Dreaming of Summer!
Well you would be dreaming of summer when the temperature has dropped below 10 degrees again and everything is covered with a fine layer of red dust following the wild winds last night!
In the world of libraries summer can be a quiet period as our major client groups go on holidays. However in the public library sector it’s time to rev up for the Summer Reading Club! This year’s theme “Read on the Wild Side” has enormous possibilities for our ever enthusiastic and creative children’s librarians. Without having even spoken to them I know that my collegaues up the highway at Macquarie Regional Library will be planning something in conjunction with the Western Plains Zoo - I think it’s the monkey on the web site that inspires this confidence!
Together with Library Lovers’ Day, Australian Library and Information Week and National Simultaneous Storytime the Summer Reading Club is one of ALIA’s major campaigns. but do these campaigns count as advocacy? That’s one of the questions we’re posing at this years National Advisory Congress. Mylee Joseph has written an thought provoking submission on this topic which I would encourage you to read. If the NAC roadshow hasn’t yet reached your town there’s still time to participate.
Love it or hate it there is no doubt in my mind that the Summer Reading Club has real impact at a local level positioning the public library as a major player in the “summer fun” sphere. Combine this with the media exposure that a news slow period provides and you have the makings of an awareness campaign.
My recent visit to England coincided with the wind up of Quest Seekers, the 2009 Summer Reading Challenge. It had an amazing fantasy theme where participants were in search of the “golden” book, at their local library. One of the requirements for a read to be “recorded’ was for participants to talk about the books they’d read to a member of library staff. I can almost sense your reaction “how much time would that take!”, as it was my first thought too. However having spoken to my UK colleagues about the benefits of this approach, and seeing first hand the delight that my neice Lily had in telling the Librarian at her local library about the books she’d read I changed my mind. Some of the larger services were using volunteers to assist and one library I visited had a special “Quest Lounge” where you could wait - a bit like the Drs but a whole lot more fun, which is what reading’s all about.
Cheers
Jan Richards
ALIA President