APLA2018

See the 2018 APLA Advocacy Award winning project in person and learn about the ins and outs of the project!

Remember the excitement of having the Dickie Dee ice-cream bike visit your neighborhood? Imagine that fun and novelty, except that you don’t need money to participate! Anyone can enjoy the free books, music, movies, story times and puppet shows that a library book bike brings.

Over the past three years, staff at the Fredericton Public Library (FPL) have been working on their vision of a mobile bike-based library that would serve users and groups that would not typically visit the library, while promoting literacy and library services in the community. The FPL Biblio Bike was completed and launched on December 19th, 2017 and will begin serving the community in the spring of 2018.

We would like to share the research and planning that went into this project so that other library staff can create library bike services that best fit their community. We will explore the history of book bikes, the benefits to staff and the community, book bike model options, equipment, costs, funding sources, project partners, staffing, safety considerations, route planning, and promotion. We hope to bring the Biblio Bike to the session for show and tell as well.

While this session would be of greatest interest to staff from public libraries, academic libraries are also using book bikes to connect with students, so we believe this session would have universal appeal.

Learning Objectives:
After attending this session, participants will be able to:
· Define the benefits of community outreach via book bike
· Understand the advantages of the various book bike models
· Identify community partners and funding opportunities
· Plan their own book bike outreach project