Promoting reading 1
small but methodologically stringent body of quan
titative research in the area. Such programmes have demonstrated high efficacy in terms of both improving children’s literacy and parents’ capacity to give their children support. Four factors determine the success of a project, according to the report: financing, the quality of the project, collaboration, and research into the efficacy of the methods used. Some projects add a fifth factor: support by media. A new project ought to have two pilots: a first in order to gain knowledge about what adjustments need to be made to satisfy the needs of the participants; and a second to evaluate the project’s efficacy. The main question to be asked in the implementation of a reading promotion project is not whether it will work, since most projects tend to work to some degree. The question that should be asked instead is how well the project worked in comparison with other feasible alternatives. Interestingly, the report observes that family literacy initiatives exhibit greater efficacy than many of the pedagogical interventions carried out within the school setting. Nor do they need to compete with school-based intervention programmes, but may instead be a complement for improving the child’s reading ability. Book gifting Since children’s librarians were established throughout Sweden in the 1960s and 70s, there has been a long tradition among them, of outreach with reading promotion methods. In the twenty-first century, libraries have increasingly focused on the very young, with library environments having been adapted in particular to small children and their parents. One of the most common outreach tasks of public libraries in Sweden is to distribute free book packs and organise parent groups in collaboration with child health centres (barnavårdscentralen – BVC), work that has been going on for decades (Corneliuson 2007). This collaboration generally includes the participation of children’s librarians in parent education. The report Dags att höja ribban!? (Time to raise the bar!?) (Rydsjö 2012) reviewed and compiled a number of studies of projects and activities carried out in this collaboration between child health centres and libraries, with the aim of stimulating the language development of small children. Sweden’s Library Act stipulates that public libraries are to pay particular attention to children and adolescents in order to further their language development and stimulate their reading. One of the tasks of child health centres is to check, support and monitor the child’s language development. As Rydsjö points out, these two public institutions – the library and the child health centre – are brought together in this common task. In order to clarify the degrees of collaboration between libraries and child health centres, a proposal for its taxonomy has been drawn up, describing seven different levels, the highest of which entails joint planning, implementation and evaluation of activities, with the lowest level being that the child health centre simply serves as a channel for the library’s information (Ögland et al. 2010). An extended charting and description of the current status of this collaboration between public libraries and child health centres in Sweden indicate that Swedish libraries and child health centres are collaborating when it comes to free book packs, but that deeper, long-term partnerships that are monitored and evaluated are uncommon (Lundh & Michnik 2014). The most common method of collaboration between child health centres and libraries involves the distribution of free book packs to children under two years of age 31