This is National Library Week, and today is National Bookmobile Day

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A web page for the American Library Association explains that the theme for this year is Welcome to Your Library. During the pandemic our libraries have been adapting to restrictions on in-person gatherings. In metro Boise most services are virtual, but books can be ordered online for curbside pickup. In the city of Boise library branches recently reopened for browsing on weekday afternoons from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM. On February 23, 2020 I blogged about Finding speech topics and doing research, and said you should start with the databases from your friendly local public library.

 

I am a huge fan of public libraries. When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, every Thursday a bookmobile (like the one shown above) with a busload of books parked just a half-mile from home. Shelves on it displayed a little of everything, including best-sellers for adults and a couple feet of Dr. Suess for kids. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every couple of weekends my mother drove us a couple miles over to the stunning main Carnegie Library building in Oakland (shown above). It had hundreds of thousands of books. The Carnegie is a cultural jewel – a gigantic complex containing that library, museums of both art and natural history, and a music hall. That library and those museums opened up a whole world to me.   

 

In my early teens (perhaps age 12) I finally got a tan Adult library card to replace my pink Children’s card. At last I could roam the building rather than just the Children’s room. I devoured mass quantities of novels, particularly science fiction. One thing which amazed me was finding a translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 We, that described a dystopian Stalinist world of green glass earlier than either Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four. The narrator and main character in We was D-503, the chief engineer responsible for building an interplanetary spaceship.

   

Along with circulating and reference books, the third floor reading room for their Science and Technology Department had an amazing display with an entire wall containing magazines including titles like: Aviation Week & Space Technology, Bicycling, Car and Driver, High Fidelity, Hot Rod, Modern Photography, Popular Electronics, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Road & Track, and Wireless World.