Niagara Falls Public Library Bookmobile nearly ready to hit the road

The Niagara Falls Public Library Bookmobile is about ready to hit the road.

This being, as far as we’re aware, Niagara’s first bookmobile since the Welland Public Library bookmobile was decommissioned in 1995 after more than 20 years of service, we expect to have some explaining to do as far as what a Bookmobile is and what it does, so here it goes.

There are more than 670 bookmobiles across the U.S. and a handful in Canada. They sometimes go by different names — Library on Wheels, Travelling Library, Neighbourhood Service — but the idea behind bookmobiles remains the same: bring a little bit of the library out into the community to break down barriers to access and offer service to people that can’t or wouldn’t usually visit a branch.

Bookmobiles come in all shapes and sizes. The earliest bookmobiles were librarians delivering books on horseback. In modern times, bookmobiles are customized transit buses, school buses, box trucks, ice-cream trucks, RVs, cargo vans — any vehicle large enough to accommodate some library shelves and a handful of people standing up and walking around inside. The shelves are filled, of course, with books, but also a selection of the other wonderful things libraries have to offer: DVDs, CDs, board games, nature kits, playaway tablets and more.

When you step on board a bookmobile, you’re stepping into a little library where you can do most of the same stuff you can do at a regular library branch: register for a library card, request and pick up holds, browse library materials, check out and return library materials and access Wi-Fi. The major difference is that rather than you going to the library, the library comes to you.

Bookmobiles do a mix of regularly scheduled one-hour stops that happen at the same time and same place every week, outreach visits to schools, retirement homes, pop-up markets and one-off community events. Our bookmobile will have a handful of regular stops to start, with a lot of room left in the schedule to be responsive to community outreach needs and to do events like Mother Earth Day.

Bookmobiles are becoming more popular in Canada, and Ontario in particular, with Niagara’s Lincoln Pelham Public Library in the process of getting one, and others popping up lately in Bruce County and Pickering, joining longer standing services in Guelph, Hamilton and Toronto. In every library system we’ve spoken with, bookmobile service is well-loved by the community. We hope, as we roll out bookmobile service here in Niagara Falls, we can soon say the same.

Now you know what a Bookmobile is and what it does. Stay tuned for more information about the Niagara Falls Public Library Bookmobile.