Teens (website) - Wellington City Libraries

Author: Wellington City Libraries
Title: Teens
Age range: 13 - 17
Genre: Website
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5

Description: This website from New Zealand has been designed with teens in mind, but does not offer many obvious ways for teens to get involved with helping to influence the content. There is extensive coverage of environmental topics with lots of resources to external information and sites. The teen blog is updated once a day and often more (by library staff), with current events, highlighted collection materials, books on film coverage, new books and music, and video clips, such as a recent one highlighting Earth Hour. Entries on new books often have a brief synopsis of the title posted as well. The blog is colourful and interactive, with videos to click on and lots of links to items in the collection as well as tags to help with browsing (in both list and cloud formats). Plus users can comment on blog posts. The tone of the entries that I perused on the blog are light-hearted and fun, which I think would attract teens and hopefully keep them reading on a regular basis.

One section of the teen area of the library website is called ‘Foundations.’ This includes graffiti, MCing, DJing, and dancing information, but it is difficult to tell how current the content is, as no dates are given. Each section has a spotlight on (and sometimes comments from) a local artist or musician involved in the related activity. This looks like a relevant and fun area for teens to find info about these ‘Foundations,’ but keeping the information current might be a challenge. These topics are very current and if the information gets outdated it could detract from the credibility of the site as a whole.

There is a homework help section of the website, but it’s not immediately obvious because it’s not included in the home page series of highlighted links. It is included at the bottom in a less obvious horizontal list of links, as well as in a drop-down menu across the top under ‘Your library / Teens / Study stop’ – so there are three levels of menu to navigate before finding the study page this way. The coverage of subjects looks pretty basic, though the formatting is attractive once you’ve reached the page. All links go to external homework help websites.

Comments: Overall, this is an attractive teen website. There is a good use of space, without filling the whole page full of text and images. Even with a number of lists of links, archived posts, tags and books lists, the page doesn’t look crammed full of information, which could be off-putting. Some of the content is updated frequently, and some of it is impossible to date, so it is not clear how new it is. This website has a lot of promise and hopefully it will continue to get developed and promoted to teens so that they continue visiting and also perhaps get a chance to contribute in the future. There is an image linking to a page where teens can read about submitting their art work to be included on the site, but this art page is not linked through the regular menus as far as I can see, and so it is difficult to know how much activity is going on around this idea of including teen artist in the website content. It does appear that the library staff care about developing this section of the library website to appeal to teens, which is great!

Date Viewed: 3 April 2009