Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal December 2006 Volume 4(6)

Future of the profession

Are you down with the kids?

Working with young people can be daunting for some library staff, but the right attitudes are crucial, says Jane Milne, as they are the future, after all. And it doesn’t have to mean listening to rap music or wearing a hoodie...

At Sighthill Library we have always had many young people coming into our building, but previously, instead of using any of our services, they often found less acceptable ways to spend their time such as acts of vandalism, graffiti or aggressive behaviour directed towards the staff. We quickly realised that here we had an ideal opportunity to increase our issue and membership figures but we were ignoring it by banning these young people and not dealing with their behaviour in an appropriate way.

The first step we took to turn around our library service was to ask these young people what they wanted from us, and the answer came back loud and clear. They simply wanted innovative events and respect from the staff. It was clear that even through this simple consultation, young people felt that library staff respected their opinions and were willing to engage with them. This was illustrated by a decrease in antisocial behaviour and a growing mutual respect.

I know you will all now be shouting, “But we don’t have any funds to run these innovative projects” and, neither did we. The answer to this is partnership working. A range of partnership agencies had funding available, such as our local community police officers, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and other local organisations. And at the library we could provide a large group of young people who were looking for exciting projects to participate in. With the help of the young people during the planning process, these projects became truly relevant to their needs, and therefore high attendance and commitment was guaranteed. This encouraged them away from perpetrating antisocial behaviour in and around the library building.

The key aim for all of our activities is to develop the young peoples’ literacy and life-skills. Activities include football literacy projects, a girls’ reading group and website design club. Our Youth Video Project involved young people producing short films which address cultural stereotypes and youth issues. Funding from the Scottish Executive and the City of Edinburgh Council meant the film makers were able to visit New York to participate in the Tartan Week celebrations and to work with other young people.

I would like to make it clear that our work with young people would not have been as successful without the commitment of a dedicated group of library staff who really want to work with young people, and genuinely respect them and their opinions. As a team, we have attended intensive training on dealing with anger and aggression in young people, and we have worked together to implement some of these techniques into our daily work. We have also adopted many new approaches in dealing with unacceptable behaviour as we make it clear to young people that in order to participate in our activities, they must behave in an acceptable way.

We work flexibly to manage behaviour within the library by introducing intervention techniques such as ‘time-outs’ or bargaining tools, rather than excluding young people from using our services altogether. The close relationship that we have built with parents and carers also allows us to work together to address behavioural issues before they become serious.

Thankfully, there have been few difficult instances of antisocial behaviour since 2004, and we manage these by working with our local community police officers. They advise on when we should press charges and when to use ABCs (Acceptable Behaviour Contracts), which have worked very well in negotiating behaviour improvement.

I feel that proper training for library staff is essential for the delivery of new services for young people. However, managers also have a responsibility during recruitment processes. We need to ask the difficult questions and find out if future librarians and library assistants really want to work closely with young people. The library staff at Sighthill bring many additional skills to the job, which means that they can plan and deliver youth activities themselves. Our library assistants are film-makers, actors, musicians and technology experts, as well as being excellent library assistants.

As well as having fully committed and trained members of staff, another key to our success has been involving young people in service development. By adopting this inclusive approach, we have seen a decrease in youth crime statistics and a welcome increase in library visitor and issue counts. As a result of this success we have been given national awards including the CILIP Libraries Change Lives Award 2006.

We feel strongly that future success for public libraries can only be achieved by listening to our users and responding to their needs.

Jane Milne is Team Leader, Sighthill and Ratho Libraries, Edinburgh

Information Scotland Vol. 4(6) December 2006

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