| The
award to Christina in this year’s Honours List is, above
all else, a recognition of her tireless work in striving to
meet the library needs of all the people of the local community,
and her constant efforts to ensure that the library is an
adaptable resource, capable and willing to embrace change
in the service of that community.
Christina was delighted to receive the award; she said, “There
has been a great response from all our local readers about
the MBE. Cards, good wishes and many congratulations have
been received. This award is a great boost not only for myself
but also for my colleagues in the library, it is a wonderful
recognition of everyone’s hard work, enthusiasm and
dedication over the years”.
SELB Chief Executive Helen McClenaghan commented “This
awards is a tribute to the high regard in which Christina
is held by the Newry community and her colleagues; the SELB
acknowledges the innovatory work and high quality of service
provided by the Newry Library under Christina’s leadership
over the years”.
Newry has been described as a ‘frontier town’,
situated as it is close to the border between Northern Ireland
and the Republic of Ireland, and its population has been quite
severely affected by the violence of the past thirty years.
In a divided community Newry Library has constantly striven
to straddle the divide, to help bring people together, to
help tackle the problem of falling literacy levels among young
people, particularly young boys, while at the same time reaching
out to the communities on the other side of the border. Under
Christina Sloan’s inspired leadership the library has
successfully defined and retained its position as a neutral
focal-point in the town, a safe area where the various divided
groups and communities can come together to make use of the
library facilities or to take part in book-related projects.
‘Books Across the Border’ was one such project,
a unique library venture, a cross-community, cross-border
project, run as a partnership by the public libraries in Newry
and Dundalk. The project, which was hugely successful, was
funded by the European Union’s Peace and Reconciliation
programme and launched by the President of the Republic of
Ireland, Mrs Mary McAleese. The project ran for two years
and helped forge valuable links between groups of people of
all ages, many of who would not have been regular library
users, and most of whom might never have met had it not been
for the involvement of the library.
The success of the ‘Books Across the Border’ project
was a major factor in Newry Library coming a close second
in the national ‘Libraries Change Lives’ Awards,
which were held in Birmingham in 2000. This was a major achievement,
given that it was the first time that a library from within
the SELB area had entered the competition and the fact that
Newry Library was competing against library projects from
across the whole of the British Isles. |
