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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

An uncertain future for the region’s bookmobile

Rising costs, increasing use of digital downloads, raise doubts about its long-term viability

Aloysia Power
Posted 7/2/14

REGIONAL- The world of books, magazines, movies and other informational materials is becoming more virtual every year with the increased accessibility and usage of the Internet, iPads and other …

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An uncertain future for the region’s bookmobile

Rising costs, increasing use of digital downloads, raise doubts about its long-term viability

Posted

REGIONAL- The world of books, magazines, movies and other informational materials is becoming more virtual every year with the increased accessibility and usage of the Internet, iPads and other digital reading devices.

Since 2013, the Arrowhead Library System has seen a 35-percent increase in downloads, and customer usage has become more around-the-clock when the physical library isn’t open, according to Jim Weikum, the Executive Director of the Arrowhead Library System.

This change in user behavior puts expensive county-funded library services like the bookmobile in tough situations. More and more, the library system’s money is going toward online assets, Weikum said.

The latest online feature the library system added this year is Zinio, a downloadable application that allows its users to read through 88 different magazines, from National Geographic to Cosmopolitan, for free.

Competition with Zinio and other online, digital services isn’t the only worry for the bookmobile, however. Rising gas prices and declining county funding to the Arrowhead Library System are growing issues as well.

“Many library systems are doing away with bookmobiles. They’re very expensive,” retired librarian and routine bookmobile user Marge McPeak said about the walk-in library-trucks that stop in rural towns across northern Minnesota.

In its heyday in the 1970s, the bookmobile was renting out books left and right with five trucks on the road serving northern Minnesota, Weikum said. Then, in the 1980s, the library system was hit with county-funding cutbacks and had to retire a few of the mobile trucks. And by the 1990s, the service was down to one truck, he said. With that, readership fell, too.

“The traffic has to do with the number and frequency of stops,” he explained.

Since the mid-90s, the bookmobile has maintained fairly stable traffic – exception for when the truck is in the shop– Weikum said.

Despite this enduring stability, Weikum said he’s unsure how long the library system can support the rural service.

The bookmobile’s budget, set at $251,400 for 2014, is a struggle to manage.

Right now, the county funding is so low, the Arrowhead Library System needs to dip into its reserves to support its programs and services.

“Something will have to give at some point,” Weikum said, “but we’re not sure what that might be. We haven’t reached that point yet.”

The money currently allocated for the bookmobile is used to cover the truck’s gas and maintenance, staff salaries, and rentable library materials “which never go down in price,” he said.

Without the bookmobile or library services like Mail-a-Book, which mails books to rural readers, book worms from northern communities without public libraries wouldn’t be able to get their hands on new stories quite as easily, particularly if they have usable Internet service.

“It’s very convenient because I do not like driving in the winter,” said Kristine Jonas, a Tower mom who home schools her three kids and uses the bookmobile often. “Now that I have children, it’s more nerve-wracking … So, it’s nice to only be four miles from home or two miles from home to be able to go to it.”

On top of not wanting to drive the half-hour to the Ely or Virginia libraries, the Jonas family has a hard time accessing the growing online library services.

“We just have a hotspot, so it’s not high-speed Internet where we are,” Jonas said. “It’s hard to get anything like that up here.”

Because of readers like the Jonas family, Weikum doubts physical libraries will ever disappear.

“We have numbers that show library use is robust as it ever was,” said Weikum. “We’re trying to figure out how to keep up with that demand without an increase in funding.”

Although the library system is facing financial challenges, there is plenty of investment outside of its online services.

Weikum uses Ely as an example of a flourishing library community with the construction of its new library.

“As a community, they see the vital importance of a library,” Weikum said about Ely citizens. “It’s the first new library building in ten years.”

Even the bookmobile may see some investment.

Weikum said he’s planning to replace the current aging bookmobile with a new one by the end of next year.

“We’ve been setting aside a little money every year,” he said.

Only the future will tell how long that new truck and the bookmobile would stay in service.

“I doubt that it will ever completely disappear,” said McPeak, “ I hope.”