Integral Plan to Encourage Reading
The objectives of this plan are: to know the population reading habits in order to plan public reading policies better; create social awareness in regard to the importance of reading; encourage, in collaboration with the competent administrations, the accessibility and suitable stocking of public libraries and school libraries; carry out and help carry out activities to promote reading in various environments; and attend to groups (immigrants, senior citizens, the handicapped, or prison inmates) which have difficulties in accessing books and in reading, supported by initiatives of NGOs and other public and private institutions.
Included in the Strategic Plan (2012-2015) of the State Secretariat for Culture, the plan is based on the postulates of the 2007 Law on Reading, Books and Libraries, which states that “the plans to encourage reading shall consider reading as a basic tool for the exercise of the right to education and culture, in the framework of the information society, and shall underscore the general interest reading has in the daily life of society, through encouragement of the reading habit”.
The activities being carried out to attain these objectives are: the María Moliner Annual Campaign –a campaign to encourage reading in municipalities of under 50,000 inhabitants-, which awards the best projects or activities carried out by municipal public libraries; aid to encourage reading and Spanish literature, aimed at not-for-profit entities presenting projects to encourage reading; activities in secondary education, and a National Award for the Encouragement of Reading, awarded annually to institutions or entities carrying out an important task in this regard. This is in conjunction with other actions, such as periodical awareness campaigns in mass media.
Other tools are used, such as the Book and Reading Observatory, for the permanent analysis of the situation of books, reading and libraries as a whole. With the deployment of the new technologies, there is an added need for the continual monitoring of changes in the book sector and of their repercussions on the reading processes, as well as for the analysis of the library system and proposals for its improvement.
Another valuable resource is the website www.leer.es, a product of the collaboration between the areas of education and culture, aimed primarily at activities for children and young people.
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