Know your audience

An excerpt from YALSA's 1/29/2009 blog, Dear Teens, It's okay to ask for things:

"I’ve noticed a particular phenomenon among teens that I don’t see as much in children or adults. Actually, it’s two things.
1. Often, when I see a teen searching for a book on the shelves, and I approach her and ask if I can help her find what she’s looking for, she says no–even though it’s pretty obvious that she’s having trouble locating the title she wants.2. When a teen asks if I have a particular book and we don’t own it, I always offer to buy it for him. Many times, he will decline. The same goes for offering to put an item on hold–he will say “no, it’s no big deal, don’t worry about it” very politely, but very definitively.
Why does this happen? And what can we do about it?"

YALSA, Young Adults Library Services Association, is an organization that reaches across the wide-ranging topics that involve young adults and library services. This association holds a wealth of information for students, like myself, who are new to the field.

I searched GoogleBlog, http://blogsearch.google.com/, to find blogs related to my areas of interest, and I chose this one because it's a great reminder of how we need to recognize that different teens have different personality types and most teens are different than adults. It seemed a wonderful starting point when attempting to cater to the needs of others; I must know my audience in order to reach them.

To reach this YALSA blog, go to: http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/2009/01/29/dear-teens-its-okay-to-ask-for-things/#more-2169