Being able to criss-cross the globe on the strength of the Internet has made it possible to engage with creative ideas, conversations, and experiences which otherwise would be beyond our reach—and at times, even beyond our imagination. On The Same Page will bring to the reader of Torchlight, a combination of textual-audio-visual curated content, about and around libraries and bookish love.
Shape-shifting Libraries
1986 FIFA World Cup Mexico quarter final. An audacious “Hand of God” goal scored by legendary Diego Maradona against England, makes football history. For the uninitiated—the goal that Maradona scored against the formidable English team remains controversial; some saw it as divine intervention while others thought of it as plain foul play. The goal was scored by sleight of hand; the rules of the game had been defied! If you are an avid reader with little or no interest in sports, you may well ask with some degree of impatience, what is the point of this trivia in a journal about libraries and bookish love?
For many parents and teachers, Reading and Sports have been viewed as, arguably, the perfect hobby combination to bridge the mind-body divide in a child’s development. The reality is that most children as they move into teenage years, become devoted to one or the other. Soon enough, signs of an unanticipated malady begin to surface. Those wedded to a sport or fitness won’t pick up books and those wedded to reading won’t put down books! (In the latter case, addiction to digital reading devices has added another worrying dimension.) To return to the earlier question…
Cut to 2008. Inspired by the “Hand of God” goal, a soccer aficionado-cum-librarian presents a paper at the International Federation of Library Associations Conference. Determined to tackle the stereotype that football players are not interested in books, Stig Elvis Furset of the Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority, Oslo, introduced the idea of a “locker-room librarian.” What matters most, according to Furset, is for a librarian to be able to evoke in football players an emotional response to reading (much like Maradona’s goal did for the audience towards football). He saw the “locker-room librarian” as a key figure who can promote literature directly through a space that librarians customarily do not enter, viz., sports clubs. All it takes is a book bag with selected titles—and a librarian who is ready to defy some library conventions to become “the Diego Maradona of reading.”
Illustration by Alia Sinha
Furset explained passionately, “Being true to the original [text] involves an endless recounting of the content. This rendering of the content represents a kind of “fair play” with a book…. What I want to impart when I stand there, book in hand, in front of a group of thirteen-year-olds, who wonder what I am doing in their locker room, is the emotional experience. The emotions are far more important to impart than the book itself. If there is no emotional impact, communication will collapse before we have even reached the name of the author and the title of the book. The book is the ball, and we need to play it as we see fit…..to experience the golden moment when the boy or girl who had never bothered to read anything comes up to you when you’ve finished to say that he or she would really like to read some of the books you have brought.”
The idea spread. When the Rijeka City Library (Croatia) launched the BookBall project in 2013, they were at the receiving end of statements such as the project was sure to fail because investing in footballers was “investing in morons.” Undeterred, the library collaborated with the Football Club, Rijeka, one of the most influential football clubs in Croatia to start various activities for the 400 odd children and teenagers, all football school participants. Besides giving them free membership to the library, a Little Library corner was set up at the Club premises with titles of fiction and popular science carefully chosen by the librarians that would interest boys.
On a Sunday afternoon in 2014, in a stadium outside Oslo, 30 teenage boys and girls arrived an hour before kickoff for a meeting with Arild Stavrum, a former professional football player—and first-time author of a children’s book, Maradonas Magi. The meeting was part of “Hat trick” collaboration between Association Read, a national non-governmental organisation that encourages teenagers to spend more time reading, the Norwegian Football Association, and public libraries all over the country. Who would have thought that a book and a football shared common ground? To paraphrase Furset , Given imagination, you can do magic with both.
Illustration by Alia Sinha
Getting readers to take their mind off books and into fitness has posed less of a challenge for libraries. They have adopted measures that range from simply arousing readers’ interest in sports and a healthy lifestyle through books and magazine displays to actively engaging them in sporting and fitness events. In South Australia some local libraries house sporting and recreational equipment that can be borrowed by its members. Transforming temporarily into gyms and exercise rooms, libraries have begun to offer fitness programmes which are fashionable with all age groups.
Consider the village of Pietrari in Romania. Alarmed that in their village of 3000 people, 25% (which included teenagers) were overweight, its local public library introduced the Be Fit not Fat programme in 2012. A steady supply of health information coupled with fitness classes in the library gradually had children opting to walk and bicycle and play outdoors and weight loss was recorded amongst participants. Libraries in Russian cities have organised similar events. In 2013, the readers of Kemerovo Regional Library for Children and Young Adults participated in a national marathon and had to walk, run, cycle, skate or ski for a length of it. Wednesdays at the Chelyabinsk Regional Library for Young Adults are dedicated to sports-related events such as meetings with successful athletes and local sports heroes, exhibitions of books and magazines on sports, and sports competitions which are especially enjoyed by middle school students.
Any which way you look at them, libraries are essential to well-being.
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