"Reading is crap," said 13-year-old Kelly, mooching around on the fringes of a group of young women, excluded or self-excluded from school. Kelly was on a YouthBoox double-decker bus, staffed by two librarians. Over the weeks, infected by the buzz that was developing, she picked up and leafed through first magazines and then books that the librarians had brought with them. She picked up The Little Book of Exam Calm, flipped through it and was intrigued. Finding a corner of the bus, she hid away and read it from cover to cover. "I didn't know there were books like this, " she said. "Like what?" asked the librarian? "Like you don't want to put it down when you've started. " "You want to try this one now," said one of her friends from the other side of the bus, waving a Jacqueline Wilson. And soon, Kelly again was engrossed and, with her mates encouraging each other and reading out loud the juicy bits, they had all soon raced through the whole Wilson cannon.

Kelly's journey from hostility to enthusiasm was replicated across the eight projects of the Well Worth Reading/National Youth Agency YouthBoox project funded earlier this year by the Arts Council of England's New Audiences Fund. YouthBoox was designed to promote the image of reading to young people by developing partnerships between library and youth services. What could the library service learn about reaching disaffected young people, about ways of changing perceptions of the library service and reading, or about improving customer care for young adult users? How could youth workers tap into the fiction, poetry and non-fiction knowledge and expertise of the librarian in support of their informal education and emotional literacy agenda?

Given £1,000 each to spend on books, visiting artists and activities, these youth and library service partnerships, experimented with ways of engaging 13 to 19-year-olds in reading. Most of the young people never went into libraries and believed "'reading's not for us".

Storytelling went down well in Shropshire. The visit of a professional storyteller, linking fables into books, had a knock-on effect. The youth librarian told stories to a group using picture books. Then the youth worker, learning from this success, began to tell stories in his youth work, which in turn, led to one 14-year-old using picture books to tell stories to a group of her friends. Poetry had a particular impact in two projects, and in Liverpool, a young black poet impressed the group as much with the way his poetry had opened doors to him across the world and earned him a living -an important message -as with his poetry itself.

As with 13-year-old Kelly, peer recommendation was an important trigger across the projects in terms of widening young people's reading repertoire. This too influenced book selections when the young people were invited to spend £400 of the partnership money on books for the library. Librarians were impressed with the research that the purchasers had done with their friends before the trip to the bookshop and the way they selected for a wide audience, not just for themselves. In Sunderland, on arriving at the warehouse, money in hand, the group was stunned to be met with a message from library headquarters asking them that they spend a further £1,000 on graphic novels for the main library collection.

Taking books and magazines to youth projects where young people could engage with them on their own terms and territory, and at their own pace, excited many librarians by the positive response elicited not only to reading and to the literature but also to themselves as librarians. For the young people, being trusted to spend the money and organise book collections was an important message in itself. It raised the question as to whether outreach libraries should be available as a permanent feature of youth service provision, just as they are already available in old peoples' homes and in playgroups.

Five favourite YouthBoox reads
Jacqueline Wilson's The Illustrated Mum
Louis Sachar's Holes
Benjamin Zephaniah's The Face
Alan Snow's How Dogs Really Work
Nick Sharrat's Cheese and Tomato Spider  
 

Lessons from the Youthboox project are available in Reading Kit 2, £7.50 from the National Youth Agency on 0116 285 3700. Reading Kit 1 (also £7.50) is still available. The Reading Agency (formerly Well Worth Reading) provides a range of training and resources to develop and support teenage readers, including support for youth/library partnerships. Visit www.readingagency.org.uk.

 
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