Article 1: "Reaching Out to Young Adults in Jail"

Since I have done a lot of outreach type work this first week at my internship, I wanted to try to find an aritcle about the importance of outreach in youth services. I ended up stumbling across this article and thought I'd check it out.

Throughout my first year in library school, we have often talked about providing outreach services, especially from a public library. While I have learned about outreach to youth and outreach to incarcerated persons, I don't think I've ever before come across outreach that combines the two. This article provided a brief overview of providing outreach library services to incarcerated youth. While this is obviously not something every library can or should do, it seems to be something that should be considered if presented with the opportunity.

One of the things I liked best about this article is the discussion of measuring this sort of outreach program's success. If you only look at statistics and traditional methods of evaluation, these programs make little to no sense. However, if you take a more qualitative approach and look at outcomes and not outputs, they look much more successful.

I also liked the discussion of dealing with issues of intellectual freedom in this situation. Correctional facilities can and do limit what materials their prisoners have access to. This can be a frustrating obstacle to many a librarian who supports intellectual freedom for all patrons. But by focusing on the good one is doing simply by providing any sort of service to this population, it may be easier to push that issue with intellectual freedom to the back of one's mind.

This sort of outreach is something I would definitely have an interest in seeing on a first-hand basis. I know Mooresville doesn't do anything like this (at least not in youth services; I'm unsure about adult services) and it may be because there isn't a call for it. But I would very much like to see how this sort of outreach functions and how the librarians who do it feel about it, as well as the patrons being served.

Jones, P. (2004). Reaching Out to Young Adults in Jail. Young Adult Library Services, 3(1), p. 16-19. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.