How social should libraries be?

Social media has been hotly debated by parents and other adults ever since youngsters started flocking to it and spending (it seems) hours posting silly and sometimes disturbing messages and photos on it. At first some school districts and public libraries assumed that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were time-wasters and students should not be allowed to use them in schools and libraries. But social media crept into our lives and gradually made it difficult to separate personal fooling around from serious learning. Now there is a movement to reverse the trend to ban websites from schools and children’s libraries. The American Association of School Librarians this year inaugurated a Banned Website Awareness Day designed to call attention to the problem. In a report on the growing trend toward freer access for young people to social media and other websites and the New York Times published an article this week describing some of the ways teachers use social media to advance studies. For example, in one Advanced Placement Biology class, lab groups created a Facebook thread to share data and collaborate on projects. Many educators believe that today’s young people will work in environments where shared projects are the norm and they will have to learn to use the tools of collaboration. By exposing young people to social media and to websites that might be considered offensive in schools and libraries, teachers can help students learn how to use the Internet safely and where to draw the line on offensive material. As generations of adults have learned over time it is almost impossible to shield young people from questionable information; it is far better to help them learn how to evaluate it. Librarians have been in the front lines of the fight against book censorship for many years; now is the time for us to extend our concern for books to other materials. As digital material in many formats becomes more and more a part of the life of young people, we should help them to decide how to handle it rather than try to build walls around our libraries. We are all interconnected now, so we might as well get used to it.