By Savannah Guyer
A library on wheels will make its way to the Iowa City streets.
The Iowa City City Council on Tuesday authorized the bookmobile, a vehicle that could hold thousands of books and travel to various parts of Iowa City numerous times a week.
The authorization included the purchase of the vehicle as well as the annual funding, which will be just under $100,000 annually to cover on-going costs, such as maintenance.
“We were really happy to be supportive of their ideas and to increase the services of the community,” said City Councilor Rockne Cole. “We’re very excited about it. It allows the full capacity of the library to be used. We’re very pleased with our decision.”
Iowa City Public Library Board President Robin Paetzold said the library is thrilled with the decision.
“We are happy that the City Council held this as a priority,” she said. “We are very appreciative of the opportunity to gift the communities within Iowa City that felt isolated with this wonderful service.”
Public Library Director Susan Craig said the idea to start the bookmobile came out of the last strategic planning process.
The library created focus groups and undertook community surveys. Accessibility of the Public Library was the biggest challenge for the local population.
“A lot of things we learned is that access to the downtown library is limited,” Craig said. “There is very limited parking spaces around our library and transportation is an issue for some of our members, we thought a good solution to this was to have a bookmobile.”
The library has a five-year strategic plan to implement both a virtual library and a bookmobile but decided to push the latter forward.
“We are asking the City Council for a full-time staff person to help us run the bookmobile, we plan on having two people in the vehicle at a time,” Craig said. “We hope to make two to four stops a day, four days a week at places we know are underserved.”
Kara Logsden, the library community and access services coordinator, said the bookmobile will hopefully promote yearlong reading.
“In the summertime, we hope to focus on children,” Logsden said. “There’s a big push for keeping children reading, and doing so at an appropriate grade level. We want to be there for children who need help reading or have barriers getting to us.”
Craig said the bookmobile would have a large inventory of children’s books in hopes of promoting literacy and library memberships among children.