YOUR NEWS

The Big Read at Bolsover Children’s Festival

People in small book tent Sunday, 6th July, 2003For the last few years Bolsover District libraries have been actively supporting Junction Arts at their annual Children’s Festival held at Bolsover Castle. Each year we run storytimes throughout the day and in recent year’s simple competitions to win books, all of which have worked really well.

This year we felt we wanted to try something new and the BBC’s Big Read seemed the perfect tool, so it was decided to run a festival vote on the children’s titles from the top 100 books. We decorated a dump bin, which we stocked with the relevant titles and made up a voting box in the shape of a chocolate bar from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Voting slips were produced as well as a handout of the 32 children’s titles. As a means of encouraging children to vote we also produced small goodie bags with the list of books, a Big Read bookmark, a sticker and some sweets inside, and everyone who voted received a Big Read sticker.

People in small book tent From the moment the festival opened officially at 11am until late afternoon we were inundated with voters! Our 200 goodie bags had all gone by 2pm and still people were coming along to vote and look at the books. We had set out a story rug for the storytimes but this was soon taken over by children who just wanted to read bits from the Big Read titles. Subsequently our storytimes never really happened this year, but a lot of children took the books to read with their parents or just enjoy on their own which I felt was equally successful.

One of the highlights of the event was the discussion generated by the voting. Adults and children were all chatting about the books on the list as well as other favourites, they wanted to know which books were getting most votes and many just wanted to talk about their reading in general. It was a wonderful atmosphere and a far greater success than we had anticipated. On a walk around the whole festival it was great to see so many people with the Big Read sticker on and to hear people telling friends to be sure and vote! I don’t think we could have had a better response to the day.

Finally we added up the votes and produced a banner for the exit with the winning title displayed. It was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, although it is worth mentioning that the votes were very evenly spread over the list and only 2 books got no votes at all.As a direct result of the success of the day, we will be running voting on the top 100 throughout Bolsover District libraries and holding a evening open event at each library leading up to the announcement of the top 20!

Cathy Petersen
Bolsover Library

Tel: 01246 823179