Library Program Beckons to Children

Ventura County libraries are putting the mystery back into reading for area youngsters this summer.

School-aged children throughout the county are signing up for reading programs offered by their local libraries. This year’s theme, “Case No. 167: The Undercover Caper,” lets kids have fun reading books while earning detective stickers, badges and free books. At the same time, program participants play sleuth as they try to uncover the mystery character who placed a safe in the library. Clues are given out by library volunteers.

The four workers who staff the children’s division of Ventura County Library Services--Julie Albright, Ed Hopkins, Star Soto and Sara Ellinwood--have been working for months to create the summer program used by 16 libraries in the county, as well as several in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

“Once the theme is decided (by area children’s librarians), we do the nitty-gritty,” said Hopkins, an artist for Ventura County Library Services. Most of the time Hopkins is busy creating the signs used in the county’s libraries, but for several months he and his colleagues devote their energies to the summer reading program.

The staff creates a program to go along with the selected theme, develops and sells related products--the badges and stickers, for instance--to individual libraries, and even goes on tour to present a kick-off puppet show at libraries and schools. Twenty-five to 30 presentations in a month is about average during the summer, Albright said.

“We have to come up with something that has to do with the library that we would want to encourage,” Albright said. “It’s really important to us to put out a quality program that kids will sign up for.”

Last year, 6,700 children--about 10% of the elementary school population--registered for the county library reading programs, Albright said. “We’re going gangbusters already, so we’ll probably outdistance that number this year.”

With more than 1,500 registered participants, Simi Valley Library had the most children signed up for its reading program last summer. Janet Weaver, children’s librarian in Simi Valley, said she hopes that this year’s theme, along with the library’s own events, will encourage even more participants this summer.

“The main purpose is to keep them reading during the summer,” Weaver said. “We want the kids to keep up their reading skills, plus we want to teach them that libraries are fun.”