Report from the Field

Lisa Comstock (CT)

Kate Lentz (RI)

Curtis Rogers (SC)

Introduction• Like many great ideas,

Route 1 Reads was concocted over lunch and committed to over margaritas!

• Goal - to promote East Coast Centers for the Book

• Start as a demonstration project and then try to pitch it to a likely collaborator (e.g., AAA) for development into an annual outreach project.

Process

• Mary (NH) and Sharon (MA) organized us and sent out a survey:

– Did the books we chose need to reference a geographic area where Rt 1 goes through the state?

– Did they have to be well known?

– Contemporary?

– Fiction?

• We voted to keep it vague. Route 1 would be our organizing tool.

• We decided to launch at the National Book Festival.

• Sharon (MA) made bookmarks.

• Andrea (MD) launched early and her blog posts were awesome!

• Rocco (NY) started pitching the idea to Library Journal and of course had a drink made after his book.

• Kate (RI) stole all the best descriptions for her website.

Logo Creation and Evolution

General Use

Font: CourgetteColor: #cc0000Canva.com

Instagram

Twitter version

Facebook

CANVA.com

Building the Route 1 Reads website

• The domain was debated with the participating Centers for a time, but finally settled on Route1Reads.org

• Site was hosted on Rackspace Cloud Sites with CT Humanities other sites. CT Humanities pays a flat monthly fee for the server, so hosting another modestly-sized site was no hardship and kept the overheads down in the experimental stage.

• The build was made in WordPress, a very flexible open source platform for building websites

• Theme: Make (free version) – a really basic theme

• Plug-in: Leaflet Maps Marker (a free version of Maps Marker) which allows for a map with pins connected to each state’s Center for the Book and a description of the book selected by that state.

Route1Reads.org

• A live site allowed for distribution of bookmarks with the Route1Reads.org URL at the National Book Festival.

• Since these titles are in place for a year, no changes have been made to the site’s content and hasn’t really been touched since then.

Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Empire State Florida

Georgia Maine Maryland Massachusetts New Hampshire

New Jersey NCPennsylvania Rhode Island SC Virginia

Big Questions & Next Steps

• Was a website useful for participating Centers for the Book?

• Does it create value for this project?

• We have a nascent program and we can talk about how we got to where we are and what we think we will be doing moving forward.

• We are thinking of mysteries as our next unifying Rt 1 genre. Sharon received a lot of positive feedback about this at NEIBA!

Thank you!

• Lisa Comstock | lcomstock@cthumanities.orgManager of IT Services &Connecticut Center for the Book

• Kate Lentz | kate@ribook.orgDirector, Rhode Island Center for the Book

• Curtis Rogers | crogers@statelibrary.sc.govCoordinator, SC Center for the Book & SC State Library Communications Director