The Bookseller.com

5th December 2008

« Headlines

Library campaign could become annual

18.06.08 Benedicte Page

The National Join a Library Day campaign, which was held in April as part of the National Year of Reading, may become an annual event after statistics showed big membership rises across the country.

NYR project director Honor Wilson-Fletcher said that the campaign had gone "awesomely well". "We set a target for the eight months [from April to December] of 350,000 new library members and we hit that target in less than two months," she said. "The Society of Chief Librarians has now increased the target to half a million."

Average membership across library authorities was up 24% in April on figures for the previous year, said Wilson-Fletcher, with the star authorities being Cumbria, Oldham and Derbyshire which all saw membership increases of over 100%. "It's down to a mix of local activity and national campaigning, and we will be doing more work to support libraries in reaching our target audiences both with the Summer Reading Challenge and with adult learning enrolment in the autumn."

Wilson-Fletcher added that there had been unanimous support for repeating the library membership campaign by the 13 local authorities approached by the NYR on the issue. "There is considerable enthusiasm for making it an annual event," she said.

Benedicte Page libraries National Join a Library Day