Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

9.8.09 | Far from becoming irrelevant in a digital world, libraries and museums are becoming critical stops in the vast learning network literally at youth’s fingertips today.

“In fact, all people today—youth and adults—spend the majority of their lives learning outside the walls of formal classrooms: in out-of-school programs, workplaces, internships, and other informal learning experiences such as those offered by libraries and museums,” according to a 2009 report from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute of Museum and Library Services called Museums, Libraries and 21st Century Skills.

The key is to create informal learning environments that build on the learners’ motivations and interests.

IMLS is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums in their mission to be centers of life-long learning. It has taken seriously President Obama’s call to promote a new set of skills to prepare youth for the future. The IMLS report identifies these skills in the context of libraries as:

• Critical thinking and problem-solving
• Creativity and innovation
• Communication and collaboration
• Cross-disciplinary thinking
• Visual literacy
• Science and numerical literacy
• Basic literacy
• Information literacy
• Media literacy
• Information, communications, and technology literacy (applying technology effectively)
• Life and career skills such as flexibility and adaptability, self-direction and initiative, and social and cultural skills, and leadership, among others

Integrating the New with the Traditional

Within this 21st-century model, libraries are emphasizing engagement and collaboration between and among libraries and their patrons. YOUmedia is one example of this. Teens are remixing the written word in music, video and other media. They are in essence recreating a work of creativity. The quest to remix and reimagine the stories on the library’s shelves has led teens to discover even more of the library’s collection, including its maps and most recently, its collection of vinyl jazz records.

As one teen said of the vinyl collection, “YOUmedia has given us unlimited resources to music other than what we’re already used to, so they’ll bring out records that we haven’t even heard of… so we can make something new out of something that was old.”

Sari Feldman, president of the Public Library Association, a division of the Chicago-based American Library Association, says libraries understand the need to change. Libraries of the future will devote less space to bookshelves and more space to computers that offer new ways for patrons to access traditional media—by downloading electronic books, for example—as well as allowing them to create their own media to share with other patrons. It’s the next logical step for libraries whose mission always has been to promote literacy. In the 21st century, that will be mean promoting literacy about new media.

Photo by: Mike Hawkins