Middle School and Young Adult Collection and Programming Guidelines

Collection Development

With the addition of a new Young Adult Collection, it is needful to clarify both age groupings and criteria for each collection. It is important to encourage and promote continued reading during the pre-teen and teen years and to give access to both popular, high demand items as well, as award winning, quality writings.

Middle School

Consideration is given to the following criteria when ordering books for the middle school area:

• The target audience is the sixth, seventh and eighth grader who may be as young as 10 and as old 14.
• Age of the main characters
• School setting or grade level
• Use of language
• Theme or subject matter
• Consideration of graphic violence, sex or other social issues
• Location of the majority of an author's works

Young Adult Collection Development

Consideration is given to the following criteria when ordering books for the Young Adult area:

• Target audience for this collection is the 9th through 12th grader who could be as young as 14 and as old as 18.
• High school or college setting
• Age of main characters
• Theme or subject matter
• Reviews and /or book clearly labels it Young Adult

Programming

The library's basic goals are (1) to provide a collection that will answer the community's educational and recreational needs and (2) to help people access that collection through service at the reference desks. Our third goal is to provide programming that brings people and books together.

Under the umbrella of Community Services, the pre-teen and teen will find most of their needs met. The library best serves this population by:

• Providing an excellent reference collection that will answer homework questions
• Providing recreational reading materials
• Offering activities that are enjoyable and require use of the reference sources
• Offering programs that stimulate their desire to read and to learn
• Visiting their schools and booktalking
• Communicating with educators on a regular basis
• Assisting sister Community Service areas who provide for other teen needs by providing information and publicizing activities