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The Western Education & Library Board (Northern Ireland) has been involved in a two year reader development project with the library service of  Donegal County Council (Republic of Ireland) called INSPIRING READERS.

The project is funded by the European Union’s Peace and Reconciliation programme Peace II through the Special EU Programmes Body.

In addition to training staff from both authorities together, the project has ‘kick started’ more than ten reading groups in the area, funded a number of special reading projects including a community reading project (One Book) , and has tried to demonstrate that books can be used to tackle issues of cultural identity.

We allocated an agreed sum for reading group support, bought books initially on staff recommendation (using Richard and Judy lists, identifying books we felt dealt with the themes of conflict resolution/cultural identity) We also used core stock from both authorities and once the book groups were established we asked them to choose ahead which books they wanted to read. Given that many of our groups have less than 15 people attending at any one time, it was possible sometimes to supply books from core stock. But if we were buying for book groups, we rarely bought more than 15 titles anyway.

The group leaders had a list of the books we had chosen for the project and tried to encourage their groups to choose at least some titles from the list – it didn’t always work out like that.

At the beginning of the project, the titles were held centrally – however this seemed like a waste of resources and we tended to allow them into general circulation and just trusted that we would get enough back through requests when needed.  At the end of the project, we will bring the collections together and share them equally between both authorities.

Within N. Ireland and separately within ROI there is an agreement to lend across authorities, so we don’t anticipate a problem being left with too many multiple copies of the book group stock unused. With the One Book project (Theresa Breslin’s Divided City), we bought over 200 copies of the book between both authorities and have already been approached by schools and some local groups who want to use it or their projects.