Carol Tilley, GSLIS assistant professor, has been selected to give the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) Past Presidents’ Paper Presentation at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in January 2013. The award includes $1,500 to fund travel and registration costs.
The YALSA Past Presidents’ Paper Presentation is an annual event at which librarians, educators, and students examine a topic affecting young adult services. Tilley’s paper, “Comics: A Once-Missed Opportunity,” traces the readership, publication, collection, and promotion of comics in the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the present day:
This paper will provide a broad historical overview of young people’s comics readership in the United States from the mid-twentieth century – a period when more than eighty percent of all adolescents read comics regularly, despite many librarians’ attempts to discourage this practice – to the present day, a time of burgeoning interest in getting comics in the hands of young readers.
A variety of sources from published surveys of comics readership, relevant comics and other archival collections, descriptions of reading promotion and guidance activities related to comics, and even recently conducted interviews with adults who were comics readers as youth during the 1940s and 1950s will inform the synthesis and analysis for this paper.
Beyond delineating the important historical trajectory of young people’s comics reading, this paper will also encourage today’s youth services librarians and scholars to consider how we might apply the important insights about key areas such as information seeking, civic engagement, and pleasure reading to be gained from studying comics readership to enhancing the services and resources we provide young people in public and school libraries.
Tilley’s paper will be published in the Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults, YALSA’s peer-reviewed journal, after the conference.