Your Local Library and MySpace:
How the Goshen Public Library is Helping Teens Make Informed Choices Online

MySpace is The most popular social networking sites on the Internet. With its growing popularity, MySpace has also faced much controversy due to safety issues regarding teens and Internet predators. With the millions of users on MySpace, we here at the Goshen Public Library have decided to brave the nebulous cyber-world of MySpace and create our own profile on the site, which can be found at http://www.myspace.com/goshenpubliclibrary.

Geared to a teenaged audience, Goshen's MySpace friends include Goshen patrons, other public libraries' teen departments, and many acclaimed teen fiction and comic book writers. We also link to teen book reviews from our staff, to our teen blog (http://teens.goshenpubliclibrary.org), our website, and our on-line events calendar. Since we have started our profile in this past February, we have thirty-nine friends, and growing, and have had positive comments left on our profile from Printz Award nominee K.L. Going and highly lauded teen author Brent Hartinger.

Through the Goshen Public Library MySpace profile, teens have the opportunity to network and connect to their favorite authors and other teen library departments in different states--an opportunity that they may not have had otherwise.

For parents: this profile--which is consistently monitored both by the library's network administrator and the teen librarian--provides a positive, safe and non-threatening cyber-environment for your kids to explore. MySpace does not need to be a site of ill-repute. And the more public libraries, and other organizations who have positive messages and advocate for teens, join the site the more potential it will have to be an efficacious and rewarding online community for teens and adults alike.
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