Bookmobiles

Getting books to customers is easy (well, easy if you don’t have global pandemic to deal with, anyway) – they visit the library or a bookmobile, and pick up their book. How about using drones or robots to deliver books?Well … both are being done right now.

From: https://davidleeking.com/drone-and-robot-book-delivery/ Drone and Robot Book Delivery | | David Lee King

Fast forward thirty years. The magic of the bookmobile remains. But the magic has evolved. Whereas the bookmobile of my youth was a place for my imagination to run amok (and today’s bookmobiles still provide this outlet for all), bookmobiles today have changed the way a library connects to the people it serves. Bookmobiles today serve a more effectual purpose than before—but that is not to say bookmobiles of my youth were ineffectual. As a valued part of any library’s arsenal, bookmobiles today help to disseminate information, erase barriers, and equalize opportunity for all patrons—much like in the past, only in different guises today. Bookmobiles today have spawned other mobile outreach vehicles: vans, buses, campers, bicycles, and scooters; and it is within all these different vehicles that a new type of outreach has developed.

From The Relevance of Bookmobiles and Mobile Libraries in 2018 » Public Libraries Online

Growing up in the 1960s, Storm Reyes lived and worked in migrant labor camps across Washington state. When she was 8 years old, she began working full-time picking fruit for under a dollar an hour.

At StoryCorps, Storm shared stories of her difficult childhood with her son, Jeremy Hagquist, and remembers the day a bookmobile unexpectedly arrived, opening up new worlds and bringing hope.

From The Bookmobile – StoryCorps

His subjects are as diverse as the places they serve. There is a one-room “free library” shack in California’s San Joaquin Valley, then the polished marble floors of Chicago’s hangar-sized central branch. There are stately Carnegie Libraries, glassy modern edifices by Koolhaas and Safdie, strip-mall outposts, and steel-sided bookmobiles. The photographs are mainly architectural, but there are moving interior shots as well. In San Francisco, a grown woman learns to read. Visitors browse Chinese-language books in Queens. “Tool librarians” lend out hammers and clamps in Berkeley. And in towns large and small, oil-painted heroes of U.S. history peer over readers’ shoulders.

From Robert Dawson’s Photographs of America’s Public Libraries – CityLab

In “The Bookmobile,” a StoryCorps project, a young Native American girl shares a tale of discovery.

From The Power of Mobile Libraries, a StoryCorps Animation: ‘The Bookmobile’ – CityLab

In “The Bookmobile,” a StoryCorps project, a young Native American girl shares a tale of discovery.

From The Power of Mobile Libraries, a StoryCorps Animation: ‘The Bookmobile’ – CityLab

National Bookmobile Day (Wednesday, April 13, 2016) celebrates our nation’s bookmobiles and the dedicated library professionals who provide this valuable and essential service to their communities every day.

National Bookmobile Day is an opportunity for bookmobiles fans to make their support known—through thanking bookmobile staff, writing a letter or e-mail to their libraries, or voicing their support to community leaders.

National Bookmobile Day is coordinated by the ALA Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services, the Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services (ABOS), and the Association for Rural & Small Libraries (ARSL).

From National Bookmobile Day 2016 | Offices of the American Library Association

National Bookmobile Day (Wednesday, April 13, 2016) celebrates our nation’s bookmobiles and the dedicated library professionals who provide this valuable and essential service to their communities every day.

National Bookmobile Day is an opportunity for bookmobiles fans to make their support known—through thanking bookmobile staff, writing a letter or e-mail to their libraries, or voicing their support to community leaders.

National Bookmobile Day is coordinated by the ALA Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services, the Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services (ABOS), and the Association for Rural & Small Libraries (ARSL).

From National Bookmobile Day 2016 | Offices of the American Library Association

From The LA Times www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0419-straight-bookmobile-20150419-story.html:

Bookmobiles have been a fixture of rural American life since the 19th century, when horse-drawn book wagons stenciled with gold lettering read Free Library. There were low-slung black panel trucks in the 1930s, side doors open to shelves, with children sitting on the wide fenders turning pages.

In the Riverside (CA) Public Library recently, I read the catalog from the Gerstenslager Co. in Wooster, Ohio, which built bookmobiles for the nation. Children and adults stood in line to ascend a few stairs and be inside a real library, albeit one with shelves set on a slight incline, so books wouldn’t fall out when the coach was moving.

Three enterprising Arizona State University students capitalize on the food truck craze by devising a plan to convert old trucks into modern-day bookmobiles for low-income schools and communities lacking basic library resources. They hatched the idea as part of their Changemaking in Education course co-taught by ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and Teach For America.

From Students turn food trucks into mobile libraries | ASU News

When one of the bookmobiles at the Fort Vancouver Regional Library (FVRL), WA, wore out, spending a quarter of a million dollars to buy a new one was not an option. Yet patrons in remote, rural locations in Clark County still needed library service. The innovative solution was the Yacolt Library Express (YLE): a building that is open to the public nearly 70 hours a week, yet staff only spend about ten hours there during the same period.

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/11/opinion/one-cool-thing/the-off-site-librarian-one-cool-thing/#_