Picking the Flowers in the "Fair Garden": The Circulation, Non-Circulation, and Disappearance of Young Adult Nonfiction Materials

Research and practitioner publications offer indications of the importance of nonfiction materials to young adult information needs. The present study attempts to discern patterns of adolescent information seeking by analyzing reports of unused and underused materials in the young adult collections of an individual library system. Such an approach contributes to a fuller picture of adolescent information seeking behaviors by complementing existing survey or interview-based research. The analysis shows high use of materials in areas that are nonetheless flagged by computer analysis as non-circulating. Collection analysis indicates that there is evidence that high-use items disappear from the collection at significant rates, that these items have monetary value, and that they cover topics ranging from sex and drugs to rock stars. Introduction The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts: The Library and the Young Adult (Edwards, 1969) argued the need to offer a full range of materials to young adult library users, and today, accounts of young adult collections indicate that the seeds sown by Edwards have taken root. Services and materials for young adults in the United States are growing, and many libraries now offer younger readers a garden of their own. The question emerges, then, of what use young adults make of these offerings. To address this question, this analysis examines the results of an in-house assessment of young adult nonfiction in a large metropolitan library on the East coast of the US. Library service is provided to a county of approximately 200,000 residents. The most recently available census data indicate that the county's residents, nearly 30% of whom were born outside the US, have diverse cultural and ethnic origins. The county's population is still largely white (just under 70%), with significant representations of Hispanics and Latinos (together totaling almost 20%) and African Americans and Asian Americans (each nearing 10% of the total county population). The county's young adults among the approximately 16,500 residents are between the ages of 5 and 17. In 1999, approximately 9% of the young people in this county lived in families whose earnings were below the poverty level; it should be noted, though, that the proportion of students qualifying for free or reduced-cost lunches in county schools is significantly higher. This community, then, represents both racial and ethnic, as well as economic, diversity. Although a developing body of literature addresses cognitive and communicative aspects of young adults' information seeking behaviors (KuIthau, 1993; Ross, 1999; Julien, 1999), less is known about broader patterns of information use as reflected by use or apparent failure to make use of materials in a library's collection. This is the case despite Lukenbill's (1979) observation nearly 25 years ago that "we are beginning to collect data on the information needs and the information seeking habits of young adults in relation to topics such as sex, drugs, and career-information" (p. 194). There are a number of reasons for gaps in our understanding of this aspect of information use. Latrobe and Havener (1997) observe the tendency of library research on young adults to focus on information seeking behaviors over information needs, which inherently directs attention away from resources needed or used. Further, some work in this area is exclusively bibliographic and does not account for whether users even encounter the material (Gross, 1997). There is the added complication that some valuable work on particular areas of information needs, such as health-related concerns, is done by nonLIS researchers and does not ask questions about librarians as intermediaries or libraries as information sources (Alan Guttmacher Institute, 2003). Studies have focused attention on library use and non-use for specific types of information needs. In this category is the work of Julien (1999) on adolescent information needs for career-related decisions, which found that many of the youth surveyed were unable to identify appropriate sources of information and perceived traditional information sources, including libraries, as unhelpful. …