Aldus Up, the project co-funded by Creative Europe that had further developed the network of European book fairs along topics like accessibility, audience development, translation flows between language areas and the harmonisation of European reading surveys, has ended at the end of August.
The Working Group on Reading of Aldus Up was in charge of the harmonisation of European reading surveys and for other reading-related issues of interest to the book industry.
We had informed the public about our activities on the K-Hub regularly, but have now produced two concluding documents which we would like to share.
This was our journey between 2020 and 2024 (and the documents with the help of which you can follow up):
- First, we examined what there was in Europe with respect to reading surveys: who did what using which methods etc.
- Then, we proposed ERICS, a core set of items that should be used in as many future national studies as possible to make those surveys comparable (more on that in the attached document “ERICS – and beyond”).
- Then, we used the opportunity to roll out ERICS-compatible national reading studies in Norway, Italy and Spain; these we evaluated and developed a 2.0 version of ERICS that took account of the experiences (more on that also in the attached document “ERICS – and beyond”).
- Then – and this is still going on outside Aldus Up – we are talking to a number of institutions in European countries that are preparing or already conducting reading surveys that are ERICS-compatible; among them are particularly Slovenia, Ukraine and Latvia (more on that also in the attached document “ERICS – and beyond”).
- Moreover, we found out that the main application area for reading surveys (to document states and to monitor developments) is reading promotion: policies and measures need a clear view of what is going on and if policies and measures were succesful; since this was not part of the Aldus Up project, we only pointed out what should be done in the direction of a e.g. a systematic catalog of policies and measures to learn from in projects to come (more on that in the attached subreport document “Working off of each other”).
- Finally, to bring together reading promotion objectives, policies and measures and reading surveys on a more conceptual level, we published a whitepaper that presents the positive effects of reading and proposes a tool to mediate between theses positive effects in the development of reading promotion policies and measures (this whitepaper you can find here: http://doi.org/10.25358/
openscience-9065).
When it comes to reading issues, the former (!) Working Group on Reading of Aldus Up will tie up on Aldus Up and is currently developing a European project that will bring together the strands of surveying and promoting reading with (for reading promotion) the particularly decisive aspect that “democracies depend on reading”, as becomes clearer and clearer. We will work together with WEXFO, the World Expression Forum, for that.
Stay in contact, a new infrastructure for European reading issues is being developed.
Documents:
