Sports and reading

On 11. September 2006 Brodd Football
Club in Stavanger was the first to be
visited by a ‘changing-room’ librarian.
The club’s team for 14-year-old boys
has a librarian who brings literature
directly to them rather than their going
to a library. In addition to Brodd
Football Club there are 13 other sports
clubs participating in this project run
by the organisation ‘Read!’ with the
support of Arts Council Norway and
the Norwegian Archive, Library and
Museum Authority.

The clubs taking part in the project are
spread right across the country and
their ‘changing-room’ librarians meet
the youngsters in different ways and in
a variety of places. Librarians who
themselves play handball, for example,
may train with the youngsters in a
warming-up session before presenting
their books. The whole team may go
out for a pizza evening or perhaps visit
the cinema to see film versions of the
books they are reading. There are many
possibilities open to enthusiastic and
creative librarians. Each club receives a
collection of some 25 books which they
can take to their meetings or which the
players can borrow and take home.
Visits to the teams by top athletes can
also be arranged. This is a pilot project
to gain experience before extending the
campaign in the autumn to sports and
athletics clubs throughout the country.

This nation-wide approach towards
sports clubs is just one of three initiatives
in the total project ‘Sports and
Reading’. Top-level sportsmen and
athletes, including the National football
team, will also be targeted both with
books and visits by authors. This initiative
has a role to play in connection
with the nation-wide campaign aimed
at youngsters, since wider reading
among well-known sports personalities
is expected to have a ripple-effect also
at club level. The third part of the project
consists of the website ‘Book Pallet’
(http://www.bokpallen.no), where famous
names in sport recommend their
favourite books. If you want to know
what Kjetil Andre Aamodt, Norway’s
greatest-ever alpine skier, likes to read,
you can find the answer here.

Erlend RaAdviser
Norwegian Archive Library and
Museum Authority
erlend.ra@abm-utvikling.no

Translated by Eric Deverill

Who am I?

What is a thought? Where does space
end? These and many other questions
were considered by pupils and professional
thinkers during the project ‘Who
am I?’ carried out in the Norwegian
county of Østfold during the period
2005-2006.
The aim of this project, part of a wider
programme ‘The Cultural Rucksack’,
(http://www.denkulturelleskolesekken.
no/oversetter/english.htm), was to offer
children the opportunity to ponder the
meaning of life in surroundings appropriate
to such thoughts. Philosophy
provides an arena of the mind, while a
library with all its books containing
questions and answers from various
sources and different ages offers the
perfect arena for practical initiative.

The main activity in the project consisted
of pupils (forms 5-7) meeting a
philosopher in the public or school
library and taking part in a philosophical
discussion. As an incentive to
making use of archives, libraries and
museums, the pupils were given a
brochure containing a brief summary
of their visit to the library, advice on
further reading, information on obtaining
a borrower’s card, a list of
museums in the region and a short
introduction to tracing their family
records in Internet-based archives. In
addition they received a ticket providing
free entrance for their family to a
museum of their choice in Østfold.

The response from pupils, teachers,
librarians and philosophers has been
mainly positive. To quote one of the
pupils, “Together we found answers I
could never have found on my own”.
A full report on the project (in Norwegian)
is available on http://ostfold.
ksys.copyleft.no/swfit/pub/ostfold/2006
9 21 12.0.22.shtml?cat=aktuelt

Sidsel Hindal
Adviser, Norwegian Archive,
Library and Museum Authority
sidsel.hindal@abm-utvikling.no

Translated by Eric Deverill