Family Reading Night

Each year our local elementary school held a family fun night. This year the parent teacher organization has decided to put the focus on reading, so it has become Family Reading Night. This is a welcome change, especially after reading this article about how less than half of children aged nine to 14 read fiction more than once a month.

The goal is to focus on award winning titles such as Caldecott Medal winner The Lion & the Mouse, Geisel Award winner Benny and Penny in the Big No-No!, Newbery Medal winner,When You Reach Me, and books by the Wilder Award winner, Ashley Bryan .

During this year’s Family Reading Night, the school will also announce the winner of the 2010 Family Reading Night Kids’ Choice Award. Entry boxes were placed in the school library, public library, and here at BayShore Books. The choices are:

Click Clack Moo, Cows That Type(Cronin)
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (Archambault/Martin)
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (Numeroff)
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (Scieszka/Smith)
How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? (Yolen)

Tough choices! Which would you choose? Or is there a favorite not on the list?

It would be great to see this idea spread to the middle school and high school, too. Even the entire city. Many communities, including Brown County, have One Book, One Community which is an initiative that brings communities together to read and discuss the same book. This is a partnership between the schools, libraries, and independent bookstores. What a great concept!

Library Community

The Concord Public Library, like many other libraries, couldn’t afford to purchase all the books they wanted due to budget cuts. So they began thinking outside the box and came up with a creative idea. Why not post a wish list so that patrons could purchase books to be donated to the library? It would be convenient for the customers and the library would receive the exact books they needed.

Great idea! If only they would have spent a little more time thinking about how to implement it. According to the owner of Gibson's Bookstore, Michael Herrmann, “The reason they had the problem was budget cuts, which are due to less revenue coming into the city…" Kind of a no-brainer, right? Apparently not.

The library director chose to post their wish list, not at the local independent bookstore, not even at the nearest chain bookstore, but online at the biggest competitor of these locals. “Their strategy to combat (the budget cuts) was basically to send money out of town. There seemed to be a real disconnect there…” Herrmann sent in a message to the people on his store's e-mail list, “In requesting donations through a national retailer, the city had neglected its traditional community partners while promoting a rival who neither pays city taxes nor employs city workers… In short, if you try to support the library by buying books from (online retailer), you are actually harming the library in small but significant ways."

Herrmann found another solution. He included links to the list of desired books in the e-mail and asked for potential donors to choose the titles they would like to buy. The list, which was posted online for a month and sold four books, was completely filled within 24 hours through Gibson’s. Herrmann then sent out a list of books requested for the Penacook branch and those were sold as well. Not too surprising since the customers of the local independent bookstores and the patrons of the local libraries are most likely one and the same. As librarian Brian Herzog points out, “Library communities are not just the people who come through the door, and certainly not just the people who visit the website. When libraries reach out to the community, we have to go to where the community is, and not just wait for them to come to us.”

After the feedback the library received over their decision, they now include the local bookstores when posting their wish lists.

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