The Perambulating Library

Bookmobile, c.1935                                                                                  iPad, c.2011

Information Delivery 

The first record of an operational bookmobile dates back to 1859.  The Warington Perambulating Library, a horse-drawn carriage stacked with maps, texts, and pamphlets, loaned nearly 12,000 books on the streets of Lancashire, England in its first year of operation.  Bookmobiles continue to operate throughout the world and, in some remote communities, offer the only access to publicly owned printed material.  In many ways, the bookmobile and Library 2.0 share the same motive: to increase public access to knowledge and actively expand that access beyond the confines of physical space. 

I bring up the concept of the bookmobile to point out that Library 2.0 is not the first challenge to the conventional role of libraries as bastions of the written word.  While the bookmobile exists essentially as a form of information delivery, it offers an instructive variation on the concept of public book lending.  Unlike the library which is geographically fixed, the bookmobile seeks out readers, offering not only access to information but offering it on the readers’ own familiar territory.  Is this not also how Library 2.0 claims to operate within the terrain of new, social media?  The distinct advantage of Library 2.0 and the lowly bookmobile are that they actively promote access to public knowledge while acting as deployable frameworks for public discourse.  (I use “deployable” here in the sense that both operate in the “field”, or beyond the walls of the physical library.)

Access

Library 2.0, digitization of print media, user-manipulated content, and the application of social media concepts, at first glance, seem to threaten not only the role of libraries, but the book itself.  However, if we begin to see libraries as vehicles for information delivery, rather than mere information storage, it is easier to accept the transformations libraries are making.  John Sutter offers an excellent working definition for the library: “A free place where people can access and share information.”  This definition grants enough latitude to include past library oddities such as the bookmobile and possibly even new forms of media distribution such as digital readers.  Because bookmobiles and digital readers are designed specifically to deliver data directly to the reader while offering the potential for social exchange, they democratize the exchange of information.  Free access is perhaps the most valuable endowment that libraries possess but it depends on how well the library is able to deliver information to the public.  The library of the future should look beyond convention and adopt active strategies that defend and deliver free access.

Deployable

Like the bookmobile, the Library 2.0 paradigm is framing how the library might exist beyond the shackles of its own physical geography.  This discussion is appropriate in the age of social media where many of our relationships and interactions are mobile, i.e., not restricted to or confined by contact in physical space.  While this concept blurs the lines between information, communication, and scholarship (which is a problematic proposition deserving of its own discussion), it does encourage us to think of “library” as a deployable framework for communication rather than a fixed repository of data.  If the modern library’s role is transformed from data storage to public dialogue/data exchange, then we can assume that much of that exchange will follow current models of communication, which are increasingly untethered from geography.  

Issues

For architects who, for the most part, are tasked with designing geographically fixed, physical spaces, an argument for a missionary system of deployable, virtual libraries may be too much of a tangent.  However, the scale and effectiveness of bookmobiles in service of specific community needs does offer an interesting alternate library type to explore.  If nothing else, I think the bookmobile is a valid and informative precedent for how public information might be delivered in the near-future.