Monthly Archives: March 2012

2012 IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award Winners Announced

The IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award is given every two years to two projects and presented to the winners at the biennial IBBY Congress. Each nominated project is targeted to children who live in disadvantageous circumstances with no or little access to books.

The two winners for 2012 are Abuelas Cuentacuentos – The Grandmother Storytelling Programme, Argentina and SIPAR, Cambodia.

SIPAR began as a Franco/Cambodian association in 1982 to help Cambodian refugees living on the Cambodian/Thai border during the Khmer Rouge regime. When the government fell, SIPAR helped to rebuild the educational network and by 1993 was focussing its activities on reading including organizing libraries all over Cambodia and setting up rural reading centres. From 1993 to 2011 more than 1,000 librarians were trained in the SIPAR workshops. Recently the Cambodian Ministry of Education has taken over the network.

By 2000 it was very noticeable that there were no Cambodian children’s books in the libraries and the SIPAR staff were translating the donated foreign books and sticking the texts in Khmer in the books. During the regime of the Khmer Rouge all books had been destroyed and the creators had been killed. There were no publishing houses left in the country. In 2000, SIPAR started running training workshops for publishing, writing and illustration, mostly for children’s books. Today SIPAR has a small publishing department that is run by Cambodians. They have published 70 titles, and printed 130,000 free copies for the 200 SIPAR libraries and the students at the teacher training colleges for primary schools.

The IBBY Jury was impressed by the work done over the last twenty years as well as by the long-term training aspect of SIPAR that will build a book culture and thus answer a very big need for literacy in Cambodia. The work is sustainable and able to bring local language books to Cambodia.

Abuelas Cuentacuentos – The Grandmother’s Storytelling Programme in Argentina is organized by the Mempo Giardinelli Foundation (FMG) and engages older persons who like to read stories to children. Specialized personnel at the Foundation train volunteers and organize programmes in many schools in the metropolitan area of the city of Resistencia the capital and largest city in the province of Chaco, in northeastern Argentina.

This programme promotes reading, while at the same time it takes literature to thousands of the poorest children, many of them living in marginal communities. Abuelas Cuentacuentos has created opportunities for exchanges across generations, thus is not only beneficial to the children, but also has an important impact on the self-esteem of the grandmothers. The volunteers, mainly unemployed women between the ages of 50 and 70, have found that this programme is a new and productive way of using their time and their capacity to give affection through their new role of storyteller.

The project impressed the IBBY jury by its simple and original approach to reading promotion. The programme is easy to replicate and is sustainable over a long period. The promotion of intergeneration interaction is another aspect that gives it effective and emotional dimensions that are beneficial to both the children and the grandmothers.

Congratulations to these excellent two projects.

New report: How public libraries contribute towards reaching the Millenium Development Goals

The Beyond Access initiative has just published a new report showing how libraries are helping to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs):

Libraries powering development: How public libraries contribute towards reaching the Millenium Development Goals

Featuring stories from about twenty different libraries around the world, the report emphasizes the role that libraries are taking in powering development.

Here are a few examples:

* In Guatemala, the Chiche Community Library offers an early childhood literacy and nutrition class to teach new parents child care and nutrition.

* In Zambia, open access Lubuto public libraries reach large numbers of the country’s street children, orphans and other vulnerable children who are largely not enrolled in school.

* In Kenya, the Kenya National Library Service is helping to prevent deaths during pregnancy, birth or unsafe abortions by providing healthcare providers with knowledge on how to correctly apply simple, inexpensive interventions.

* In Botswana, the Ramotswa Public Library in southeastern Botswana is playing an active role in reducing the impact HIV/AIDS has in the community by partnering with the District HIV/AIDS committee on a “Lifeline Project” to help educate young people, ages 14-30, about important health issues.

* In Jamaica, the Jamaica Library Service introduced public access computers in over 100 public libraries.

 

New book on school libraries around the world

Farmer, L. (Ed.). (2012). Youth-serving libraries in Japan, Russia, and the United States. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.  ISBN 978-0-8108-8225-6

In recent years, interest in International Librarianship has grown rapidly and will continue to grow as globalization influences education and librarianship. In countries around the world, public and school libraries have unique roles and their staffs collaborate across types of libraries to varying degrees. Library staff preparation, training, and ongoing learning and organization of youth-serving librarians mirror each country’s values and priorities.

The essays in Youth-Serving Libraries in Japan, Russia, and the United States address the universal and culture-specific aspects of library services to children and teens in these three countries. This collection shows how libraries have developed in light of each country’s political, educational, and social history. They examine how government and citizen roles in youth-serving libraries also reflect culturally defined social structures. The chapters highlight unique collections and services within each country and also show how librarians deal with the challenges they encounter, both from within their culture as well as from outside—including natural disasters. Each country’s authors discuss contemporary issues that face youth-serving libraries, such as information literacy, reading in a multimedia world, and the overarching influence of technology.

Editor Lesley S. J. Farmer coordinates the Library Media Teacher program at California State University Long Beach, where she also serves as a reference librarian for the university’s library. She is the author and co-author of numerous books, including Technology Infused Instruction for the Educational Community (Scarecrow, 2004) and Information Literacy Assessment in K-12 Settings (Scarecrow, 2007).

Associate Editor Natalia Gendina is professor for the department of information technology at Kemerovo State University of Culture and Arts in Russia and directs the Information Technology Research Institute of Social Sphere.

Associated Editor Yuriko Nakamura is associate professor at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. Nakamura has published several books and academic papers. She has been working as a committee member of the School Libraries and Resource Centers Section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions since 2005, and serves as Information Officer for the section.