Bookmobile Operations Over the World

Bookmobile Operations Over the World S. H. HORROCKS AND J. A. HARGREAVES INTHE LAST DECADE bookmobiles have started to operate in all continents of the world, either for the development of new library areas or for the extension of existing library facilities. Their widespread use provides a systematic coverage of many rural areas in some countries of western Europe, e.g., Great Britian. In other countries pilot schemes have been started with bockmobiles, and Unesco in particular has helped to start schemes in countries where public libraries were previously unknown. The basis of bookmobile service was laid in the United Kingdom prior to the Second World War, firstly in a few urban areas and by 1938 in rural areas as well, when the county of Lancashire introduced a vehicle used both as a mobile branch library and as an exhibition van. Today there are almost 250 bookmobiles operating in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland and they are readily divided into those used by municipal libraries and those used by county libraries. It must be remembered that in the United Kingdom the public library service is based on a large number of autonomous library authorities established by counties, boroughs, and urban district coun- cils. Of the mobile libraries now in operation by far the greater number are run by county libraries which serve populations ranging from over two million down to 23,000. In the main the larger urban areas maintain their own library services while the county library is responsible for the remainder of the administrative county. The county libraries themselves aim to provide a static library service in villages and towns above 1,000 population and utilize bookmobiles for both the very rural areas and the nucleated villages having a population below four figures. Most extensive use is made of them in the English counties of the West Riding of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Staffordshire. Mr. Horrocks is Borough Librarian, and Mr. Hargreaves is Reference Librarian, Reading Public Libraries, Reading, England. Bookmobile Operations Over the World A recent set of definitions issued by the County Libraries Section of the British Library Association 1 puts bookmobiles as used in the United Kingdom into two groups: 1. Mobile library: "a vehicle devised, equipped and operated to provide, as far as reasonably practicable, a service comparable to a part-time branch library." 2. Traveling library: "a vehicle of small size (i.e. exceeding 30 cwt.) shelved or otherwise equipped to provide a rural service to villages and isolated farms and houses, with short stops for issuing of books." Incidentally other associated definitions useful in discussing mobile libraries are: 3. Exhibition (or display) van: "a vehicle fitted with shelving or other methods of displaying books, from which Local Librarians, Teachers, etc., select the stocks for their Centres, but which does not serve the public direct." 4. Delivery van: "a vehicle intended and adapted primarily for the transport of books in boxes or trays, and providing no facilities for the selection of books." Bookmobiles in the first group are used by the municipalities, and by the county authorities in their most heavily populated areas. They include new vans, articulated vehicles, trailers, converted vans, omni- buses, and lorries. British usage of these terms is somewhat different than in North America. A 20 cwt. (hundred-weight) vehicle would be equivalent to an American one-ton truck, a 30 cwt. equal to a ton- and-a-half (1%)truck, etc. An articulated vehicle in Britain is a typical trailer-tractor type, similar to American "semi-trailers." In North America, however, an articulated vehicle is more com- monly thought of as a double-section (or more) type, connected by a flexible vestibule (for passenger types). Two or more trailers in tandem arrangement, powered by the same tractor unit, are usually re- ferred to as tandem trailers or double trailers. It will be understood that the administration and use of book vehicles in the United Kingdom vary quite differently from place to place, but as typical examples of current practice an outline is given of an urban service in the borough of Luton, and a rural service in Berkshire, a county located in the south of England about forty miles from London. Luton is a borough with a population of 118,000, and after the war was among the &st towns to use bookmobiles for serving an r 361 I S. N. HORROCKS AND J. A. HARGREAVES urban areas2 A reconditioned single-decker Daimler omnibus, with bodywork converted to hold 2,000 books, was used for six years to serve six outlying districts of the town. When the running of this vehicle became uneconomical a new mobile service was planned with two 22 foot long, four wheel, trailers, towed to the various service points by a tractor. The trailers started operating in February 1957. Each bookmobile has shelving for 2,300 books on shelves fitted down each side and at the front end of the van. There is a continuous flat floor, clerestory roof for natural lighting, and staff counter placed on the near side of the vehicle close to the entrance door. Heating and lighting is by electricity provided by plugging into the mains, at outlets, at the fixed service points. There are ten service points, or stops, carefully pre-selected and provided with permanent hard standings, for parking. The total circulating stock of the bookmobiles is approximately four thousand books, half of which are non-fiction. All the stock is for adult readers. Hours of opening are from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. and the vans are operated by two full-time and two part-time staff. Only one assistant is on duty at a time in each vehicle. A contrast with this wholly urban service with fixed service points is a bookmobile serving a rural area with no large center of population in its midst. This is situated in Berkshire, a county of 725 square miles and a population of 365,900. The North Berkshire mobile library service (one of two in the county) serves places in an area of the county which would not otherwise have easy access to library books, apart from static centers with limited book stocks in some of the villages. This bookmobile, which began to operate in February 1960, is a van mounted on an Austin two/three ton chassis, which operates from a site near Wantage close to the center of the region served. The bookmobile operates in fortnightly cycles over nine routes in the northern part of the county. During this time it calls at 133 service points for anything between ten minutes and half an hour. Stop- ping time depends on the size of the community, which may be a village, hamlet, or isolated farmstead. The service is staffed by a librarian and a driver/assistant, and operates between 10 a.m. and 4:15 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. There is at present a circulating stock of 3,750 adult and 1,700 junior books. Mobile libraries have not been used in Scotland to the same extent as in England. In central Scotland, the most thickly populated part of the country, bookmobiles are in use in Dunbarton, Fife, Midlothian, Bookmobile Operations Over the World and Stirling. With the exception of one vehicle in Dunbarton all of them are on five ton bus chassis and are used in both urban and rural districts. In Midlothian two vehicles are in use and a third is on order. The three vehicles are anticipated to fulfill all the requirements for mobile libraries in the county in the foreseeable future. One is used as a stop- gap service in a coal mining area where it is expected that a branch library will be built in the near future, but the second is used mainly for rural villages and small mining communities; the third, a small vehicle, will take the library service to small rural hamlets, isolated houses, and farms. Whereas the first two have weekly visits to specified stops of an hour or more duration, the third will have fortnightly visits for shorter periods on the usual pattern of a rural service. In Stirling the one vehicle in use covers both urban areas with stands of an hour or more and a rural district covering isolated houses. The area requiring this service within the county is by no means covered by this one-vehicle. The same applied to Fife where the one vehicle in operation originally served entirely as a stop-gap service in urban areas requiring branch libraries but with the development of the branch library service in the county has now become available for a part of its time to serve the scattered rural districts. Two further vehicles are required before these rural areas can be said to be covered. In Dunbarton the larger vehicle operates as a service point at some of the larger villages and in the more outlying housing schemes but the new fifty cwt. unit serves a purely rural area, with stops at indi- vidual houses. The only other mobile services in operation are in the extreme northwest of Scotland in the County of Sutherland, in the largest of the outer Hebrides, the island of Lewis (Ross and Cromarty), and the extreme southwest the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. The Suther- land mobile library is perhaps the most interesting as it serves un- doubtedly the most difficult area at present served by a mobile library in Britain. The county is large and the population exceedingly small; it is broken up by deep sea lochs and mountain chains and the van serves the small pockets of population hemmed in by loch and mountain on a three-week cycle.

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