The 94th All-Japan Library Conference

【2009-KN002】

The 94th All-Japan Library Conference, sponsored by the Japan Library Association (JLA), was held on September 18th and 19th, 2008 in Hyogo Prefecture. A staff member of the International Library of Children's Literature (ILCL) participated in the meeting of the Section on Library Services for Children and Young Adults.

On the first day, it was announced that the next Conference would be held in Tokyo. The Conference will continue to be held every year. As it is getting difficult to hold it in every prefecture, it will be held in areas around Tokyo every few years – although as far as possible they will try to hold it all over the country.

Section meeting 4: Section on Library Services for Children and Young Adults
In the morning, the Section meeting began with Otsuki Ruriko's keynote speech on her experience of working in a library in the USA. She said children needed to enjoy identifying with characters through storytelling. After that, Takeshi Sakabe, chairman of the Committee on Children and Young Adults of the JLA, delivered a keynote report on "the present situation of children's reading circumstances." He talked about the present problem that junior high school students are spending less and less time on reading, a Basic Plan for the Promotion of Children's Reading Activities (Kodomo no Dokusho Katsudo Suishin Keikaku: See 2008-KN005), the projects carried out by some prefectures to put the Plan into practice, and the conference by the ILCL on library services for children, with the aim of sharing information and cooperating with prefectural libraries.

Sub-sessions (in the afternoon)

  • The 1st sub-session: Cooperation between families, local communities, and libraries
  • The 2nd sub-session: Cooperation between libraries and schools
  • The 3rd sub-session: Support for child readers by prefectural libraries

In every meeting, some case studies are reported and a question-and-answer session and a conclusion followed.

In the 3rd sub-session, the member of the ILCL staff learned about the projects some prefectures carried out to put into practice the Basic Plan for the Promotion of Children's Reading Activities. Saitama Prefectural Kuki Library began running a center for the promotion of reading activities for children, just with one desk of the room for building a network of support, training volunteers and introducing them into volunteer groups. Ehime Prefectural Library, as a result of an investigation into children's reading activities, found out that many institutions hoped to cooperate with public libraries.

Ref:

(2009.3.31 update)
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