The Bookseller.com

5th December 2008

Tabloid campaign to recruit library users

08.02.08 Benedicte Page

A nationwide campaign to boost public library membership will launch in April, with a standardised library joining form to be issued in a tabloid newspaper.

The ambitious drive is part of the National Year of Reading, and will be launched by the as-yet-unnamed news­paper in conjunction with a two-week national and regional­ radio campaign run out of the Department for Children, Schools & Families, which will call on people to join their local library.

NYR project director Honor Wilson-Fletcher said the “country-wide, standardised and ­simple” library joining form would also be available digitally from the NYR website, a social networking site and in a special national newspaper supplement in the summer. Wilson-Fletcher is also in talks with high street partners. “Local libraries will use the same form, and we will reprint it throughout the year,” she added.

Further campaign advertising will run in magazines ­targeted at young mothers. “The clear message is, ‘Whatever you want to do for the National Year of Reading, you can do for free—just join your library’,” she said.

Library joiners will receive a membership pack including a range of materials to help them understand what libraries offer, together with a free, specially commissioned guide to books for children and teenagers with a 250,000 print run. The B-format guide will offer a choice of books for children aged seven to 14 years old. “Hopefully, this will lead into the promotion of the Summer Reading challenge,” said Wilson-Fletcher. “That reached around 800,000 last year and we want to push that to over a million.”

Wilson-Fletcher said the membership campaign represented “a unique opportunity for public libraries to attract and retain new members, with strategies to make people join, and then look after people so that they stay in the library system”. She added: “We have had the absolute support of the sector, and both the SCL [Society of Chief Librarians] and the Museum, Libraries & Archives Council have been fantastic.”

The library membership campaign will the first of two major initiatives dominating the NYR. The second is a volunteering campaign scheduled for the autumn.

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