A Place of Our Own

Operation

The PLACE OF OUR OWN LAN (local area network) creates personal user accounts on the system, rather than the more usual "guest" accounts. This allows teens to customize their Windows desktops with graphics they created or downloaded from the net. It also allows young people with visual or physical disabilities to have information displayed in large type, or to adjust the keyboard as their motor skills require.

Personal accounts allow the staff to better monitor system use, and to ensure fair distribution of time among the users. Because new users must fill out a slip to get an account, staff learns their names. Getting to know the teens has been the key to staff/user interaction at the library. It makes everyone more comfortable. The young adults all know the staff, and have always been intensely curious about any new workers.

The staff has always been a young staff. Clerk positions have been filled by people in their early twenties, and the pages have been high school students only a little older than the Young Friends.

Although our network consultant designed and fine-tuned the LAN, the staff has had to provide its own technical support. Each staff member must learn to be a system administrator as well as to run the small library. The consultant has been able to help with some major troubleshooting and the upgrades, but mostly the staff must work things out on their own.

After nearly a year of informal meetings, the Teen Advisory Council (TAC) finally began to meet regularly once a month enabling them to be even more directly involved in decision-making on policies and use of equipment. The first formal meeting (that is, the first one with pizza) was on August 16, 1996.

The TAC meetings also launched the electronic newsletter, the very declarative WHAT'S NEXT. WHAT'S NEXT became a good vehicle for students to practice their growing web skills while actually doing some extended writing. Articles have included photographs of local graffiti, descriptions of life as a disabled teen, and a story of gang life. They have included the inevitable lists of favorite things, and even an advice column. Issues of the newsletter are hung on the PLACE OF OUR OWN webpage: http://garfieldlib.com.

Learning from each other has characterized the way students have used the homework center. With no prompting from staff, they quickly began to exchange hints on playing Oregon Trail, trade advice on using Word to write their reports, and offer clues for creating wildly imaginative web pages. They generously share what they learn with staff and any other adults who happen by.

We did offer internet classes during both summers of the grant, and several young people learned more about surfing the net, creating web pages, and applying their knowledge to the creation of Issue 3 of the newsletter during those times. Most of the learning has always occurred, however, in the glee of a YA eager to share a new discovery, or during a long patient process conducted by a small group huddled around one of the PC's.