Center for the Book Turns 30
By Judith Rosen, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 12/20/2007
The Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, which was created to promote books and reading, marked its 30th birthday in Moscow during the Russian Book Festival (or BiblioBraz 2007), which took place in October. It’s fitting given that the biennial festival, sponsored by the wife of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, was inspired by the National Book Festival in Washington, one of the activities for which the Center is best known. And like BiblioBraz, the focus of the Center, which was created by then-Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in fall 1977, is to get children reading.
The Center has actively pursued its mission both here and abroad. Over the past three decades it has set up individual Centers for the Book in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia and established a national reading and writing program, Letters About Literature, which is cosponsored by Target. In addition, the Center has developed partnerships with international organizations involved in literacy, like the Pushkin Library Foundation in Russia, which copublished its most recent book, Building Nations of Readers: Experience, Ideas, Examples, a bilingual Russian and English history of promoting reading in Russia, the U.S. and the U.K.
John Cole, director of the Center for the Book,
and Valeria Stelmakh of the Pushkin Library
Foundation (center) discuss Building Nations
of Readers, which they coedited. Maria
Vedenyapina (r.), president of the Pushkin Library
Foundation, moderated the panel at BiblioBraz.
For the Center’s founding director, John Cole, the anniversary offers a chance to reevaluate the Center’s work. “I’ve made it in part a period of reassessment and a strengthening of areas where I see greater potential,” he says. As part of that process Cole points to Librarian of Congress James Billington’s announcement last summer that the Library of Congress will create a new post at the beginning of 2008: the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. It will be modeled after the Children’s Laureate in the U.K.
In addition, Natalie Furner, former coordinator of the California Center for the Book, is in the midst of a months-long evaluation of the Center and how it can best use digital technologies. Earlier this summer, the Center launched a new Web page on the Library of Congress’s site to highlight its activities. It is also in the midst of digitizing much of its American history and world history content to make it more accessible to young people and teachers.
