Look up the Six Book Challenge on The Reading Agency website, if u are not familiar with it. V successful packageyou can use for a good part of your target audience.
Also Sutton and Kensington - see story from CILIP Update, Oct 2010:
A SIMPLE SCHEME to put books in
police cells is demonstrating the kind of ‘value and impact’ that public libraries are desperate to prove (see p. 9).
Librarians at Kensington & Chelsea have used the Generic Social Outcomes measures (GLO) devised by MLA (Museums, Libraries & Archives Council) to show its success, and its wider benefit to the
community.
The basic idea was devised by Sutton Libraries, which maintains small collections in workplaces. Word spread, and the Detainees’ Officer at Sutton police station asked for a book service. Good idea, agreed Anita Myatt, Principal Librarian (Reading).
Books are simply kept at the desk in the holding cells. Result: a calmer atmosphere and ‘markedly improved’ behaviour in the cells.
The idea was picked up at a London
Libraries conference by Kensington & Chelsea’s Head of Library Service, Jane Battye. Sally Connew, Senior Librarian (Stock), contacted local police – ‘they were enthusiastic and keen to start straight away’.
Now there are books at Chelsea and Notting Hill Gate police stations. The library service sees it as ‘a service in return for help the police service gives us, whilst introducing books to people who may not be regular readers’.
The books supplied, in both boroughs, include basic skills, quick reads, graphic novels, popular fiction and non-fiction, and a few magazines. Up to 50 books are kept in each police station, replenished every two or three months. All the stock has been withdrawn from libraries, but is in reasonable condition. Sutton also offers stock to family and friends waiting for detainees.
A Sutton officer says: ‘We have all noticed that the long-term detainees are a lot more relaxed and calm. They treat the gaolers with more respect and are even thanking us on leaving.
‘A lot of detainees are enjoying reading the books so much that they ask to take them with them.’
Chief Inspector Alan Hodges, Kensington & Chelsea, adds: ‘It has been a calming effect just to offer a book sometimes, even if they do not make use of them.’
And it’s all measured up in GLOs, too.
On 28 Jan 2011, at 15:22, Bernadette Main wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Subject: Workplace library collections
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Here in Cumbria we are considering linking up with some of the main emplo=
yers in the County to set up book collections in the workplace for emplo=
yees - resourced and managed by the public library service.
Have any other authorities actually managed this kind of initiative as a =
project? Would you consider sharing how you managed it and if it was su=
ccessful?
I will be happy to summarise responses for the List.
Many thanks
Bernadette Main
Customer Services Manager
Cumbria Library Service