I commented before that some of the "Library campaigners" appear to be actually campaigning against the improvement of library services. The example I chose was our pilot for school library cards, which has now made some progress.
We have so far had 13, mostly primary, schools express an interest and several hundred pupils actually signed up. As far as I know, this is the only pilot of its kind in the country. Portsmouth has a scheme to get all their pupils to have a library card, but I don't think they follow it up in the way that we plan to. We think that simply giving people a card doesn't necessarily mean that they will use it, so we are following up with the schools either to get them to arrange class visits, or to take part in an outreach service which brings books to the school, with some story telling element. Hopefully this will get the pupils to be embued with a library culture, and a love of reading. Of course, reading for pleasure is highly correlated with educational attainment.
Had we gone down the route of simply cutting opening hours and book stock, I don't believe a pilot like this would have even been on the cards.
No comments:
Post a Comment