“Citizen Action for Reading” is a movement of people who aim for a society based on the dignity of man, reflection, and maturity.

Citizen Action for Reading is a civic movement that seeks to expand and improve knowledge-based facilities, so that every citizen enjoys the equal right to have free access to knowledge; to form a society in which even underprivileged citizens can have access to books whenever they want to; and to renew society so that all citizens create their own values with truly equal access to education, culture, information and knowledge. Citizen Action for Reading is a people’s solidarity created for the purpose of building a community with a mature sense of citizenship, alert self-examination, reasonable civic judgment and democracy full of justice by cultivating mature civil culture through reading. Citizen Action for Reading is a spontaneous movement of people that aims to expand the base for decent lives with warm hearts from sense of morals, imagination and refined emotions empowered by reading; to prepare the way for a society guaranteeing tolerance, coexistence and mutual prosperity. Citizen Action for Reading is a valid and sincere movement to create a better life. The significance of reading has been degraded and equitable opportunities to access good reading materials are not provided to all as a result of the pressures of competitive systems and social injustice today. The efforts of Citizen Action for Reading are aimed at restoring humanity and justice by the dissemination of desirable reading culture and education.

 

Mission & Vision
Citizen Action for Reading believes that we can right the wrongs of society and open the benefits of mental culture to all by people’s cooperative power generated from reading and knowledge.
The missions of Citizen Action for Reading are to:
- Expand the social equality of access to information and knowledge.
- Realize mature civil society through reading culture.
- Make a culture and community based on humanity.

Under those missions, Citizen Action for Reading has carried out a variety of projects:
- Policy proposals
- Library projects
- Bookstart Korea programs
- Support for little libraries and school libraries
- Reading promotion
- Strengthening welfare based on mental culture
- Legislative proposals
- Study, Research, Promotion, Education
- Developing cultural contents and programs
- Support for cultural movement concerned with the humanities

 

Declaration of Citizen Action for Reading

Commemoration of World Book and Copyright Day
A book is mankind’s memory, creation, thought, and expression. As we know, early human culture was introduced by Egyptian and Mesopotamian letters and books. The first evidence of books comes from Mesopotamia five thousand years ago, where stylus-inscribed clay tablets were used to record cruciform pictographs. And Mesopotamians built a library of cuneiform tablets to house them. It was the source of our current form of library. According to a Sumerian Cuneiform script, when the sky god went into the earth and competed with the god of darkness for seven days, a green tree rose from the wild earth where everything needed was not brought into being yet. It is possible owing to a heritage known as a book that the beautiful story about 5,000 years ago has been transmitted to posterity and its thought and imagination have continuously inspired to generate another thought and imagination. If human beings were not beings of remembering, thinking, and expressing imagination, we would have no self-identity. Books exist in the heart of being. It is greatly important in this age of discord not only to make a way of communicating with people in other parts of the world but also to understand others and to respect their differences. We believe that ‘World Book Day’ organized by UNESCO is designated on the basis of communication, mutual understanding, and the spirit of liberality, and that books are the best peaceful, powerful instruments for promoting those sprits. We are confident that books open doors of mutual understanding and liberality and guide human beings to the way of making peaceful co-existence and their future. Thus our society should not disregard the fact that books convey the best knowledge, they evoke the best imagination and they are the best medium for creation. Therefore this medium should be easy to access and enjoyable for all people. We maintain that school libraries should be broadly used for everyone and public libraries need to be more constructed, expended and improved because spreading reading culture provides all people with the equity of knowledge, information, and expression, and allows our society to realize a proper, creative, normal culture. Celebrating the 7th World Book and Copyright Day, we hope to remind all of our social request and tasks that encourage activities for our society.