Illescas Municipal Library is the last Spanish library to join the program. They’ve come out with an idea for an activity and are looking for other Sister Libraries to team up with them in order to implement it.

In Illescas, their town (26,672 population), there’s  a very active community involved in reading clubs: there’s a club at the library but also one at the women’s centre and one at the old people’s home, plus 2 clubs for reading in English: one for kids between 8 and 12 and another for young adults, 16+

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They want to establish links between the members of reading clubs from different libraries in different countries so they can share information about the books they’ve read, preferred authors, local authors, to tell the rest about local legends or folk tales.

The activity could be organized as follows:

One library, coordinator of the club, would be in charge for the distribution and management of the correspondence from each member of the club. This library would request information about a topic (favourite local author, for example) to the other members, who’d write a letter in English (if it’s the common language). The coordinator would compile this information and edit it so each member of the club can use this material in their local clubs. This could be used for a range of activities, like parallel readings, competitions, etc.

The idea behind this activity is to enable the interchange of different perspectives and literary interests. There are a lot of reading clubs all around the world, different ways of interpret and understand literature. Do Portuguese kids read also Roald Dahl? Which is Croatian children’s favourite book? What is Finnish most popular folk tale?

Here’s an opportunity for enriching our local reading clubs through the cooperation with other libraries from different countries, also to know a little better other countries through literature.

Do you like the idea?  You can contact them directly at patricia.robas@illescas.es, write to naple.sisterlibraries@gmail.com  or to your national representative

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