Library as a lifestyle – new standards of the young people’s library behavior, Russia

Every country has its own standards and specifics regulating a young person behavior in a public library, which particularly depends on the philosophy of a library towards its young patrons. You are unlikely to find a special “youth area” in a Russian library, while it is the common practice in the USA and is widespread all around the world. However Russia is nearly the only country to have a network of regional specialized libraries for young adults, which has been operating for more than 40 years. Russian State Library for Young Adults is the methodical center for all public libraries dealing with young people in Russia. For young people of today the familiar image of a library in Russia is rather poor: it is a library strictly divided into two zones – the lending library and the reading zone, where only 30% of collection are in the open access, where the most items are out of date and new arrivals are rare, where you can use the internet but there is no Wi-Fi or remote access to digital libraries, where one can hear “No” and “You are not allowed to do this” much more often than “Yes, sure”. This presentation discovers how the changes in a library influence the changes in the library behavior of its young customers taking as an example Russian State Library for Young Adults, which has been recently updated and modernized.