Promoting reading 1
library as a cultural centre, centre of knowledge
, information centre, and social hub. The Danish Ministry of Culture’s report Fremtidens biblioteksbetjening af børn (Future library services for children) (Enemark & Poulsen 2008) emphasises that in future, the children’s library ought to be a place where you can be, learn and do. Two Danish library researchers, Casper Hvenegaard Rasmussen and Henrik Jochumsen (2010), have discussed what this might mean in concrete terms for the design of the library space. They describe a historical process from the 1930s to the present day in which library services for children and young people have changed from having been an extension of the school and an information service to promoting children’s own interests more and more, within a less restrictive institutional framework. In parallel with this development, there has been a shift in how we view children – from having been regarded adults in the making (becomings), they are now seen to be very much beings in their own right. As indicators of this development, Rasmussen and Jochumsen mention that books are supplemented with other media, the concept of quality has been broadened, and educational activities are combined and supplemented with play, gatherings, and experiences. This in turn affects the design of the library space, which has less and less of an institutional character. Rasmussen and Jochumsen describe how the library space has evolved from having been a collection of books to becoming a much more alive and versatile institution grouping together the individual user and media, culture and other users – a development which has been summed up in the phrase from collection to connection. They compare what was the traditional library with a supermarket in the sense that both constitute a rationally organised warehouse for goods and for books, respectively, where the visitor usually has an idea in advance of what to take home. The library as a place to be means an expansion of the library’s function as purely a lender of books and other media. This expansion has been deemed necessary not least due to the fact that the library’s function as a lender of books and other media has shrunk in pace with information, knowledge and experiences being digitised. The fact that the activities of children’s and young people’s libraries have shifted their focus from content and collections to engagement with the library’s users has meant in particular an increased interest in the design and architecture of libraries – as evidenced by, for example, the anthology Designing Library Space for Children, which is part of the IFLA Publications Series (Bon et al. 2012). The staging of the library in terms of its content can be counted as part of the library’s reading promotion efforts, that is, the library’s more active role in giving users advice and encouraging reading, broadening their reading horizons, or simply making it easier for them to make choices. The idea of the library as a place to be is interesting in this context. Traditionally, the library was largely designed for users who knew what they were looking for in advance. But since a significant proportion of visitors to public libraries are not goal-oriented borrowers – or borrowers at all – library research has begun to discuss the idea of serendipity, meaning opportunities for serendipitous discoveries in the material. Thus, Danish library researcher Lennart Björneborn (2008) expects a number of serendipity factors to be included in the physical design of the library. Factors that make it easier for users to make new and unexpected discoveries include arrangements of material that make it easy to study material found in the here and now, which Björneborn calls “stopability”. It should also be noted that orienta86