bookmobility

information in motion

9 notes

I defended my dissertation—“Here Comes the Bookmobile: Public Culture and the Shape of Belonging”—today, and it was a rousing success. Consequently, if you imagine the dump-truck is a bookmobile, the picture above pretty much captures my mood. Thanks to all of the bookmobility.org readers for helping me muddle through ideas and continue thinking hard about books and information on the move.

I defended my dissertation—“Here Comes the Bookmobile: Public Culture and the Shape of Belonging”—today, and it was a rousing success. Consequently, if you imagine the dump-truck is a bookmobile, the picture above pretty much captures my mood.

Thanks to all of the bookmobility.org readers for helping me muddle through ideas and continue thinking hard about books and information on the move.

Filed under books bookmobiles self-promotion

11 notes

I must add that I can not pretend to be a dispassionate, nor impartial observer. I come from a particular place. I’ve now been out in the world, and seen how other people in other places live. They don’t strike me as more intelligent. They strike me as better armed.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Social Construction of Race” (May 17, 2013)

Filed under race culture segregation

4 notes

Responses to Michael Rosenblum’s “What’s a Library?” have rocketed around the internet over the past few days. One of the most interesting results has been the creation—by the Magpie Librarian (see above) and Natalie Binder—of Libraries Changed My Life, a Tumblr devoted to recording patrons’ voices. Check out my story about this great new site here: “What’s a Library?”: Patrons Share How Libraries Changed Their Lives

Responses to Michael Rosenblum’s “What’s a Library?” have rocketed around the internet over the past few days. One of the most interesting results has been the creation—by the Magpie Librarian (see above) and Natalie Binder—of Libraries Changed My Life, a Tumblr devoted to recording patrons’ voices. Check out my story about this great new site here:

“What’s a Library?”: Patrons Share How Libraries Changed Their Lives

Filed under libraries advocacy librarians

0 notes

Vic smelled the vast vault filled with books before she saw it, because her eyes required time to adjust to the cavernous dark. She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.
Joe Hill, NOS4A2 (HarperCollins, 2013)

Filed under books food fiction

2 notes

Yesterday, in an effort to bring fresh produce to a city without much of it, the Camden Children’s Garden launched a mobile produce market. An AP headline refers to it as a “combination of a bookmobile and an ice cream truck,” but they probably don’t know how right they are. One of the chapters of my manuscript is about “booketerias” (self-service mini-library branches in supermarkets in the mid- to late-twentieth century), and in particular about how they participated in the decay of public infrastructures for educating (and feeding) a diverse population. Several years ago, I wrote a brief essay for HASTAC, which I then reposted here to bookmobility.org about booketerias and a modern reversal, which uses libraries and mobile technology to bring food into food deserts. The Camden mobile market is yet another example, so I’ll print that essay here, to raise some questions and ideas: From Booketerias to Virtual Supermarkets: Libraries & Our Public Landscape Last week, NPR ran a story about a new program in Baltimore that uses public libraries to combat the problem of access to healthy foods in urban environments: “Under a new city program, patrons can order groceries online and pay with cash, credit or food stamps. The orders are filled by Santoni’s supermarket, a longtime Baltimore grocer. They deliver the items to the library the next day. … The Virtual Supermarket Project is part of a city push to make healthy food more accessible in communities where major supermarkets are scarce. Baltimore’s health department launched it last month at two of the city’s public library branches. They’re located on opposite ends of town: one neighborhood is mostly African-American and working-class, the other racially and economically mixed. These areas lack large, competitively priced supermarkets within walking distance sometimes called ‘food deserts.’ Both communities have plenty of fast-food and corner stores, but many tend to offer less healthy fare.” I am working on a dissertation project about bookmobiles and library extension in American culture, so this immediately caught my eye.  In fact, it reminded me in a curious sort of way of an earlier program I’d run across in the archives last summer.  In 1947, the Nashville Public Library first proposed what they called a bookateria.  The plan,” one newspaper article put it, “would be to have the books within easy reach of customers and let them have their favorite novels, mystery stories or biographies checked out with their groceries. In 1953, the library finally put the idea into practice.  The bookaterias, in strategically placed supermarkets around town, ended up taking shape as self-service branch libraries (you filled out a card with your information, and the book’s, and dropped it in a box on your way out of the store).  As you can see in the photo, buying produce and checking out a book are made into parallel experiences.  Self-service was the hallmark of the supermarket, in contrast to the full-service general store of the past, just as it distinguished the modern library (and, of course, especially the bookateria) from closed-stacks models that had characterized many earlier models of librarianship.  Like the bookmobile, the bookateria tied library extension to an icon of America’s burgeoning consumer culture (automobiles and supermarkets, respectively) and also allied library use with the independence and autonomy associated with it.  But such autonomy has often been a mirage.  As John Urry has pointed out, the rise of the automobile and the concomitant decline of public transportation has granted car-owners immense flexibility—but it is “coerced flexibility.”  The fantasy that we can go anywhere, at any time, has crushed many alternatives, and that has often meant the decay of urban centers and the infrastructures of the “walking city.”  The emergence of supermarkets, which tend to assume automobility in their location and architecture, was closely related to the centrifugal force of suburbanization that was accelerated by the automobile. The food desert has been one of the consequences of the rise of automobiles and supermarkets, with corporations putting profits first and with car-ownership assumed and then built into the environment of our cities.  People who are not profitable, and who cannot travel the new infrastructures, get left out.  The Baltimore program and proposals like it actually—and admirably—reverse that dynamic, thus use the expansive public-ness of the public library to try to alleviate the pain of living in the gaps and fissures of capitalist circulation and consumption.  (See this blog post for a post about the possibility of using bookmobiles to do similar work in a different sort of urban environment.) They are thus a reassertion of libraries role in supporting public landscapes in the face of capitalist indifference and what Raymond Williams called “mobile privatisation.”  They are also, in their ways, challenges to the possibility of total digitization in librarianship and therefore are claims for the continued physical presence of public libraries in our cities.  Indeed, even more than institutions devoted to the circulation of information, libraries at their finest are institutions that build and maintain communities.  And communities are built of more than simply abstract information or social networking; they are made of people with material needs.  And the Virtual Supermarket Project stands as evidence that libraries—in their increasingly characteristic synergy of digital technology and bricks-and-mortar—can fulfill both intellectual and phsyical needs and thus help build communities that are healthy in all senses of the word.

Yesterday, in an effort to bring fresh produce to a city without much of it, the Camden Children’s Garden launched a mobile produce market. An AP headline refers to it as a “combination of a bookmobile and an ice cream truck,” but they probably don’t know how right they are. One of the chapters of my manuscript is about “booketerias” (self-service mini-library branches in supermarkets in the mid- to late-twentieth century), and in particular about how they participated in the decay of public infrastructures for educating (and feeding) a diverse population.

Several years ago, I wrote a brief essay for HASTAC, which I then reposted here to bookmobility.org about booketerias and a modern reversal, which uses libraries and mobile technology to bring food into food deserts. The Camden mobile market is yet another example, so I’ll print that essay here, to raise some questions and ideas:

From Booketerias to Virtual Supermarkets: Libraries & Our Public Landscape

Last week, NPR ran a story about a new program in Baltimore that uses public libraries to combat the problem of access to healthy foods in urban environments:

“Under a new city program, patrons can order groceries online and pay with cash, credit or food stamps. The orders are filled by Santoni’s supermarket, a longtime Baltimore grocer. They deliver the items to the library the next day.
…
The Virtual Supermarket Project is part of a city push to make healthy food more accessible in communities where major supermarkets are scarce. Baltimore’s health department launched it last month at two of the city’s public library branches. They’re located on opposite ends of town: one neighborhood is mostly African-American and working-class, the other racially and economically mixed.

These areas lack large, competitively priced supermarkets within walking distance sometimes called ‘food deserts.’ Both communities have plenty of fast-food and corner stores, but many tend to offer less healthy fare.”

I am working on a dissertation project about bookmobiles and library extension in American culture, so this immediately caught my eye. 

In fact, it reminded me in a curious sort of way of an earlier program I’d run across in the archives last summer.  In 1947, the Nashville Public Library first proposed what they called a bookateria.  The plan,” one newspaper article put it, “would be to have the books within easy reach of customers and let them have their favorite novels, mystery stories or biographies checked out with their groceries.

In 1953, the library finally put the idea into practice.  The bookaterias, in strategically placed supermarkets around town, ended up taking shape as self-service branch libraries (you filled out a card with your information, and the book’s, and dropped it in a box on your way out of the store). 

As you can see in the photo, buying produce and checking out a book are made into parallel experiences.  Self-service was the hallmark of the supermarket, in contrast to the full-service general store of the past, just as it distinguished the modern library (and, of course, especially the bookateria) from closed-stacks models that had characterized many earlier models of librarianship. 

Like the bookmobile, the bookateria tied library extension to an icon of America’s burgeoning consumer culture (automobiles and supermarkets, respectively) and also allied library use with the independence and autonomy associated with it.  But such autonomy has often been a mirage.  As John Urry has pointed out, the rise of the automobile and the concomitant decline of public transportation has granted car-owners immense flexibility—but it is “coerced flexibility.”  The fantasy that we can go anywhere, at any time, has crushed many alternatives, and that has often meant the decay of urban centers and the infrastructures of the “walking city.”  The emergence of supermarkets, which tend to assume automobility in their location and architecture, was closely related to the centrifugal force of suburbanization that was accelerated by the automobile.

The food desert has been one of the consequences of the rise of automobiles and supermarkets, with corporations putting profits first and with car-ownership assumed and then built into the environment of our cities.  People who are not profitable, and who cannot travel the new infrastructures, get left out. 

The Baltimore program and proposals like it actually—and admirably—reverse that dynamic, thus use the expansive public-ness of the public library to try to alleviate the pain of living in the gaps and fissures of capitalist circulation and consumption.  (See this blog post for a post about the possibility of using bookmobiles to do similar work in a different sort of urban environment.)

They are thus a reassertion of libraries role in supporting public landscapes in the face of capitalist indifference and what Raymond Williams called “mobile privatisation.”  They are also, in their ways, challenges to the possibility of total digitization in librarianship and therefore are claims for the continued physical presence of public libraries in our cities. 

Indeed, even more than institutions devoted to the circulation of information, libraries at their finest are institutions that build and maintain communities.  And communities are built of more than simply abstract information or social networking; they are made of people with material needs. 

And the Virtual Supermarket Project stands as evidence that libraries—in their increasingly characteristic synergy of digital technology and bricks-and-mortar—can fulfill both intellectual and phsyical needs and thus help build communities that are healthy in all senses of the word.

Filed under communities mobility technology food infrastructure economic inequality

1 note

Books follow the American soldier wherever he goes. Books travel the Berlin airlift. They fall from the sky to soldiers in remote jungle outposts and isolated arctic weather stations.

Traveling up and down the European continent, the soldier knows that the bookmobile is not far behind.

Josephine Riley, “Global Army Library: An Intimate Message from Washington,”The Christian Science Monitor(March 24, 1949)

Filed under libraries bookmobiles history military

11 notes

The Strange Familiarity of the Guantánamo Bay Library A couple of weeks ago, New York Times reporter Charlie Savage launched a Tumblr on which he has posted images of the prison library for detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Scrolling through the pictures is a strange but fascinating experience. A main point of the Guantánamo system—of its location outside the continental United States in Cuba, of the separate legal system at work there, of the official rhetoric that has surrounded the detention facility since its inception—has been to make it seem as though Americans have nothing in common with the men being held within it. But books connect. Not as strongly as some theorize—reading the same book as someone else doesn’t make you inexorably and totally connected—but shared experience of a cultural artifact is, indeed, a powerful thing. Scrolling through photos of Danielle Steel novels, of Narnia books, of Harry Potter and 300 Orchids: Species, Hybrids, and Varieties in Cultivation, I’m struck by the intense familiarity of these shelves that I’ve never seen, in a place I’ve never been, used by people that I do not know or, by design, know much about. [The photo of Danielle Steel’s The Kiss wascontributed to gitmobooks by Carol Rosenberg]

The Strange Familiarity of the Guantánamo Bay Library

A couple of weeks ago, New York Times reporter Charlie Savage launched a Tumblr on which he has posted images of the prison library for detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Scrolling through the pictures is a strange but fascinating experience.

A main point of the Guantánamo system—of its location outside the continental United States in Cuba, of the separate legal system at work there, of the official rhetoric that has surrounded the detention facility since its inception—has been to make it seem as though Americans have nothing in common with the men being held within it.

But books connect. Not as strongly as some theorize—reading the same book as someone else doesn’t make you inexorably and totally connected—but shared experience of a cultural artifact is, indeed, a powerful thing. Scrolling through photos of Danielle Steel novels, of Narnia books, of Harry Potter and 300 Orchids: Species, Hybrids, and Varieties in Cultivation, I’m struck by the intense familiarity of these shelves that I’ve never seen, in a place I’ve never been, used by people that I do not know or, by design, know much about.

[The photo of Danielle Steel’s The Kiss wascontributed to gitmobooks by Carol Rosenberg]

Filed under books print culture community state power

5 notes

My latest post for Book Riot takes a look at the Stockholm Public Library, opened in 1928 as the first library in Sweden to allow open access to its stacks. The design, as you’ll see in the article, fully embraced openness as a design feature. (And more recently, it’s inspired other architects and designers to play with open shelves, as in the digital concept for an extension to the library, above.) Check out the article, complete with more great pictures, here: Cool Bookish Places: Stockholm Public Library

My latest post for Book Riot takes a look at the Stockholm Public Library, opened in 1928 as the first library in Sweden to allow open access to its stacks. The design, as you’ll see in the article, fully embraced openness as a design feature. (And more recently, it’s inspired other architects and designers to play with open shelves, as in the digital concept for an extension to the library, above.) Check out the article, complete with more great pictures, here:

Cool Bookish Places: Stockholm Public Library

Filed under architecture design print culture books libraries