On the eve of May holidays, the Russian State Children's Library held a ceremony of awarding the winners of the Strana Chitalia 2026 (Country of Reading 2026) contest. The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ joined the event as an IT partner. The record of the event is available on the pages of the Library’s VK community.
The contest is intended to initiate children and teenagers into leisure reading, to draw their attention to books in general using information technologies: through booktrailers, i.e. video ads on the book read; the task of the video author is to engage the viewer with the story to make the viewer read the full version of the work.
According to the contest organizers, creation of a booktrailer requires good knowledge of the book content, a profound and complete understanding of its story and characters, identifying the main ideas that the author wants the reader to understand:
“We call it a meaningful reading, i.e. an active and intelligent approach to reading, including not only simple perception of the text, but its analysis, understanding and reflection as well.”
In 2026, Strana Chitalia was held for the fifth time. Over 1,500 children and teenagers, as well as their parents and tutors took part in the contest. The results have been published on the official website: страначиталия.рф.
Director of the Coordination Center Andrey Vorobyev presented a special prize to School No. 1474 for its active participation in organizing and holding the first Moscow Media Literacy Day, which took place in March 2026 at the Coordination Center’s initiative. Two hundred schoolchildren from Moscow media classes, would-be journalists, publicists and bloggers, who are interested in the media sphere and technologies, took part in the event. Schoolchildren communicated with a practicing journalist and a representative of an IT company, and learnt how to use AI working in the media.
“The Coordination Center’s mission is not only to develop the domain space and internet technologies as a whole, but also to bring up an intelligent and literate generation. Including by popularizing reading among children and teenagers using the digital formats they got used to. We sincerely believe that the greater the number of young people who are keen on books, learn to analyze what they have read and perceive the information critically, the stronger our country’s intellectual potential will be and the more talented specialists will come to our IT area. This is why we support the contests like Strana Chitalia and organize events aimed at raising media literacy in modern generations,” commented Andrey Vorobyev.
