An friend told me to read a blog from Susan Brown, Chap Hill Library, North Carolina USA.

The titel was:
Are we solving a library problem ? Or are we helping solve a community problem?

This is so close to my how my work has been the last months .Talking to the police, guardians, social workers and politicians. Sometimes the librarians are very worried about that the adolescens dont visit the libraries .How can we make the library attractive to them.? Now in my case the library has around 30-40 youth coming every day after school because we are a good place in the city. And they dont have anything else to go to. Of course we also have
the homeless and drogs addicted also? And all ordinarie visitors as babies and order people. Thats our
Strenghness in the libraries.
Our library is not built for this large groups of youth so we have to start thinking of how the visitors use our libraries nowadays.

Some other subjects I’m thinking of and discussing with others are:
If we are solving a lot of community problems is this maybe a way for us to show us in the community and for politicians? We are a place who works with helping the community to solving problems.But do we have the right people for this or do we really need people with other education ?

IFLA Public Liibraries Section are going to have a
meeting soon and I really would like to dicuss this
Issues with my collegues in the Section.

Last week I have been to some nice, inspirng and interesting meetings. On meeting  was about literacy in Sweden comparing to the Netherlandes. Adriaan  Langendok from IFLA s Section for Literacy and Reading talked about Bookstart works in the Netherlandes.To representatives from the Swedish Art Council spoke about the new possibilities to work with literacy for children. Now its possibilities to search  for new foundings to begin with Bookstart in Swden.

Bookstart is aimed to children up to three years old and their parents.The goal is to stimulate  the youngest children’s languages development and interest for reading.The strenght of this project are that it will be in  cooperation with Child  Carecenter and preschools and the Libraries.

A few Libraries in Sweden are already trying modell for this work.

www.kulturradet.se

Similary project are going on in UK and Japan and other countries too.

www.booktrust.org.uk

www.bookstart.or.jp

So now we are discussing in my Libraries  what kind of model of Bookstart we will  try to search money for. We really want to cooperate with Children’s Care center.

How many of you has Bookstart in your countries?

Anette Mjöberg

Library Director  Hässleholms bibliotek , Sweden

Hello

Here in Sweden the government has unexpectedly decided to

make a committment to strenghthen  the Public Libraries for 3 years.

The Swedish CulturalCouncil is commissioned to allocate SEK 225

million.This is still great news among Public libraries that offer great

opportunities for strenghthen and developing our libraries.

I,m a Library Director in Hässleholms municipality and we have not yet decide what we want to do and what to write in our application.But I,m thinking about developed on more branch library to a library with self- service and open 77 hours  every week.We just have one library

with this service. We will se but I,m sure that many new good library

activities will come. It will be exting to follow this development in our Public Libraries in Sweden During the next  3 years.

Anette Mjöberg , Hässleholms Public Library, Sweden