International Book Giving Day 2017

Today is Valentine's Day! Today is International Book Giving Day (IBGD)!

Give books! Give love!

As far as I can remember, I have posts in the blog dating as far back as 2013 celebrating International Book Giving Day. Here is a looking back post on past activities I had for International Book Giving Day.

For more information on IBDG 2017, visit the website.  What makes this year's IBDG really cool is the participation of the National Book Development Board of the Philippines in the initiative. The NBDB conducted a book and a library contest over at Facebook. Using social media and the #bookgiving. As of writing, there are winners already so head on over to their FB page and see how successful the campaign has been.

Adarna House, a publishing house in the Philippines partnered with different reading groups and organizations to give away books to children in the different areas of Metro Manila and nearby provinces.

For this year's IBGD, I celebrated it four days earlier with friends from the library profession. Last February 10, 2017, Friday, a group of librarians from the south of Manila, headed by officers of the MUNPARLAS Library Association visited the Academy. This is part of their professional development program, but they were joined by librarians from the regions. There were 40 librarians in all! And each went home with a book and a nugget of chocolate.

Other than the sweet and thoughtful gifts, I gave them a brief orientation of the work we do at the Academy: Design Thinking, Conceptual Teaching and Discussion Based Learning, and how the library adopts and supports the teaching and learning framework we have in place as reflected in the services and programs we provide the learning community.

With the help of my library staff and colleagues, our visitors were given a tour of the school. They were impressed at our learning environment, but I feel blessed with their presence too. I realized that where ever librarians are,  we all face the same challenges. In a world that is getting more divisive by the hour, the more we need to appreciate and tolerate the gifts of diversity. We need to see the uniqueness of each one and respect its very nature.

There will always be forces that will divide humanity. But I think, humanity needs librarians all the more to bridge this divide. We can start with book giving.  As a matter of fact, I also received a book from the MUNPARLAS officers as token. Such professional visits and encounters enrich one another.

Not walls. Yes to LIBRARIES!