Jersey Library in Focus
Jersey Library Service aims to inspire lifelong learning, support health & wellbeing and enrich the island’s economic and cultural life through the management of outstanding collections and the provision of services that support customers to access libraries and realise their potential.
The library team works together with partners and volunteers to deliver services across the island, both in person and online. The ever changing 250,000 items held in the library’s collections are supplemented by a constantly growing digital offer which includes ebooks, audio books, magazines and newspapers.
Jersey Library seeks to match national best practice and deliver services to the level recommended by the Association of Senior Children’s and Education Librarians (ASCEL) in their Children’s Promise, in that ‘every child and young person in libraries is inspired to read for pleasure, has access to a diverse range of materials, can engage in a variety of digital activities and can take part in activities that improve their well-being’.
Delivering the Promise is an ongoing task. We believe that a successful library is a living library and just as our collections of board books, picture books and children’s fiction and non-fiction books are constantly changing, so is our programme of events and activities. We hold daily Baby Bounce and Rhyme sessions in the Town Library and have started a Tuesday morning session in the Communicare Library. We arrange regular story tellers and author events, alongside workshops and activities ranging from Lunar New Year celebrations to a visit from Durrell’s hissing cockroaches. All our children’s events are free, as is library membership. Overdue fines were phased out in 2020, ensuring that borrowing and reading is accessible for everyone in our libraries.
Preparations are well now well underway for the Summer Reading Challenge, that will start on 8 July. The Challenge is open to all nursery and primary aged children, who can join in the Town, Communicare and Mobile libraries. For each book read children can collect a sticker. If they read six books children will be awarded with a medal and a certificate. The theme of the Summer Reading Challenge this year is sport and we’re very pleased to have been able to team up with Aquasplash to offer every child who successfully completes the Challenge a free swim pass. We’re also pleased to be working with several primary schools to offer the Challenge through their school libraries during the summer holidays, so families can take part closer to home.
Before we reach the summer holidays, though, we have a Bear-tastic event taking place overnight on June 23rd, when the Town Library will be hosting its first Teddy Bears Sleepover. Everyone can remember a favourite comfort toy that they talked to, read stories to, shared their emotions with and snuggled with as a child. On Friday 23rd June children will be invited to drop-off their teddy bears to take part in a sleep-over in the library. The bears will be ready for collection on the morning of Saturday 24 June, together with some pictures of the adventures they’ve had in the Library overnight.
Jersey Library’s reach and impact is greatly extended and enriched through the work we do together with partners. Every Child Our Future’s Book Buddies scheme has provided invaluable support for many town primary school children, while Move More’s Toddler Time in the library proved so popular they had to introduce coloured wrist bands to manage numbers. We are always looking for new partners to work with and new initiatives to be part of. Our guiding principle is that ‘bad libraries build collections, good libraries build services, great libraries build communities’. We want to see Jersey Library at the heart of the community, inspiring a love of reading for all children.
