Warrington's poems go the whole distance!
Wendy Molyneux, Service Development Officer for Warrington Library, Museum & Archive Service with the Kelleher children, Christmas Eve 2003.
To celebrate National Poetry Day 2003, Warrington Libraries decided to ask local poets and school children to send poems into the library, so that these could be attached to balloons and launched from the Town Hall on NPD. There was a huge response, and 100 balloons were launched at a special ceremony in the morning, all with short poems attached in laminated card.
Because of the winds, a cluster went up together and disappeared out of sight - the last that anyone expected to see of them... or maybe not!
Three weeks later, library managers were contacted to learn that the balloons had travelled over 1,300 miles and landed in Italy! The balloon cluster, which amazingly managed to stay together during its flight across Europe, landed by an astonishing coincidence in the garden of the holiday home of an English family. The Kelleher family's three children, Jack (12), Tara (10) and Liam (8), from London, found the balloons in the garden of their villa near Florence the day they arrived for a half term holiday. And by even stranger coincidence, the family has close relatives in Warrington.
Cllr David Keane, Executive Board Member for Education, Culture and Lifelong Learning, said: "I never imagined that when the balloons were released that they would get further than the motorway and so I was amazed when I heard about the distance they had travelled. It really follows this year's National Poetry Day theme, as I simply can't imagine a better place for poetry than the rolling Mediterranean countryside of Tuscany!
'Ad Lib' : working with young people to enhance library services
Members of Burtonwood Ad Lib group sit in the children's library reviewing books and multimedia
Warrington Youth services and Libraries are working together to involve young people in the development of library services. The project, called 'Ad Lib' succeeded in attracting Partners in Innovation funding from the National Youth Agency, and operates between October 2003 - July 2004
The project involves 2 groups of young people meeting twice weekly with project youth workers in one library in an inner borough ward (at Orford Library), and the other at Burtonwood Library, in an outer ward.
The Burtonwood group is well established and has helped design a poster used to promote services to young people.
Both groups are going to experience training in selecting stock for service points led by the young people's manager, and will get some practical hands-on at a book buy in March 2004. Following that, they will be evaluating the decisions they made and monitoring the issues to establish whether their selections have proved popular.
They are carrying out mystery shopping in various libraries and will look at how to market the service in a way that would appeal to younger age groups.
