NY Times: “Librarians Are Meeting Younger Readers Where They Are: TikTok”

From The New York Times:

The pandemic wiped out decades of progress in children’s reading skills. So what’s a librarian hoping to engage children and teenagers with books and reading to do?

“Meet them where they are,” said Sara Day, a teen services librarian at the Woodland Public Library in Woodland, Calif. And that, she said, is on TikTok.

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Several librarians also said that the platform can be helpful in dispelling stereotypes and giving people a realistic view of what libraries and librarians are like in 2022.

“We have this misconception that libraries are antiquated and not on top of tech trends,” said Emily Drabinski, the president-elect of the American Library Association. But historically, she said, librarians are often on the forefront of engaging with new technologies.

“It is our job to select, acquire, describe, make accessible and circulate preserved knowledge,” Drabinski added. “That’s the whole project. So as technology changes the ways things are circulated, we change with it.”

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