The festival included an awards ceremony and workshops by winners of the Children’s Digital Reading competition organized in partnership with the Smart Internet Foundation.

On October 26, the Russian State Children’s Library hosted the awards ceremony for the winners of the Children’s Digital Readingnational competition. The event was held as part of the 5th Russian Children’s Book Festival. This year’s theme was paperbacks and e-books.

More than 40 publishing companies took part in the festival to present new reads at an expo. Festival guests attended more than 120 events, including meetings with their favorite authors, theatrical performances, animated film screenings, film presentations, workshops, creative writing classes, recital championship for high school students, informative lectures, exciting quests, and the Children’s Digital Reading awards ceremony.

The Smart Internet Foundation (.ДЕТИ administrator) was the competition’s partner and the founder of two special categories. Viktoria Bunchuk, Project Manager of the foundation, took part in the expert assessment of entries as well as in honoring the winners. The winners in the special categories received valuable prizes and diplomas as well as vouchers for the 12-month free registration of .ДЕТИ domains.

The competition goal is to promote reading among children with the help of information technologies and online tools, as well as to sel ect the best interactive literature programs for children created by Russian libraries and other children’s organizations.

The organizing committee received 59 entries from 29 Russian regions, including from 3 regional, 38 city, and 3 town libraries, as well as from 8 schools. The competition results are available on our website.

After the event, the winners held workshops for industry professionals.

• Yelena Solovyova, a methodologist for working with children and youth of the Poklevskikh-Kozell Central District Library (Talitsa, Sverdlovsk Region), taught a workshop on creating a theatrical recital project, The Young Reporter’s Book.
• Yelena Nikolayeva, head of teenage programs at the Chitai Gorod Library for Children and Youth (Veliky Novgorod), talked about creating theSummer with Coralinephoto quest based on the book by Neil Gaiman. Participants also solved tasks from the online photo quest.
• Viktoria Ryzhova, head of the rural branch of the Pushkin Town Library (Noginsk, Moscow Region), spoke about introducing children to Russian folklore through personal devices, such as using web quests and recitals fr om the screen.

The event concluded with a round table, Digital Children: Problems and Prospects of Using Information Technology to Promote Reading. The participants discussed the existing methods of engaging children and teenagers in reading using modern internet technology, shared their experience and talked about the projects they are implementing.