Building the Ultimate Summer Reading App

The summer reading program is probably the most ubiquitous public library program in the United States. Whether you visit a library in a small town in Texas or one of Chicago’s 79 library branches, you will always find that from June to August the staff are busy putting recreational reading in the hands and heads of local children. As more children’s imaginations are inspired and influenced by what they read online and in digital formats, the summer reading program needs to be retooled to bridge the gap between digital and print reading experiences.

The DPLA has been hosting a conversation about what it could mean to scale summer reading software up to the national level.  There is great potential in using the emerging DPLA platform as a foundation upon which a digital summer reading application might be built.  So far we’ve imagined an application that could support all kinds of social interactions between readers, as well as list building and statistics reporting for administrators like teachers or librarians. We would like an interface in which a teen or child in a small town is able to connect to the digital reading experience of another teen or child in her own local community, but she should also be able to expand the scope of her circle to connect and compare with teen readers across the country.  By connecting the summer reading lists and interests from different communities across the country, the application would enable more discovery, more reading, more learning, and more interaction than the sum of the individual programs, all while efficiently centralizing or automating many of the redundant administrative tasks.

In the interest of making this an ultra-inclusive process, all the conversation about what a digital summer reading application might look like has been happening on the Audience & Participation email list and the project wiki.  If you’d like to contribute to the conversation and haven’t, join the email list or sign up for a wiki account. The aspects I reference above are the low-hanging fruit; they are the obvious efficiencies and features.  The community continues to define and refine these elements.  In addition to all of the free-form conversation on the Audience & Participation email list, for the purposes of this post I reached out to a few public librarians in different corners of the country to see what they thought about national digital summer reading. I asked Toby Greenwalt (IL), David Lee King (KS), Madeline Walton-Hadlock (CA), and Anne Heidemann (MI) about how a DPLA summer reading app might make a difference for librarians and young readers alike. Check out their thoughts below.

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Nate Hill: How would a free digital summer reading application from the DPLA help children and teens at your library?

Toby:  I think it’d be a great way to connect readers to something much bigger than what goes on at the library. Summer reading programs tend to be insular affairs—kids read books, turn in their sheets, collect their prizes, and forget about the whole thing. Having a nationally connected program could be a great way to connect reading interests with folks on opposite ends of the country. And if the interface is clean and fun to use, so much the better.

David:  It could help kids in Topeka all be on the same page with summer reading, from sign-up to keeping track of reading logs to sending out reminders of our huge party we throw at the end.

Madeline:  San Jose Public Library has been experimenting with online summer reading components for several years now, but unfortunately the products currently on the market leave much to be desired. We need better tools to connect to the young people that spend much of their free time in a digital environment. Summer reading is still one of our bread-and-butter programs, but I slowly see it losing relevance, particularly among older kids and teens. Our goal of preventing summer reading loss has not changed, but our methods for reaching that goal need to be revolutionized!

Anne:  We have a successful online summer reading program of our own, but we have many patrons, especially families, who wish to do more and go above and beyond what we can offer. Having more options, like those a free digital summer reading application would offer, would allow us to better serve our community.

Nate Hill: How might this change the way you administer the summer reading program now?

Toby:  We spend a lot of time configuring and troubleshooting our Summer Reading module. It would be nice to take some of the focus away from knob-twiddling and back to encouraging participation.

David:  Well, we’d certainly look into changing out summer reading program software!

Madeline:  Our staff is accustomed to administering summer reading online, but a more self-directed application could reduce the amount of staff time spent working on the sign-up process. Staff could focus more on programs or other complimentary elements of the summer reading program.

Anne:  We would likely not discontinue our current online summer program, but we would probably use the DPLA to expand our current offerings.

Nate Hill: What is the one feature you’d like to see in a nationally available digital summer reading program?

Toby:  I’d like to see some robust social features—leaderboards, reviews, tools for building conversation. The “critical mass” issue is often the biggest hurdle I face when building a new social library venture. Most online platforms tend to fall into the 90-9-1 rule, where 90% of folks lurk, 9% pop in an occasional comment or two, and 1% of the participants end up driving the majority of the activity. Having an exclusively local audience is tough because these numbers are small to begin with. If we have 100 users, there might only be 10 people doing more than just the basic level of participation—and only 1 person who feels compelled to do a lot. Without this critical mass, it becomes tougher to encourage participation since the comment fields look so bare. Having the program connect to a national group of users can help to build that critical mass, and possibly create connections between readers that never would have existed.

David: One thing I’d love to see is a national and local leaderboard, with achievement badges that kids could collect for reading so many books/pages/words. I asked my 12 year old daughter about that, and she said “that’d be cool. Because I’d WIN.” She loves a challenge :-)

Madeline: A great application would feel cutting edge, include built-in incentives (digital prizes, games?), and work seamlessly with a more traditional paper program that is essential for our youngest participants and the many, many families still on the wrong side of the digital divide. So, that’s three things…

Anne: I think that ease of use is probably most important. So many libraries do not have coders on staff and would need a program that’s both easy to use on the back end and easy to use as a patron.

Toby Greenwalt is the Virtual Services Coordinator at Skokie Public Library (IL), where he works to make his community’s web presence more human.

David Lee King is the Digital Branch Manager at Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library in Topeka, KS and blogs at davidleeking.com.

Madeline Walton-Hadlock, Senior Librarian at San Jose Public Library (CA), leads SJPL’s Summer Reading Program and served for two years on the Association for Library Services to Children’s Children and Technology Committee.

Anne Heidemann is the Children’s, Tween & Teen Services Department Head at the Canton Public Library in Canton, MI.

What do you think are the potential benefits of exploring digital summer reading on a national scale?  Please, join the DPLA Audience & Participation email list and contribute your ideas as well.

Photo courtesy Jesus Solano on Flickr; used under a CC BY 2.0 license.