Children's Reading Partners
Children's Reading Partners is the new partnership we are brokering between children's librarians and children's publishers.
We started with a partnership between librarians and publishers of books for adults and, thanks to the lessons we learnt through that partnership, have now been able to develop a partnership between publishers of children's titles and libraries who are developing their work with children.
Children's Reading Partners seeks to foster greater collaboration between publishers and libraries so that we can widen children's access to and enrich their experience of books, authors and reading resources.
Children's Reading Partners roadshow
Newcastle City Library will be hosting the third Children's Reading Partners Roadshow on Tuesday 1 December 2009. Like our other Roadshows this will be an excellent staff development and networking opportunity for librarians, publishers and writers. Forty librarians will be attending along with 10 CRP publishers and authors such as Keith Grey and Barry Hutchison. Attendees will be able to explore ideas for local collaborations including events and promotions.
"The Oxford Roadshow was a fantastic CPD opportunity for children's librarians who, perhaps, do not get to participate in book selection any more. The opportunity to hear about forthcoming highlights and to meet the authors was really inspiring" Joy Court, 2009 Chair of YLG and Learning Resources Manager Coventry City Council
The second Roadshow took place at OUP's offices on the 13 August and was attended by 52 librarians representing 32 authorities. Evaluations from librarians following the event were overwhelmingly positive. They talked about the uniqueness of the opportunity and the renewed enthusiasm that it gave them for promoting children's books to children in libraries. Publishers were very pleased with the turnout, the opportunity to market directly to librarians and build contacts and the interest and enthusiasm from the librarians. There was a tangible buzz at the event and both publishers and librarians came away having learned something new about the other. Children's Reading Partners will be holding three of these events a year in different parts of the country.
Background
We launched Children's Reading Partners in May 2008 as a two year pilot. We did this in response to a new understanding in the book trade of the significance of libraries' work with young readers and as a way of building on the successes of the original Reading Partners for adults.
We are lucky enough to have in the main body of the partnership 13 publishers (including one consortium of several independents) and 12 library representatives for the regions of the UK. The 13 publishers are:
- Bloomsbury
- Bounce
- Egmont
- Faber
- Hachette
- HarperCollins
- Macmillan
- Oxford University Press
- Puffin
- Random House
- Scholastic
- Simon and Schuster
- Walker
Children's Reading Partners also has the very active support of The Publishers' Association, the Youth Libraries' Group and ASCEL - from which we reap enormous benefits.
Children's Reading Partners is an experiment and it's evolving but so far it is proving to be a great success. As well as reaching across the entire library network through the regional representatives, Children's Reading Partners is also feeding into some of our other projects for children and young people such as Chatterbooks, Headspace and our new young people's website groupthing.org. We are also putting individual publishers and regional library representatives together so that they can work closely together and get the most out of the collaboration.
Please get in touch if you would like to find out more.
Resources
Reading Agency links
Contact
Naomi Danquah, children and young people's project mamager naomi.danquah@readingagency.org.uk