Urtė Šulskienė

Cultural project manager, Šiauliai County Povilas Višinskis Public Library, Lithuania

Urtė Šulskienė is a cultural project manager and educational programme developer with a decade of experience in the public library and cultural sector. She specialises in designing and implementing national and EU-funded international initiatives (Creative Europe, Erasmus+, Lithuanian Council for Culture, etc) with a strong focus on inclusive education, gamification, reading promotion, media literacy, and creative learning methodologies. Her work highlights the potential of public libraries as accessible learning environments, particularly through sensory reading programmes, digital storytelling tools, and participatory activities for children and youth, including neurodiverse learners.

Reading Is a Verb: The Reading Promotion Challenge in Today’s Libraries

Reading promotion in 2025 demands a reset. In Lithuania, national initiatives have expanded reach yet face a fractured attention economy and rising demand for bite-sized content. Adolescents are the hardest segment, drawn to participatory, game-like experiences. Libraries must retool reading promotion as multimodal culture-making.

Part I maps the shifting cultural terrain and the pressures on deep, sustained reading. It outlines core design principles for contemporary reading-promotion tools: interactivity grounded in narrative logic; hybrid formats that merge textual and visual literacies; and accessibility for diverse cognitive profiles, including neurodiverse readers. This section also reasserts libraries as primary reading ambassadors — institutions uniquely positioned to cultivate long-term reading habits, counter digital fragmentation, and embed reading in daily cultural life.

Part II turns to Lithuanian national practice and highlights cases from Šiauliai County Povilas Višinskis Public Library. It showcases inclusive reading programmes such as the animated story series Animukai, sensory reading sessions for neurodiverse children, and In Search of Memories — a reminiscence-based programme tailored for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s. It also analyses gamified frameworks like the Reading Tournament. This section reports what worked, what failed, and why, presenting data-driven observations on participation patterns, motivational triggers, and reading continuity across age groups. The presentation foregrounds international good practices — borrowed, stress-tested, and adapted to Lithuanian contexts via rapid prototypes and small-scale evaluations.

The session opens discussion, mapping strengths and weak spots in libraries’ reading-promotion ecosystems and identifying shared hypotheses and next steps.

Date and time: 2025-12-03, 13:20-13:40 (30 min)

Hall: ALFA