ARTICLE/WEBSITE: The Future Library? YouMediaChicago

[Ryan Goble]

Super library studies goddess Kristin Fontichiaro hipped me to this project last year and Frank W. Baker caught this article on it the other day. Is YouMedia the future of the library? Thoughts?

The website = http://youmediachicago.org/
Screenshot =


The write up in USA Today can be read HERE. In the meantime, a sampler ...

"We are in one of these rare moments in time where what it means to be literate today, what it meant for us, is going to be different from what it means to be literate for our kids," says DePaul University's Nichole Pinkard, who first envisioned the space. Just as schools have always pushed teens to read critically and pick apart authors' arguments, she says, educators must now teach kids how to consume media critically and, ideally, to produce it.

"It's really a shift from thinking of a library as a repository to a community center, a place where things actually happen," says Taylor Bayless, 27, a librarian and one of the center's mentors.

YOUmedia owes much of its basic ideology to Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California-Irvine who in 2006 studied how teens use "new media." After three years, her team concluded that most kids shift between three stages of consumption and creation, informally dubbed "hanging out," "messing around" and "geeking out."