’s youth movement—can better overcome the current precarity and drive toward future success. But to sustain a productive role in the future, libraries must envision young people as they are now.

Going Public “For Real”

Anthony Bernier, Project Director, YouthFacts.org | March 2026

White young people just walked in the front door of the Greenville, South Carolina, main library in 1959. Not so for 18 year old Jesse Jackson (1941-2026). The books Jackson wanted to read during his freshman Christmas break from University of Illinois took a lot more.

Jackson’s local McBee Avenue Colored Branch didn’t own what Jackson wanted to read. Instead, the McBee librarian used a favor and wrote a personal note to get him an appointment with the main Whites-only Greenville County library staff.

Even with his note, Jackson had to use the main library’s rear entrance. The librarian read his note and responded “It’ll take at least six days to get these books.”

Reasonably, Jackson replied, “Couldn’t I just go back in the shelves and look for them… where nobody else would see me?”

“You cannot have the books now…” the librarian answered, “that’s the way it is.”

A policeman, standing nearby (probably because of the advance appointment), joined in, “You heard what she said.”

Jackson, the future civil rights titan, reportedly stormed out the library’s back door. He circled around to the front of the building and read the inscription written in its granite entablature,

“That thing says public, and my father is a veteran and pays taxes.”

Greenville Eight and Two Unidentified Adults (Greenville County Library Website)

1960, The Greenville Eight (Greenville County Library Website). Jesse Jackson upper left.

Jackson vowed to return over the summer promising to make the library “go public for real.”

Jackson, good to his word, returned to Greenville later in the summer, and, along with 7 other young people, entered the main library and mounted a 45-minute sit in. They became known as the “Greenville Eight,” mostly kids from Sterling High School (5 girls and 3 boys).

The library director promptly called police who arrested them all for “disorderly conduct.”

According to the American Library Association, later that fall, Greenville became South Carolina’s first public library to desegregate in response to Black community activism. ¹

Among all of Jesse Jackson’s myriad civil and human rights campaigns, throughout his long and productive life of progressive activism, his career as an activist began as a teenager at his local public library.

Of course, this story also begs questions about the myths libraries continue to tell about being “free for all.” Today’s criticism of racist public policies targeting the Black community, and Black peoples’ often heroic struggles to overcome them, rather obscures legacies of how public libraries complied with racial segregation. Further, the story illustrates the American Library Association’s still unacknowledged complacency and silence in how the institution looked the other way for decades. ²

Such civic heroism also rests uneasily against the vision that public libraries generally hold of young people – as needy, skill-lacking, individual information consumers. Upon learning the history of reform and innovation young people initiated libraries would do well to revise their visions of youth.

But an equally pertinent story resides, especially for our YouthFacts readers, in how young people, teenagers (Jesse Jackson was a teenager himself in 1960) led the movement to integrate their public libraries. This story of young people at the forefront of the broader movement to integrate public services also documents the leading roles young people assumed across the nation. And, like so many histoires of social movements, it ignores the roles young people so often play in pursuing social justice, as I pointed out in my previous critique of Ken Burn’s new documentary of the American Revolution (see my December 2025 YouthFacts.org blog post).

¹ George M. Eberhart, “The Greenville Eight: The Sit-in that Integrated the Greenville (S. C.) Library, American Libraries, 1 June 2017.

² For a critique of public library reluctance to reconcile its complicity with racial segregation, see Wayne A. Wiegand, “Sanitizing American Library History: Reflections of a Library Historian, Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 90, no. 2, pages 103-120. For specifics on Jackson’s Greenville library protest, see, Wayne A. Wiegand and Shirley A. Wiegand, The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018.

Librarians Punch Down on Teenagers

By Anthony Bernier | October 2023

How can I continue doing this work? I teach future librarians about serving teenagers professionally and equitably. People find it odd that librarians need this teaching. The behaviors of national library leaders, though, demonstrate they do.

The hottest issue in libraries today pits libraries against “book banning” zealots challenging intellectual freedom. Librarians find themselves defending books and materials their professional ethical commitments require them to make available to everyone.

Most of these disputes constitute what we know as “cultural war” issues particularly as they pertain to books for young people. Attacks include charges of promoting anti-American themes, “wokeness,” and “deviant” sexual, gender, and racial identities.

Librarians rightly defend intellectual freedom. If you don’t like a book or an author’s writing, don’t read it. One of my own librarian heroes, Dorothy M. Broderick (1929-2011), gained notoriety by posting a sign: “If you don’t find something offensive in this library, see the librarian.”

Toleration for difference, unfettered access to contrary opinions, and the promotion of free expression number among the institution’s core values. This is especially true as libraries continue to adopt policies and practices promoting DEI and LGBTQ rights. Presumably, it is these values that keep libraries among the nation’s most trusted public institutions.

So, it’s all the more disturbing to continually discover national library leaders punching down on the very young people they purport to be defending in these pitched battles.

During the last month alone, the president of the American Library Association indulged in unqualified negative characterizations of youth (an entire demographic) not once, not twice, but three times! Each instance includes peeks into what is also clearly a challenging domestic situation – for which a teenaged son is held accountable in front of a large social media audience.

And in the latest issue of the Public Libraries, the president of the Public Library Association, in an otherwise cliched attack on library schools, also punches down on youth. The essay’s only mention of youth characterizes “unruly teenagers” numbering among the topics library schools allegedly do not address.

Among the worst aspects of these anti-youth screeds, aside from the fact that they
contradict the profession’s own ethical aspirations, is that these national leaders feel entirely confident that their bigoted assertions appeal to large and sympathetic audiences. Unfortunately, my own studies of the profession’s legacies and practices tend to support these assumptions.

Another odious aspect of these behaviors manifests in how they distract from more pressing concerns about young people. During our current effort to emerge from pandemic, many claims surface about the crisis in youth mental health. Librarians enthusiastically participate in the campaign – producing columns in national media, at conference presentations, in classrooms. This enthusiasm spreads even though librarians are not trained or equipped to identify, assess, or treat mental distress.

Yet, as YouthFacts’ own Mike Males points out in his 15 July 2023, article in Salon.com, the crisis originates not in schools or among peers but at home.

Males cites the Center for Disease Control’s statistics documenting, for instance, 400-600% increases in physical and psychological abuse among girls perpetrated by parents or other household adults.

The crisis, nearly universally blamed on youth behaviors, emanates instead from home.

Males’s point deserves wide readership among policy experts as well as library leaders hell-bent on punching down on young people.

In answer to my opening question, about continuing my work,” I’ll borrow from Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”