A different kind of mobile library: on bookmobiles

Bookmobiles have come up in a number of conversations I’ve had recently, so I thought I’d share some thoughts and links.

Jane Hu wrote a piece earlier this summer for the Awl called “Booktorrent! The Bookmobile as Rural Filesharing Network”. There weren’t quite as many parallels to today’s models of sharing information as you’d expect from the title, but it’s still a good, short introduction to bookmobile service in England and America. She touches on the way public library service first began in cities, leaving those who lived in more rural areas without the free access to information libraries were beginning to provide. Bookmobiles were a way to bring that information and those resources to a wider audience.

One emerging trend in librarianship now is to position the library as a “third place,” a location that is neither work nor home but which allows for social interaction and the establishment of a sense of community. (The more common way to refer to this is as the library as a community center.) But Hu points out that this is something early bookmobiles were already offering:

The bookmobile also provided often-detached rural populations opportunities to socialize. In attempts to appeal to adults, bookmobiles often added late night stops. (I’m a little disappointed these don’t happen anymore.) The goal of the bookmobile to educate and thus “make better Americans” opened up a cultural conversation that spreads each day with the traveling word.

For a more extensive chronicling of the history of bookmobile service in a particular place, check out the articles and photos (such great photos!) that Western Maryland’s Historical Library has collected and made available. In fact, it was in Washington County that Mary Titcomb started the first bookmobile service in America in 1905 as a way of reaching potential patrons who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) visit the deposit stations in general stores and post offices that she’d established throughout Washington County, Maryland. What I found especially interesting was her evolving thoughts on what the bookcart should look like and what connotations it should evoke. She wrote in The Story of the Washington County Free Library:

The first wagon, when finished with shelves on the outside and a place for storage of cases in the center resembled somewhat a cross between a grocer’s delivery wagon and the tin peddlers cart of by gone New England days. Filled with an attractive collection of books and drawn by two horses, with Mr. Thomas the janitor both holding the reins and dispensing the books, it started on its travels in April 1905.

[...]

When directions were given as to painting, we had the fear of looking too much like the laundry wagon before our eyes, and the man was strictly enjoined, not to put any gilt or scroll work on it but to make even the lettering, “Washington County Free Library,” plain and dignified, directions carried out only too well, for in the early days of our wagoning, as our man approached one farm house, he heard a voice charged with nervous trepidation, call out “Yer needn’t stop here. We ain’t got no use for the dead wagon here.” Suffice it to say, that we promptly painted the wheels red, and picked off the panels of the doors with the same cheerful color.

In 1912, the library began using a motorized bookmobile.

However, this bookmobile suffered frequent accidents and breakdowns, prompting the librarian at the time, Miss Nellie Chrissinger, to write in the annual report, “The wagon is a victim of circumstances over which we have no control. Even at best, but eight or nine months can be counted on and wet days, wet roads, and repairs shorten the time of operation still more.”

The Washington County Free Library most recently upgraded its bookmobile in 2004. It can carry up to 4000 books, has four computer workstation outlets, is air conditioned or heated depending on the season, and comes equipped with a wheelchair lift.

It’s interesting to see how much bookmobile service has evolved in the last hundred years!

Hu mentions that bookmobile service was the only way libraries were able to reach many people living in rural areas. I’m not completely sure I’m remembering this correctly, but during one of my courses with Dr Preer during my MLS, she told us that when public library service was expanding across the country, the government provided funds for libraries to develop bookmobile service in their area to reach rural residents. Even then, though, Indiana had something of a libertarian bent, and most libraries declined this funding, not wanting to take federal money to provide a local service. So while other states were sending out bookmobiles and demonstrating the relevance, importance, and general awesomeness of library service to as many people as possible in their towns or counties or service areas, Indiana was focusing on physical buildings and not doing as much outreach. As a result, even to this day, support for libraries isn’t as strong as it could be in Indiana, and library service often lags behind other states in the Midwest. There are still plenty of people who don’t have library service without having to pay for library cards (the white areas on this map show unserved areas), and because library service is still a patchwork of town and county libraries, it’s harder to have state-wide standards for staff qualifications and services provided and operating hours. If only we’d said yes to bookmobiles!

Mary Titcomb wrote, “No better method has ever been devised for reaching the dweller in the country. The book goes to the man, not waiting for the man to come to the book.” But it’s not just country dwellers whose lives are enriched by bookmobile service; bookmobiles across the country now bring the library’s resources to nursing homes or the homebound.

Even elsewhere in the world, mobile library service provides people with access to information they wouldn’t otherwise have. The InfoLadies of Bangladesh bring villagers practical information on agriculture, health, and social services available to them. In Colombia, Luis Soriano is saving children from illiteracy with his “biblioburro.” And across the world, children get library service in all sorts of ways.

It seems like a lot of people have fond memories of bookmobile service. When my parents first moved us to Indiana, we lived in an area just outside of Fort Wayne that was only just beginning to be developed. The nearest library branch was about 20 minutes away, so we made use of the bookmobile service the library provided while they planned and built a branch in our area. While my memories of the bookmobile are pretty hazy–mostly I remember enjoying the coolness after being out in the hot summer sun and the delight I felt in being in a room full of books–my mom still reminisces about how much she enjoyed being able to request specific titles and have them brought to her the next week.

W. Ralph Eubanks mused on his own memories of bookmobile visits during his childhood in Mississippi for All Things Considered earlier this summer. What I found especially interesting was this passage that reflects on both the inequality of life for a black family in the South, but also on the way library service can change our lives:

Even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Mississippi resisted enforcing it. But when my mother, a school teacher, asked for the bookmobile to stop at our house in the summer of 1965, the librarian did not hesitate even though schools were still segregated. By simply following the law rather than ignoring it, the bookmobile transformed me into a lifelong reader and eventually a writer.

The thing I came across most recently that got me thinking about bookmobiles was Audrey Niffenegger’s The Night Bookmobile, a graphic novel about a woman who discovers a bookmobile one night that contains every book she’s ever read. The bookmobile disappears, though, and the woman spends years trying to find it again, becoming a librarian in the mean time.

Being able to bring library service to as many people as possible is part of the mission of any good library. We help those who are able to make it through our doors, but we also need to consider the needs of those for whom visiting the library isn’t possible or practical. We send books to nursing homes, we visit juvenile detention facilities, and we provide ebooks and downloadable audio books, but for many, the bookmobile has a special place in their heart as the way they access their libraries.

Share this post:

1 Comment September 23, 2010

Distinctive library collections

Part of why I liked the zine collection at the Multnomah County Library (see my recent post, too) is that it reflects part of the culture of Portland. Especially with budgets being cut across the country, libraries might feel stretched just trying to maintain a core collection, so seeing these unique (or unusual or at the very least interesting) collections continue to exist is cool. I’ve run across three such collections recently that I’d like to share with you.

Archives, since they usually have a specific focus and can collect deeply in that area, often have some of the neatest collections. For example, the William Stafford Archives at Lewis and Clark College include private papers, recordings, teaching materials, and photographs belonging to the late poet. What makes this collection really noteworthy is that Stafford wrote every single day for the last 43 years of his life, producing 20,000 pages. He also saved letters that he received and sometimes even included a copy of his replies–another 100,000 sheets. The website doesn’t provide access to every item in the collection, but you can browse books, poems, audio and video recordings, and images. In “Evidence of me…”, Sue McKemmish discusses different levels of personal recordkeeping and explores how “memories of me” become “memories of us.” While not everyone wants to (or should!) keep a record of everything he or she writes, having such a huge body of work from a well-known figure is incredible.

The National Library of Medicine has a new web exhibition, “An Iconography of Contagion,” that includes many examples of 20th century public health posters from around the world. And again, a specialized organization can offer an extensive, specialized collection. But what I love is that they’re making these items available for viewing online. There are the war-era warnings against catching STIs that you’d expect, but there are also more recent posters that attempt to educate people about, for example, the way HIV/AIDS is and isn’t spread, and even more interesting things like one poster from China in 1935 that discourages spitting in public, which facilitated the spread of TB.

And lest this post be entirely about collections in highly specialized libraries, I’ll also direct you to a recent article in Fine Books Magazine about the Jewish cookbook collection at the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library. When a patron asked where the Jewish cookbooks were and the reference librarian, Roberta Saltzman, discovered the library only had a few, she began buying Jewish cookbooks at online auctions and donating them to the library. The collection includes over than 700 cookbooks (more than double the number the Library of Congress holds, according to an article from last year in Forward), many of them collections printed by synagogue sisterhoods. The collection also includes one cookbook printed as a fundraiser for the Jüdischer Frauenbund, “an early German feminist organization” in 1935 during the early part of Hitler’s reign. The collection is nearly entirely Saltzman’s doing; NYPL just accepts her donations and preserves the cookbooks.

What are your favorite distinctive library collections?

Share this post:

Leave a Comment April 23, 2010

More on our work with EPL

Erin–whom you may know as the champion of metadata from her earlier blog post–has a new post over on her own blog about our trip to Eckhart Public Library if you’re interested in another perspective on the project.

She tackles in more detail than I did the difficulty of digitizing certain things and the way best practices can’t always be implemented within the context of real-world constraints.

How many of you have a digital camera? How many of you make sure your photos are TIFF files instead of JPG? TIFF is the current standand for archival quality photos. Which is great and fine and dandy if you’re scanning old documents into your computer, but a bit more problematic when you have digital camera pics that are already saved in jpg format.

Erin also touches on why this project is so cool. Not only are we getting a chance to advance a public library’s project, but we’re also finally getting to apply what we’ve learned in class in the real world and see why things work the way they do and how, as librarians, we can use the tools we’ve learned about to do cool things.

This project is great — not only is it fantastic experience, but its a lot of fun, and I feel like we’re contributing to a pretty cool project. After completing my digital libraries class last fall, I kind of hated metadata — its a lot like cataloging, with lots of rules and details and UGH. But the cool thing, that I’m realizing now, is that with metadata, the rules are always changing. So while it is a bit like cataloging, its much more fun, since we get to create the schema and the fields, and while there are standards to adhere to, the rules we get to make ourselves.

I must confess that I’m not as excited about metadata as Erin, so my current piece of the project, figuring out what metadata we need for items we’re expecting teens in particular to want to include, isn’t firing my jets quite as much as the project in general. But it does hint at the notion that teens understand digital content–and as a result the world–differently than people of other ages might, which I do find interesting.

So go read Erin’s post. She does a good job of discussing something I probably won’t talk about in much detail.

Share this post:

Leave a Comment March 10, 2010

A visit to Eckhart Public Library

I’ve written a little bit about my directed readings course this semester that I’m doing with Andrea Japzon and four other students in the program. On Saturday we took a trip up to the Eckhart Public Library in Auburn, Indiana to see their collections, work out some details of the project, and share our best practices research.

The William H. Willennar Genealogy Center
We started at the William H. Willennar Genealogy Center where we met Gregg Williamson, the Manager of Genealogical Services (and a SLIS-Indy grad!), who gave us a tour of their building. We started off with the print collection, which has the largest collection of genealogy materials dealing with DeKalb County, and includes yearbooks for local schools dating back to 1905, family histories for local families, phone books, and individual files of research people have done on their own families. They also have a large microfilm collection of local newspapers, microfilm readers and scanners, and computer stations where patrons can use online resources to do genealogy research.

The seating space in the main room of the Genealogy Center. Photo by Erin Milanese.

Part of the print collection. Photo by Erin Milanese.

Gregg then took us through the staff workspace and talked about the people who work at the Genealogy Center (they’re mostly part-time employees and volunteers) and showed us the basement archive and the permanent archive upstairs. The basement archive is mostly local newspapers; some date back to the 1800s, but the collection also includes recent issues as well. As Gregg explained it, we’re very fortunate to have those two hundred-year-old papers, and people two hundred years from now are only going to have resources like that if we save current newspapers now.

Archival boxes in the basement archive. Photo by Erin Milanese.

The Genealogy Center has a lot of really cool technology and tools; one of the ones I found the most interesting was the microfilm camera. EPL still sends some of its things out to be microfilmed since it’s such a labor-intensive process and they do depend so heavily on volunteer work, but there are some items that they scan themselves. I can’t remember what the exact claim to fame was, but this may be one of the only microfilm scanners in a public library in Indiana. It was something really impressive like that.

EPL's microfilm camera. Photo by Erin Milanese.

The upstairs archive is the permanent archive and contains records that are available upon request but aren’t immediately available to the public (e.g., old gradebooks from local schools). We had a short but interesting conversation about balancing privacy and access; Gregg said that rather than siding with archivists who’d be more interested in privacy and protection of the physical materials, he tends to err on the side of making things open to people, reasoning that it’s a public library, so their holdings should be open to the public. He did say that there are some things that aren’t available to the public at all because of privacy concerns, like old library card registrations from earlier decades that include people’s names and addresses.

We also got to check out the digitization lab. Alaina Ring is in charge of the metadata for the library’s photo archive and database and she walked us through the creation of a database record. The digitalization lab has some neat technology, too, including a 35mm slide scanner, and what’s really cool about it is that it’s open to the public. They’ve done a lot of grant writing to build their collection and the tools they have available to them. It’s really impressive.

Two of the computer workstations (and the slide scanner) in the digitization lab. Photo by Erin Milanese.

This trip also gave us all a chance to better understand the specifics of and our own roles in this project. The Genealogy Center already has an extensive collection of photographs and documents, but most of it is of historical materials–which makes sense, since the people who use the Genealogy Center are doing research into their family’s history or into local history in general. But in the same way that Gregg is saving local newspapers now for the researchers of the future, Andrea wants to start saving the digital content of today for the researchers of tomorrow.

What we’re hoping to do with this project is to target some people whose stories reflect what’s going on in the community now: the woman who owns a local cafe, a teenager growing up in Auburn, a prominent politician, the factory worker who recently got laid off because of the economic downturn. We’ll solicit from them real and digital objects that represent their lives in the community and then figure out how to ingest that content into the library’s digital collection (or find a home for it at the DeKalb History Center or return it to its owner after scanning or photographing it). We’d also like to collect oral histories (maybe even on video) and find a way to include those in the library’s database. After an initial pilot program this year, we’re hoping to expand the project to include more community members in future years, and to promote the collection during Auburn Pride Week.

Andrea’s big on co-created community resources and on knowledge exchanges, so since we (both we students and the public library) are learning from community members with this project, we’ll also be doing workshops this summer to give some knowledge back to the community. The library’s done programs before on creating scrapbooks and preserving photographs and they’ve brought in outside speakers to talk about preserving digital information, but we’re hoping to build on what they’ve done before to help teach people about collecting, organizing, and preserving their digital content. We’ll also do workshops on privacy and copyright issues when dealing with digital content.

During our discussions, I was thinking about the different people we’re going to recruit for the pilot program and it really struck me how people of different ages understand digital content in completely different ways. Most teenagers are very at home in a digital world and are very nearly swimming in digital content. But maybe there’s also an older person in the community who doesn’t have his own computer and comes to the library to check his email where his granddaughter has sent photos from her latest birthday party. He understands those digital photographs that just live in his inbox in a totally different way than the teen understands the photos he texts to his friends. I think I’d like to learn more about that.

Now that I’ve got a more detailed idea of how the People of Auburn project is going to go and I’ve actually seen the physical facilities and gotten to know the library a little bit, I’m even more excited about this project. I have to admit that normally I find genealogy and archives only mildly interesting, but the more Gregg showed us on Saturday, the more interested I got. They’ve got so many unusual and unique resources and technology. I’m also very excited about the team we have assembled for this project!

Back row: Andrea Japzon, Erin Miller Milanese, Gretchen Kolderup, Alaina Ring, Gregg Williamson. Front row: Katie Nakanishi, Eve Grant. Not pictured: Angela Slocum. Photo by EPL's Gretel.

Eckhart Public Library is unusual in that it actually comprises three separate buildings all on the same street. We conducted most of our business on Saturday at the Genealogy Center, but we also visited the main library building and the teen library. Oh yes, EPL has a completely separate building for its teens–and it’s totally awesome. It’s open after school and on the weekends and it’s got comfortable furnishings, really striking light fixtures, computers, and a space for programming and games. Adults are only allowed in for fifteen minutes at a time if they’re not accompanied by a teen. When we walked into the building, the teens sitting at the computers turned around to stare at us; Darcy, the librarian I talked to, said that’s one of the things the teens like best about having their own space, feeling like they belonged and anyone else was an outsider. She did acknowledge that sometimes the people in adult services were too quick to send teens away from the main library building but said that overall, having their own space was great. I was impressed with how current their fiction collection was and how large their non-fiction collection (homework resources and teen-interest stuff like gaming guides and yoga books and things like that) was. I think it’s really important for teens to have their own space in the library–and it’s even better when they can have a space where they aren’t constantly being told to keep their voices down.

The outside of the Third Place, EPL's teen library. Photo by Erin Milanese.

We also visited the main library building, which was built in 1911 and is on the National Register of Historic Places and has a lot of interesting touches. It was originally going to be a Carnegie building, but Charles Eckhart, a local businessman, said he’d build the library on the condition that the contract with Carnegie be severed. The library has a fountain in the yard outside, stained glass windows, and a fireplace. It’s very comfortable and it really feels like a homey place the community can gather.

The fountain outside the main library. Photo by Erin Milanese.

Stained glass and bookshelves in the main library building. Photo by Erin Milanese.

I also took a trip downstairs to check out the children’s area. They have puppets and toys available for checkout and their storytime room is decorated with a Secret Garden theme and has an adjacent room with kid-sized tables for craft time. I was so impressed with the creative touches throughout the whole library. It seems like a really fun place to be able to go!

A tree in the storytime room in the children's department. Photo by Erin Milanese.

EPL has internship opportunities available for SLIS-Indy students. If you’re interested in working in the Genealogy Center processing materials for the digital collection, in the teen library, for information services, or in technical services, email Gregg Williamson. Don’t forget that internship applications are due to Marilyn Irwin in the SLIS office by 15 March for the summer semester and 15 July for the fall semester.

Share this post:

8 Comments March 2, 2010

The importance of metadata

One of the classes that I’m taking this semester is an independent study that’s actually a group project with some other students in the program led by Andrea Japzon (whom I had for my Public Library Management class last semester). We’re going to help a public library in northern Indiana create a community digital repository to show their community pride and have a place to collect their community’s history. I’m focusing on privacy and copyright concerns.

At the beginning of the semester, Andrea had us do some reading on digital repositories and the idea of a community repository and how “memories of me” become “memories of us.” The article I found especially fascinating was “Guarding Against Collective Amnesia? Making Significance Problematic: An Exploration of Issues” by Annemaree Lloyd, which appeared in Library Trends in 2007. In it, Lloyd discusses how the very act of determining what is significant enough to go into an archive is a political act and defines how future people will determine significance. She also talked about how the dominant culture can’t understand the significance to minority cultures of artifacts from those minority cultures, and takes librarians and archivists and historians to task for not examining the lack of objectivity–and the fundamental inability to be objective–in choosing what’s significant. It’s not the kind of thing I usually read in library literature (I’d expect it more from a cultural studies program), but I found it really interesting.

Anyway, my friend and classmate, Erin (who’s also the incredibly hard-working president of ALISS), is Andrea’s GA, so she’s working on the project, too. She’s interested in doing more with digital collections once she graduates and she wrote a post on her blog about the project, including a short argument for the importance of metadata in everyone’s lives:

You’re probably on the verge of clicking the X button and not finishing this blog because you think metadata is something that only applies to us nerds digitizing things and working in libraries…. but you’re wrong. Metadata is EVERYthing. Every time you tag a photo in Facebook or on Flickr…that’s metadata. Everytime you put a title on your blog…metadata. Depending on the search engine, every word you write can be a piece of metadata. When you upload photos from your camera onto your computer, and each file is given a name like 00258_img, and you see things like 154x132px or “taken with sony digital” or “jpg”… that’s all metadata.

The problem is, while metadata is everywhere, its not standardized, often neglected, and can be very subjective (think about all those times you’ve tagged pics on facebook with things like “that crazy guy from across the street”, or “my friend’s cute baby”, or even worse, not tagged anyone and neglected to write a caption, leaving librarians and historians 100 years from now no clue as to who or what is depicted).

In the digital age, information is created so much more rapidly than it ever was before. During our meeting near the beginning of the semester, Andrea said that over 90% of all information created today is only created digitally. And from our readings, we learned that in the past, preservation was something that happened after creation, now preservation happens at creation, because as soon as you take a photo, you’re locked into that file format and that resolution for all time with no guarantee that the digital information that makes up that picture will be readable in the future.

With this project we’re not only planning to help establish this community digital repository, but to design workshops for patrons of the public library to explain how data generation and preservation works in the digital world. We need to make Erin’s argument for the importance of metadata to non-librarians and we need to help people decide how to balance social networking and privacy. That’s what libraries are for: to teach information and technology literacy.

This week we’re all finishing up our initial round of research in our different areas and our identification of best practices. Next weekend we’ll drive up to the library to finalize a timeline for this project and check out what they’ve got in place already. I’ll be writing more about the project as we continue to work on it.

Share this post:

4 Comments February 18, 2010