Along the years, the Sister Libraries have been sending the activities they do in cooperation. We have arranged them according to complexity and time consuming.

Low complexity
  • Create a centre of interest: select and display books and information about the sister library’s country. It´s an opportunity to promote and present literature and authors from each country to the readers.  Create a bulletin board display with photos of your Sister Library, its staff and users.
  • Share basic information about each library: exchange photos and information about the library. you can make, for example, an exhibition, on-site or virtual.
  • Share photos of the city where the library is situated: share photos about life in the city, local holidays, local customs… Display photographs and tourist brochures about the sister library and their hometown.
  • Share ideas on library programs for specific targets: unemployed, children, young adults, babies and toddlers. Share long range plans and programming ideas
  • Celebrate ephemeris: Celebrate Europe day, national holidays, Library Day, International Literacy Day, and similar, and exchange photos of those activities.
Medium complexity
  • Exchange examples of good practices to help both libraries learn from their experiences.
  • Exchange exhibitions: exchange photo exhibitions about the town, traditional arts and crafts or historical documents from your local community. You can ask your users to provide the materials. Exchange children’s artwork and do displays in both countries.
  • Exchange library resources:  Send books of prominent national authors translated, local newspapers or books based on a profile of what the Sister Library wants. Exchange duplicate books that can be of interest to your sister library. Help each other select and buy good books and offer to purchase resources that are difficult to purchase in your Sister Library’s country.
  • Exchange local and cultural stuff: Send a scrapbook, children’s drawings, postcards from your village…
  • Organize a pen-pal (now key-pals) for library staff and users to learn about each other as individuals.
  • Create a parallel project involving their reading clubs: organize a cross-country “read the same book” discussion; pick a specific topic to focus and share resources and program reading clubs where the same books are read. It is possible to schedule book clubs in the mother tongue of the sister library’s country, promoting the use of online forums or other ways to communicate.
  • Organize meetings for language exchange: Schedule native speakers who are living in their partner country to give in-person presentations and slide shows. Organized literary contest of tales, stories, poems in the sister library’s mother tongue or related to the local customs or culture. To organize a contact list of users interested in learning the mother tongue of your sister library.
  • Organize cultural activities together with the sister library:  an art contest using Genially, a film forum and talks with selected movies from our sister library’s country; write texts, illustrate them and publish them jointly; conduct contests for the user with question about the country, the customs or classic literary works, organize a gamification activity.
High complexity
  • Boost a reading campaign. Organize activities to promote reading (summer reading challenges, marathons of tales, and similar). Share difficulties related to specific targets, like children’s and YA, rural population or people at risk of social exclusion and try to think and find solutions together. Set up books reading committees and exchange book reviews. Share reading guides with your sister library.
  • Create and feed blogs or social media profiles in collaboration where you can inform about your sistership and share some projects.
  • Share library training programs: Organize professional training courses for the staff, allow to participate in international meetings or attend an online seminar/conference. Share access to web-based online training programs and training materials, syllabi, handouts, workbooks. Promote debates about professional topics, for instance creating a listserv for the librarians involved in the sister libraries projects.
  • Agree to provide free searches and electronic ILLs to your partner: Allow one library users to register as users of the other library e-services.
  • Job shadowing. Professional exchange between the staff and community members of both libraries to share expertise with each other. Visit the sister library, getting familiar with each other’s collections, regular programs and services, meeting the staff, etc. You can apply to an Erasmus+ grant to cover the costs of this activity.