Learning strategies for engagement and retention of young audiences

Abstract

This article examines the available literature on engaging young audiences to visit libraries, museums and performing arts shows, and their strategies for developing permanent audiences. The recommendations drawn from the review serve as an input for the Latin American Library for Children and Youth that is currently in a planning stage. Ideas regarding program, partnerships, communication and promotion of libraries in the context of the 21st century are explained in accordance with an audience approach that emphasises the presentness of children and youth, the demands and motivation of cultural participants, and the need to enable cultural rights.

Keywords

Children cultural audiences public libraries 21st-century learning youth

Context

Despite increasing global access to technology and connectivity, which facilitate remote modes of communication and learning, in the context of the 21st century the library is still a meeting place for the community. The validity of this assertion is what drives the project of the Latin American Children’s and Youth Library (LACYL). The LACYL is currently in a planning stage and is expected to come into service in Chile in 2020. Its mission is to offer children, youth and their families a cultural space in which they can discover books and reading, access a diversity of cultural manifestations, appreciate knowledge, and become creative, honest and responsible citizens (Mekis, 2016).

To accomplish this goal, the LACYL needs to internalise young people’s cultural rights. When an organisation internalises cultural rights ‘participation in cultural life becomes fundamental to an individual’s self-identity and truly inalienable’ (Reason, 2010: 30). Reason added that in an informal setting, such as a library, cultural rights ‘would be about providing young people with the skills in spectatorship, the confidence and the knowledge that allows them to take possession of the cultural forms on offer on their own terms and in their own right’ (2010: 30).

In this context, a literature review will examine the strategies that libraries and museums have implemented successfully for engaging and retaining young and young related audiences. Thereby, this paper aims to recommend learning strategies that invite children, adolescents, young adults and their families, and educators to the LACYL and are potentially successful in developing a permanent audience for the library.

I will achieve the aim of this study by examining the issue from various perspectives. Firstly, I will present an overview of the library as a learning centre in the context of the 21st century and its role in the community. In this section an emphasis will be given to the social aspects of learning and to learning in informal settings. Secondly, the concept of audience will be discussed in the light of the literature, especially whether young audiences should be considered as ‘being’, i.e. children here and now, or as ‘becoming’, i.e. adult audiences in the future. A third section will examine several strategies for engaging and retaining young audiences as informed by the literature, which will foster the recommendations to the LACYL. These recommendations will focus on aspects of programme, communication, partnerships and promotion of the library. Finally, this paper will discuss the importance of evaluation for retaining audiences and for the planning process as a whole, because as Feinberg and Feldman (1996: 103) indicated ‘evaluation streamlines all activities of the library’.

The library and the community

Oldenburg (1999) coined the concept of the ‘third place’ to designate a neutral community space which is neither work nor home, ‘where people come together voluntarily and informally in ways that level social inequities and promote community engagement and social connection’ (Oldenburg, 1999, cited in Pastore, 2009: 9). Pastore (2009: 9–10) added that ‘as opportunities for social engagement outside of private or working life and removed from the profit interests of commercial spaces, museums and libraries have the ability to identify and respond to community needs in ways that other spaces cannot’.

Oldenburg’s third place emphasises the democratic value of the library in terms of making social equity possible. On the same lines, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA, 2003) defined the publicly funded library in the 21st century as one of the most democratic of institutions by serving the particular needs of the community. It is regarded as a safe meeting point and a place where the community can gather, discover, learn, access local knowledge, enquire political and social issues, get inspired through the available bank of ideas, answer factual questions, acquire new skills, and experience sheer pleasure and enjoyment.

In terms of audience, the possibility of social equity was well explained by Pastore (2009) for whom 21st-century libraries and museums ‘are not one-way channels of information that flow from institution to audience. Rather, they are networks of many channels, institution to audience, audience to institution, and audience to audience’ (p. 7). This requires a deep involvement of the community throughout the library’s planning and evaluation processes. From a marketing perspective, Kolb (2013) used the term ‘culture participant’ to define the new cultural consumer that comes along with social communication technologies: ‘They want to move beyond merely attending cultural events. They want to have a say in the programming and even the art product’ (p. 36). Kolb recommends that organisations must provide an interactive cultural product that fulfils the culture participants’ demands. A case in point is The Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle, USA, which developed a community-based exhibition model to empower members of the community to ‘create their own exhibits and tell their own stories at the museum’ (Pastore, 2009: 8). The use of this model is in line with the museum’s mission of engaging Asian Pacific Americans to explore their art, culture and history.

All these definitions of the library in the 21st century emphasise the concepts of community and informal learning. In other words, nowadays the library is regarded as a place where people learn socially and informally.

Understanding social learning

Maddigan and Bloos (2013) compiled diverse library programmes centred in community literacy in the United States. As they defined it, ‘community literacy is formed by the engagement of participants in activities that nurture discourse – written and spoken communication’ (Maddigan and Bloss, 2013: ix). Being essentially collective, community literacy involves ‘a way for people to acknowledge each other’s multiple forms of expertise through talk and text and to draw on their differences as a resource for addressing shared problems’ (Higgins et al., 2006, cited in Maddigan and Bloos, 2013: ix). This is a matter of social constructivism, a theory grounded in Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s psychology works. Vygotsky understood learning as a social construct: ‘Each function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological)’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 57), and he adds that ‘what the child can do in cooperation today he can do alone tomorrow’ (Vygotsky, 1986: 188). As Moll (2013) outlined, the Russian psychologist was interested in the way that human beings fashion their nature through the mediation of others, ‘through the appropriation of culture and its resources, which change through history’ (Moll, 2013: 1). In the same line, Dewey (1929) believed that education is a social process that occurs in community life, where the learner is driven to ‘use his own powers for social ends’ (1929: ‘Article Two. What the School Is’: para. 1). For all this to take place, the authors regard language in a social context as the main tool for knowledge mobilisation and concept construction (Dewey, 1929; Vygotsky, 1986).

Each of the programmes informed by Maddigan and Bloos (2013) features varied learning strategies and models, and they are situated in different venues, in person and online. The authors believe that communities, just like technologies, are evolving but not losing their importance, and for this matter, schools and public libraries are two institutions that continue to play an evolving role in society. Although being pre-eminently literacy institutions, McKenzie et al. (2007; cited in Maddigan and Bloos, 2013: 2) consider that ‘the public library cannot be seen as a single kind of space, but should rather be understood as a site that supports a variety of relationships and hosts a variety of realms’. Maddigan and Bloos (2013: 2) emphasise that ‘by offering free programs for the members of any community, we are giving citizens a place to gather, engage in discourse, and develop relationships’. Accordingly, the idea of the library built in and for the ‘democratic public sphere’ (Buschman and Leckie, 2007, cited in Maddigan and Bloos, 2013: 2) has once again a leading role in the contemporary conceptions of community literacy. For this end, mapping the community is one of the most important planning actions to be developed by any library or cultural organisation, as informed by the literature.

Interactivity is a concept that cannot be left aside in the discussion of social learning and has been recommended as a strategy for museums and libraries in the 21st century to engage young audiences (Blud, 1990; Chow, 2013; Moorhead, 2005). When confronted with interactive activities or texts, participants and readers become active producers of meaning (Cordero et al., 2014; Groenke and Youngquist, 2011). Blud (1990), who conducted a study in the Science Museum of London, found that interactive exhibits encouraged more discussion among families than static ones. Interactive exhibits also demonstrated a significantly superior performance when approached by two or more people, rather than individually. These findings resonate with the social constructivist theory briefly described before.

However, interactivity is not the only learning experience worth developing in a library, if understood as a community literacy centre. The New London Group (1996) coined the term ‘multiliteracies’ for designating multiple ranges of knowledge, skills and practices, which involve printed alphanumeric texts along with media, technologies and interactions. Together with multiliteracies, ‘multimodality’ is another concept highly considered by the literature in this matter. ‘Modes are the components and conventions of representing, expressing, and communicating meaning within any media or genre, such as sound, color, tone, music, and texture’ (Jewitt and Kress, 2003). ‘Modes intersect and combine in multilayered ways’ (Dallacqua et al., 2015: 209). Hence, multimodal texts and representations are essential for developing multiliteracies.

Informal learning in the digital era

Not much has been said in this article about the role of digitisation in the 21st-century library. Although opinions differ, Wayne Clough (2013) proposed an optimistic view based on the informal type of learning that occurs in museums, archives and libraries:

In fact, the digital revolution offers museum, archives and libraries a golden age of opportunity, because they are ideally suited for a world in which learning is informal and centered on inspiration and self-motivation. Of course, online access to digitized documents and images from their collections opens the doors of these institutions to a much wider audience. But digitization also offers museums, archives and libraries striking new avenues to engage with those who use their services and to become fuller partners in formal and informal education programs. (pp. 9–10)

The issue of whether libraries should make use of digital tools to engage young audiences will not be discussed. There is strong evidence suggesting that digital generations are changing and which challenges the common belief that the new generations are the most digitally skilled (Fortunati et al., 2017; Taipale, 2016). However, by serving the community the library must introduce a variety of resources, formats and platforms to serve the needs of its members, including digital. With the aim of inviting a new audience, the Ryerson University Library in Toronto, Canada, created the Digital Media Experience Lab, ‘a makerspace that is the top attraction frequented by student creators and visionaries who are keen to make use of the high-end multimedia workstations and a large inventory of technology purposed for student use’ (Wang et al., 2017: 7). This has allowed students to develop innovating projects using cutting-edge technology and create for the real world.

Moreover, Juncker (2007) proposes that young audiences today demand a reshaped pre-modern oral culture:

The oral, expressive culture and the accompanying concepts of enlightenment and enculturation, which dominated the era before the rise of the public libraries, but lost the battle to the ‘scribes’ and the print-based culture, have re-emerged. Taking the shape of the multi-media culture, these key concepts of the past now appear to be much more comprehensive and significant than the old public library pioneers would imagine. (p. 159)

In the light of our previous arguments, Juncker’s insight corresponds not only to young people’s demands but also to society in general, because more than just a generation, the digital era has changed culture as a whole. Therefore, digitisation needs to be at the core of 21st-century libraries in order to become successful informal and social learning hubs.

Approaches to young cultural audiences

Moving towards a better understanding of community involvement in library services and programme, this section will discuss the concept of audience development and outline some considerations to take into account when planning the library programme.

Particularly speaking of children and youth, the concept of audience development is charged with ideological meanings that need to be unfolded. The main concern has to do with the instrumentalisation of the arts for children for educational ends (Johanson and Glow, 2011; Reason, 2010). Juncker (2006; cited in Juncker, 2015: 25) addressed the problem of young cultural audiences through the dichotomy of children as ‘being’ in the present and ‘becoming’ adults in the future. By considering young audiences as ‘becoming’ adults, Juncker (2015: 25) held that ‘the aim of cultural policy and cultural dissemination was to leave this participatory culture with its playing aesthetic-symbolic practice behind and to educate and qualify both taste and behaviour’. Reason (2010: 30) associates this approach to cultural policy with audience development, which values ‘the adult audience they might become, rather than the audience they are now’. The problem is well illustrated by Drury (2006: 151) who, instead, highlights the presentness of the audience: ‘Children are not the audience of the future. Rather, they are citizens of the here-and-now, with important cultural entitlements […] Being 8 is a whole experience…there are understandings and meanings particular to being 8’. For Reason (2010), although with different aims, both education and marketing are responsible for an audience development approach to young cultural audiences: while education invests in knowledge and developing critical skills, marketing seeks to build a life-long arts attendance through early exposure.

Junker (2007, 2015) and Reason (2010) brought to the discussion the matter of rights. Since the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1990), almost every country recognises the rights of children, which includes the right to freedom of expression: ‘this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice’ (United Nations, 1990, Article 13: para. 1). Therefore, cultural institutions, such as public libraries, should address what Juncker (2015: 27) called ‘children’s cultural communities’, which communicate through action, and develop programmes that ‘inspire and enrich children’s playing, participatory cultures and their expressive lives’.

Johanson and Glow (2011) presented three organisations that have succeeded in developing a theatre programme for a young audience without educational involvement: The Windmill Theatre Company in Adelaide, The Sydney Opera House, both in Australia, and Gruppe 38 in Aarhus, Denmark. The authors identify two common elements in these case-studies: ‘the engagement of children’s imagination through both the content and the formal elements of the work, and the opportunity for communication or bonding between children, young people, adult audiences, and the adults who create the work’ (Johanson and Glow, 2011: 65).

Consequently, with what was exposed in the previous section, the library as an informal and social learning centre is concerned about the needs and interests of the children and young people of the present and what they carry along with their lives at home, at school and in the community. Dewey (1929) also believed in this when he defined education as ‘a process of living and not a preparation for future living’ (p. 76). He continued outlining that ‘school must represent present life – life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighbourhood, or on the playground’ (p. 77). Dewey’s school may be a library, a museum or any other type of learning centre for children and youth, where learning is another word for experience.

Recommended strategies for engaging and retaining audiences

This study is interested in two types of audience: a direct audience, formed by children, adolescents and young adults¹; and an indirect audience formed by adults related to the former group, such as parents, carers, educators, writers, artists and researchers.

A strong programme requires a clear vision, which can only exist when the real audience is understood. As this is not an empirical study, the audience for the LACYL will not be characterised. However, I will examine the ways in which other libraries have defined their audiences.

On one side, the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany, is regarded as the largest library for international children’s and youth literature in the world. Based on Jella Lepman’s vision, the library has two guiding principles, one for adults and one for children: ‘collecting, cataloguing and facilitating communication about children’s and youth literature’, and ‘promoting cultural youth programmes and intercultural understanding’ (Internationale Jugendbibliotek, n.d., IYL Leaflet: para 4). Thanks to the extensive collection – 560,000 children’s and young adult books in 130 languages, 40,000 documentary materials and 130 current journals – the library invites every year up to 15 researchers for a few months to study the collection, as well as offering the visitors access to the reading museums, current exhibitions and the children’s lending library. There are 25,000 books and other media in 15 languages available for children to read on site and to take home.

On the other side, the State Library of Victoria Centre for Youth Literature (2014), Australia, after 22 years of reading promotion, today has a clear vision and goals that have result in a loyal and increasing audience: ‘The Centre for Youth Literature connects Australia’s young people, inspiring our young adults to engage with books, stories, writing and ideas’ (p. 3). The Centre understands the real need for young people to communicate with each other and build networks based on common interests, which in this case is literature. Under that premise, the Centre has built a strong programme encouraging youth participation. It includes creative writing workshops, meetings with authors and reading challenges. Also, they have found digital platforms to be effective to engage with this audience.

The International Youth Library and the Centre for Youth Literature serve as examples of successful institutions in which vision and goals are closely related to the audience they work with. Hereunder I will refer to some of the strategies for engaging and retaining audiences informed by the literature, which address issues related to programme, communication, partnerships and promotion of the library.

Programme

The literature consulted coincided unanimously in the need of a strong programme for engaging audiences, but what constitutes a strong programme depends on the organisation’s aims. In this regard, Chow (2013) found flaws in the British Museum’s programme for children and families. Although children are one of the Museum’s targeted groups, the lack of consistent evaluation results in a programme based on trial and error, rather than a rigorous planning for this age group. In an interview (2007) with the Museum’s Head of the Department of School and Young Audiences Education he explained that changes to the programme depend on what is feasible to offer, ‘we don’t evaluate if we can’t change any provisions at the moment’ (Chow, 2013: 305). At the same time, the Head of Department stated that the Museum ‘wants to make sure that there is always something for family to do over the year’ (p. 304). Part of the reassessment that the study recommended was to adjust the family provisions for the actual visitor’s age group: two-thirds of the children visiting the museum belong to the 5–11 years old group, and most of the activities provided are directed to 7–11 year-olds.

At this point, I need to differentiate recommended programme provisions for infants, children and youth. Parents have a lot to say regarding the infants’ library activities, because they are participants to the same extent as their children. Brock and Rankin’s view (2008; cited in Rankin and Brock, 2009: 114–115) on how to reach parents and infants involves the following actions:

modelling and encouraging parents to read with babies and young children from an early age;

providing a welcoming social space for families;

showing that parents are valued and that they are important as their child’s first educator;

providing a variety of materials that can be borrowed, including multi-sensory, tactile books, story and information book, videos, DVDs and storysacks;

creating exciting book displays to encourage parents and children to select a range of different books;

providing activities such as colouring and drawing, story activities, singing, puppets, crafts;

having story sessions at times to suit parents and carers, including dads;

offering dual language story telling sessions and providing dual language books.

Among the activities for infants’ reading promotion, Rankin and Brock (2009) encourage the use of treasure baskets, picture books and puppets, participation in rhyme times, musical sessions, storytelling sessions – including stories in different languages – as well as invite families to share stories.

There are successful experiences with children from 4 to 11 years old in opera (Cuenca, 2017) and from 2 to 12 years old in theatre programmes (Johanson and Glow, 2011), which work basically with adaptations of classic pieces and with works composed and written specifically for children. The authors emphasise the importance of adapting the classical works to current themes and voices in order to facilitate identification. Cuenca (2017) highlights the Spanish children’s opera programmes ABAO Txiki, in Bilbao, and Petit Liceu, in Barcelona. In the case of children’s theatre, the Danish company Gruppe 38 is an example in the field for representing theatre works in a fairy-tale genre (Johanson and Glow, 2011). Although these activities differ from the ones that a library is capable to offer, two conclusions can be drawn from this age group. Firstly, as children from 2 to 12 years old attend to cultural activities accompanied by their families or educators the programme offered must be suitable for a wide audience. Secondly, the activities suggested for this audience are theatre and music performances, exhibitions, storytelling sessions, and other in which children are given the possibility to interact with one another and with adults.

The State Library of Victoria Centre for Youth Literature (2014) provides a good example of a participative youth programme. The Centre communicates with young people through a busy digital platform called Inside a Dog. It is defined as ‘Australia’s peer book-reviewing site for young people’ (p. 16) and comprises user-generated book reviews, comment and discussion threads, an inspiration bank of young adult titles and new releases, editorial news and content, book clubs, author profiles, competitions, monthly Writer in Residence, Teen Writer in Residence, and moderation and monitoring of activity to provide a safe environment. Other interesting strategies are Teen Writer in Residence and Inky Awards. In the first one, ‘Teens from across Australia write weekly columns on reading and books, sharing their insights and interacting with commenters’ (p. 16). On the other hand, the ‘annual Inky Awards are Australia’s teen choice book awards, with a high-quality shortlist selected by a youth panel and winners decided by a public vote open to teens across Australia’ (p. 16). These essentially digital programmes allow adapting content quickly enough, a wide participation since they are cost-free, and promote interaction among teens: ‘we will move away from traditional models of panels and presentations towards increasingly interactive models of delivery’ (p. 11). The Centre’s programme is an example of how Kolb’s (2013) culture participants’ needs to produce culture are considered. As Buckingham and Harvey (2001) and Charmaraman (2010) reported about youth media production, when adolescents are given the chance to produce rather than consume media, they experience an active process of meaning-making as well as motivation.

These highly interactive strategies place new questions: what is the role of the library regarding youth contents? Are young people entitled to manage their contents freely, even if those contents derive from the mass culture? Or is the library’s role to mediate towards high culture? The State Library of Victoria Centre for Youth Literature (2014) is prone to the latter by stating that its ‘programme will reflect a balance of critical and commercial tastes’ (p. 11). On the other hand, Juncker and Balling (2016) support the perspective of giving voice and expression across interests and tastes, what they call ‘expressive cultural democracy’ (p. 232), taking distance from a high culture stance. The authors propose a more complex and dynamic relationship, which resonates with the task of internalising children’s and youth cultural rights, exposed previously:

An expressive cultural democracy is thus a mental expansion of cultural democracy, which allows people to create meaning in cultural activities in relation to their own life and their own creative activities inside so-called high culture institutions. Accordingly, cultural institutions and their collections should be seen as, and organized according to, a democratic platform for exchanging and negotiating meaning, as arenas in which both heritage and voice can interact (Juncker and Balling, 2016: 241).

Communication

The importance of including digital resources in the library has been developed throughout this paper, and it involves communication channels. In the previous section, I explored the Centre for Youth Literature’s programme strategies, which are all based on online communication. Organisations such as libraries and museums have been using web-based communication with almost every audience for some time but, nowadays, social media are taking communication to another level. Kolb (2013) exposed the ways in which culture participants circulate information among digital communities: nowadays organisations’ affiliations correspond to online friends groups, people upload their own works in the organisations’ website or social media accounts, fundraising can be done through crowdsourcing methods, and a lot of information can be shared through podcasts, posted reviews, links to websites, among others.

Consequently, it is possible to say that communication channels and tools are constantly changing towards more efficient, quick and impactful uses, and cultural organisations are already taking advantage of them for reaching new audiences. This is why the recommendation is to diversify communication channels, using online and offline tools, and use social media, where the library participants will propel the dissemination process.

Partnerships

Establishing collaborative actions with other organisations is regarded as a successful strategy for reaching new audiences (Lo et al., 2014; Maddigan and Bloos, 2014; Moorhead, 2005; Rankin and Brock, 2009; State Library of Victoria Centre for Youth Literature, 2014). In the context of low attendance and tight budgets that many non-profit cultural organisations face, such as museums and libraries, collaboration is highly recommended due to the possibility to share resources, policies and expertise. In the same line, Abram (2011; cited in Maddigan and Bloos, 2013: 3) identified that when libraries face economic challenges creativity and innovation increase: ‘We can build new partnerships and find new, improved ways of doing things that may be more cost-effective and impactful’.

Moorhead (2005) presented the successful experience of The Women’s Library (TWL) at London Metropolitan University, UK, at attracting local communities and young people. Since TWL’s new venue opened in 2002 it experienced an increase of 700% in the number of visitors, but as a research indicated in 2003, the diverse ethnic communities in the local areas and youth aged 24 and under were not visiting the museum. Among the strategies implemented, TWL established a collaboration with the arts organisation Magic Me and with the BA students of the Fine Arts department of London Metropolitan University, which developed creative projects that would run alongside the main exhibition of the library: the history of beauty contests in Britain. These partnerships led to a successful promotion campaign: 37% of visitors were under 24 years old and 31% were local families. The partnerships continued after the exhibition due to the positive outcomes for all the actors involved.

Rankin and Brock (2009) highlighted the Western Australia’s partnership programme Better Beginnings and the USA’s Family Place Libraries, which focus on the early years libraries’ provision and reading promotion. Together with Bookstart in the UK, both have demonstrated a considerable impact in their communities. This illustrates that partnerships can take varied forms and serve different objectives.

Promotion

As it was mentioned by Moorhead (2005), partnerships assisted The Women’s Library in developing a strong promotion campaign in order to reach new audiences. This campaign consisted of weekly creative workshops with Bengali female secondary school students and female seniors from the community; an exhibition on body image in the library’s café; a research-based symposium; a study day of talks; a free film season; summer drop-in activity sessions for families and children; and a reading list researched by library staff. The campaign was led by a strong visual identity and the programme was mailed to database contacts, displayed at popular venues across London, posters were sent to schools and libraries, and a web-based marketing was used to target young people. In this case, people were guided to TWL website and encouraged to sign up to the monthly email bulletin. In addition, local and national press, radio, and television covered the exhibition.

A more unconventional promotion strategy was described by the English Arts Council (Arts Council England, 2004), where, utilising texting abbreviations used by young people, 55 different SMS messages were sent out to a database of mobile phone numbers that belonged to 18–24 year-olds from the Plymouth area promoting 31 events. 824 people signed up for events, surpassing the original target of 300.

The European Agenda for Culture (European Union, 2014) reported on the ambassadors’ programme developed by the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland, ‘which boasts a collection of works from Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe’ (p. 55). The programme consists in attracting representatives of different communities who are given a solid expertise and then offer guided tours of the exhibitions in their own language. This is the same principle used at the Brera Picture Gallery in Milan, Italy, where mediators with an immigrant background ‘develop new, shared narratives around museum collections’ (p. 54). This approach helps to ‘build a bridge between the community and the institution’ (p. 53).

These strategies lead to suggesting some ideas around social inclusion. Rankin and Brock (2009) described three programmes for audiences that are ‘hard to reach’ because of being socially excluded: traveller families, teenage fathers and refugees. The authors highlighted the importance of partnerships to reach out to these groups and develop an appropriate programme for each of them. In terms of what has been said about the democratic value of the 21st-century library, this aspect is especially relevant to the Latin American and Chilean current context, where lack of adequate policies leaves immigrants in serious social exclusion. Therefore, it would be expected that the LACYL take an active role in reaching out to the immigrant community.

Finally, lack of knowledge prevents people from visiting libraries and other cultural organisations (Colombia. Red Distrital de Bibliotecas Públicas BiblioRed, 2016; Cuenca and Cuenca, 2014). When young people were introduced to cultural expressions that they did not know, their perception of those expressions changed positively and made them consider attending again (Cuenca and Cuenca, 2014). Hence, promotion is essential for engaging new audiences, which is more effective when done through collaboration. Retaining those audiences is responsibility of a strong and participative programme and a dynamic communication.

Evaluation: End and beginning of the process

Evaluation will enable answering the questions that this paper aims to pose: Is the library engaging new audiences? Is the library retaining its audiences? These are permanent questions that have to be addressed throughout the whole process: in the beginning, when the library establishes its objectives and intentions; during the process, when the programme is being developed; and in the end, when the library reassesses the strategies chosen. As Buckingham and Harvey (2001) suggested about their study of youth’s perspectives on media production, a deep conceptualisation and understanding of the audience can only take place during the process, when intentions and results are causally related. This brings us back to the Feinberg and Feldman’s (1996: 103) proposition on the cyclical planning process:

Evaluation streamlines all activities of the library, completes the planning process for any one activity, and provides the tools for change and growth in public library services…. Without the identification of goals and objectives at the beginning of the process, there can be no meaningful evaluation at the end.

Although this may sound platitudinous for any policymaker, it is relevant for a successful impact in the community. Therefore, the type of evaluation has to be consistent with those objectives. As Rankin and Brock (2009) indicated, measuring the impact a library has in the community is more difficult than collating statistics of performance indicators. For this matter, the authors prompt the concept of social capital and the interpretation of both qualitative and quantitative evidence for monitoring the library provision and the extent to which the library makes a difference in the community.

Pastore (2009: 21) emphasised the fact that museums and libraries are subject to changing times and demands from the community:

If museums and libraries begin to integrate more with one another and collaborate more with other organizations in the public and private spheres, they may also begin to define themselves and their roles in new ways. [This] would necessitate redefining the impacts and outcomes of their operations. It is essential that as museums and libraries reevaluate their services, their communities, and the ways in which their use is changing in the 21st century; they must also consider how they will measure their progress in addressing these changes and articulating their value to society.

A study on family visits at the British Museum concluded that families are a difficult audience to evaluate and demonstrate effective results, as opposed to school visits that provide easily quantifiable data (Chow, 2013: 312). Besides the complexity of assessing parental views and levels of satisfaction, the study found total lack of consideration of children’s perspectives in the museum’s occasional internal evaluations of family visits. In light of previous arguments, this is a relevant point to be considered by any children’s and youth library in the evaluation process: to what extent are the voices of the direct audience being represented in the programme?

Conclusion

The literature reviewed was highly useful to address the aim of this study. The first section of this article explored the definitions of the 21st-century library, where the concepts of social equity, community engagement and social connection appeared as possibilities for the library to develop. In today’s context, where there is an increasing presence of culture participants that demand from organisations that their voices be heard, a community-based library becomes even more important. This type of library entails social and informal learning. Social learning, related to social constructivism, is one in which people learn among others and where language plays an essential role in the mobilisation of knowledge. Rather than a single space, McKenzie et al. (2007; cited in Maddigan and Bloos, 2013) regard the library as a site that supports a variety of relationships; hence mapping the community is one of the most important actions to be taken. Also, in the context of social learning, interactivity and multimodality cannot be excluded from the library planning discussion due to their capacity for developing multiliteracies, a range of knowledge, skills and practices that the New London Group (1996) defined in order to understand learning in the 21st century. Digitisation has broadened possibilities in terms of informal learning, and most interestingly, as Juncker (2007) proposes, has turned libraries towards a reshaped pre-modern oral culture.

Then the article examined the treatment that young audiences have received in cultural policies. In this regard, the literature recommended considering children as being in the present rather than becoming future adults, as the audience development approach has been doing. In order to acknowledge the presentness of childhood and youth, cultural rights have to be internalised by the library, allowing young audiences ‘to take possession of the cultural forms on offer on their own terms and in their own right’ (Reason, 2010: 30).

The article continued with an outline of specific recommendations from the literature for engaging and retaining young audiences in the areas of programming, communication, partnerships and promotion of the library. Considering the aim of this review, it was found that promotion is essential for engaging new audiences, which is more effective when done through partnerships. Retaining those audiences is the responsibility of a strong and participative programme and a dynamic communication.

The final section was dedicated to the evaluation process, where the literature recommends measuring the impact of the library services in the community, which is fundamental to streamline all activities of the library and to reflect on the success or failure of programmes.

Aspects related to accessibility and physical space of the library had to be left aside; however, two ideas are worth mentioning at this point. Firstly, the majority of the literature consulted about libraries favours free access for the public to each of its services. In light of the definitions outlined regarding the 21st-century library, the LACYL must take up the role of an expressive cultural democracy, which as Juncker and Balling (2016) proposed, is an arena where heritage and voice are invited to interact. Guarantee of access for every citizen and future citizen, as children and youth are, is the first step in this important role. The following step is to promote cultural rights through a participative programme that invites young people to live and experience culture and reading in terms of their individualities and of their social interactions. Secondly, the physical space of the library should represent the voices that are being invited to participate, as well as the heritage the library promotes and offers to children and youth. As a Latin American library, the LACYL should embed the languages and the cultural differences of the region in its physical space.

Hosting the LACYL means for Chile to set a precedent for Latin American cultural integration and dissemination, and the inclusion of the immigrant communities is just another way to do so. By providing those foreign children and young people access to books and other media that represent their culture and language, the LACYL will create a path towards cultural identity.

Just as the International Youth Library and the Centre for Youth Literature aim both at a young and at an adult/professional audience, the LACYL has the opportunity to develop a cultural and learning centre for children and youth and, at the same time, a research and professional hub for the region. Created by Latin American people for the cultural needs of the region, the library should develop as an original and unique organisation where the voices of young people will be of primary interest.

Nevertheless, the task of engaging young audiences and making them regular visitors to the library is challenging. As it was demonstrated, it requires more than a good programme as well as more than a review of international experiences. A library needs to get to know the community’s young people, see what they see, and create with them based on that fresh and juvenile view.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Hereby, I, the author of the article Learning strategies for engagement and retention of young audiences, agree to submit the article to the IFLA Journal and confirm that the article is not currently being considered for publication by any other journal.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Advanced Human Capital Program of the Chilean National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) [grant no. 73170039].

Note

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