When I was growing up, I attended a K-8 grade school in a rather well-served neighborhood in a suburb near Chicago. Our library did not have a bookmobile. In my eight years of grammar school, our principle arranged for a Chicago Public Library Book Bus to drop by. It happened twice. Looking back, I wish it were more frequent.
What an escape the Bookmobile was those two times. Books and magazines filled the shelves; my eyes perusing the colorful covers of issues from National Geographic, the historical information-loaded past issues of Time and not to mention the bizarre, fun facts, from the yearly releases of the Guinness World Records books. For the reader’s reference, I attended grammar school from 2004 to 2011. Those were good days, the Bookmobile days, days the Aurora Public Library District (APLD) still brought to the community of Aurora this year, even during a global pandemic.
The Outreach Services Department at APLD managed to serve customers across the city with the Bookmobile, once the State-wide stay-at-home order was lifted. However, there is no denying that COVID-19 slowed them down. Last year, the APLD Bookmobile reached an average of 2,205 students September to December. This year in the same months, only a seventh of that number.
“We may not have served as many schools and children as last year, but we understand that many students are utilizing the digital resources available on the Library’s website,” said Jessica Cantarero, outreach services manager. “It saddens me that so many students were not able to enjoy browsing on the Bookmobile,” she said. “There’s nothing better than curling up under a blanket on a crisp Fall day holding a new library book and getting lost in an adventure.”
Thankfully, and as Cantarero expressed, many of the students who flocked to the Bookmobile in years past flew to the Library’s website for its extensive number of digital resources such as E-books, homework help and database access. And when vulnerable customers were unable to visit the Bookmobile, make an appointment to visit the Library in person or find access to its online offerings, APLD stepped up by adding 60 new stops to its regular monthly deliveries since the roll-out of its home delivery service in June.
“Even though the outreach team misses our weekly lobby stops at (Aurora) area nursing homes and retirement facilities, we’ve been fortunate to shift to a drop off delivery service at many facilities,” Jessica said. “Being able to provide customers with new materials brings us great joy and we are always looking for ways to adapt to the changing situation.”
Many of the libraries E-resources are easily accessible via our home page at aurorapubliclibrary.org. However, something this pandemic has taught us is there is nothing quite like the real thing, and that includes our Bookmobile. Seeing the impact the Bookmobile being off-road has caused from the number of students who didn’t receive their co-curricular reads, to the entertainment folks at nursing homes received and yes, even the nostalgic smell of the Bookmobile. In the near future, APLD hopes to bring back its Bookmobile services better than ever before, and in early 2022 look for a new Bookmobile with new, state-of-the-art technology, new titles and publications, and a whole host of new, portable E-resources. To learn more about the new Bookmobile, visit aplfoundationil.org/bookmobile.
Andrew Muñoz is communications coordinator at the Aurora Public Library.