Company Overview
KetongBaca – Digital Reading Room – is a free public reading room located in the village of Hueknutu, in a less-developed area in Eastern Indonesia. “Ketong baca” means “we read” in a local dialect. With the support and cooperation of local village leadership, we have renovated a locally-owned building to become a modern, efficient electronic (e-) library, stocked with tablets loaded with a large selection of e-books and simple reading applications for young elementary students up to young adults.
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The problem we are trying to address is a low level of interest in reading as an activity, leading to a terribly low literacy level in Eastern Indonesia, with little to no creative initiatives to improve. This is partly due to limited access to good resources, but there is also an underlying local perspective that reading is a sort of boring and old-fashioned activity for previous generations. In addition to not having good access to literacy development opportunities, kids in Hueknutu also often never develop any kind of love or passion for reading or for stories. This is another part of our strategy. Through modern technology and design, we hope our reading room will spark a renewed passion and love for reading in the children of Hueknutu, so that kids can love to read, and a reading, learning culture can begin to grow.
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Help is needed. But, due to current socioeconomic conditions and the traditional culture in this rural area, there is very little potential for this type of idea to arise organically from within the community. Because of this, another aspect of our role, in addition to simply opening the reading room and marketing it, is to come alongside key local leaders and drive education about the importance of literacy development in young children. We are doing this carefully and thoughtfully, through key contacts that we have in the village area. And more specifically, the reading room has one full-time worker on-site every operational day to monitor students and to manage daily tasks, as well as one assigned local supervisor for a second level of local supervision.
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Operationally, the reading room is open Monday-Saturday, from 11am-5pm. The use of our library devices and content is free of charge, but it requires people to register as members of our system, and it is limited to on-site use only. Our tablets are all also secured and locked offline, with only the reading room content available, in order to avoid the usual online distractions and temptations. We also limit students' reading times in timed blocks, according to international published standards. This all helps to create a stricter environment with less risk, both for us and for the local members. However, there is still plenty of material on the tablets to keep students busy, with an initial selection of over 1,000 books loaded on each device.
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