The city and university are inviting all reading enthusiasts to take a "mental leap" into philosophical and other adventures from Saturday during the 47th Oldenburg Children's and Young People's Book Fair KIBUM. Preparations have been underway on campus for months.
One day in summer. Christian Kühn, an employee of the Library and Information System (BIS), needs two cleaning cloths, a wooden board and a piece of close-meshed netting for his work today. Instead of his usual place at the university library's central information desk, he heads up a few floors to the media technology studio. Board, net and cloth are the props for the video shoot of a book review: Kühn is presenting a work on the origins of idioms - one of around 2,000 new literary publications that will be presented at the 47th Oldenburg Children's and Young Adult Book Fair KIBUM in November.
Although the next KIBUM is still months away at this point, preparations for the joint city and university project have long been in full swing. "Of course, you can't organise a trade fair of this size just a few weeks in advance," says Christian Kühn. Rather, October is the "final spurt" every year. This applies to the BIS, which is responsible for the reading room and the presentation of new publications there - which is once again digital this year due to the pandemic - as well as to the Oldenburg Research Centre for Children's and Young Adult Literature (OlFoKi) at the university, which is also providing academic support for this year's KIBUM.
Kühn maintains contact with a three-digit number of children's and young adult book publishers and is involved with their spring production from as early as March each year. He has been part of the KIBUM team since 1990 and is responsible for acquiring new publications. The whole thing is well organised. Kühn's colleagues Elke Boecker and Juliane Felser were able to upload the first books and supplementary material to the digital reading room in April. Prior to this, Kühn and other colleagues had already indexed the works, organised them by age group and catalogued them. A total of six people form the core of the KIBUM project at BIS, with additional support from media technology, media processing and the digital library.
"We try to present the books as well as possible," explains Elke Boecker, "for example by visualising them with videos or reading samples." She has been responsible for the trade fair's multimedia room since it was set up 25 years ago, sourcing computer games from manufacturers and preparing them for the young trade fair audience, most recently supported by Juliane Felser. Now they are taking care of the digital organisation of KIBUM instead. Felser reports: "The great thing about the trade fair is that children can sit down and browse for hours. We endeavour to reproduce this experience online at least a little." Together with Kühn, the two have created the mascot "Klecks", which helps with book searches in the digital reading room.
From the summer at the latest, OlFoKi Director Prof Dr Thomas Boyken will also be dealing with KIBUM on a daily basis. Boyken, Junior Professor of Children's and Young Adult Literature in Oldenburg since 2019, praises the university as "one of the few locations in Germany that took an interest in researching children's and young adult literature at a very early stage". In this respect, it is only logical that KIBUM was created in the 1970s "virtually with the founding of the university" and thanks to impulses from Oldenburg's German Studies department, for example. The research centre has been pooling the diverse research from various disciplines since 1999. To this end, it has been able to draw on the book collections of the fair since its launch in 1975, an annually growing repository in the university library that now contains more than 75,000 books for children and young people.
The accompanying three-day symposium, which will take place digitally from 22 November at the end of the fair, will provide an insight into the research activities. This year's OlFoKi organisers are the philosophy didactics experts Prof. Dr Christa Runtenberg and Kerstin Gregor-Gehrmann as well as the German studies experts Boyken and Prof. Dr Jörn Brüggemann. With the topic "Philosophical questions in the mirror of children's and youth literature", they are addressing philosophy and German teachers, for example. Interested parties can also find out about the potential of certain children's and young adult books for teaching at a digital forum throughout KIBUM: Researchers from all over Germany as well as advanced students will present ten-minute video contributions, so-called vidcasts.
Meanwhile, all those responsible for KIBUM already have the trade fair themes of the coming years in mind; Kühn has long since informed the publishers that comics and graphic novels will be a focus in 2022. However, the ideas for the 50th KIBUM two years later remain a secret for the time being. In any case, the first task is to carry out the intensively prepared "mental leaps" from 13 to 23 November. Good for Christian Kühn that he no longer has a literal plank in front of his head after completing his idiom video shoot. If you want to find out more about rags and nets, you can find this and many other new books on the KIBUM pages from 13 November.
