BiebPunten, library buses, beach libraries: the library is not just a static building where you as a visitor go to borrow books, but also a facility that itself comes to readers. Mobility and immobility are closely related in the library.  

In early July, my library opened two new so-called Library Points (BiebPunten), where people can visit one morning a week for (digital government-related) questions and book reservations, among other things. These additional facilities, housed in the village hall and a school, were funded by temporary SPUK funds for which the municipality and the library jointly applied to improve library accessibility. The BiebPunten were in fact opened in the two village centres where a full-fledged library branch had previously been closed. This has significantly increased the distance to the library for some residents.

So, like the famous slogan of a Dutch radio programme from the 1980s (‘Veronica is coming to you this summer’), the library is increasingly coming to the visitor. Think, for instance, of the beach library in Makkum and Station Libraries in Rotterdam and Arnhem, among others.  This is certainly not a new development, as in many places the library started as a mobile practice that came to people rather than the other way round. For instance, both Kim Vogel Sawyer (‘The Librarian of Boone's Hollow’) and Jojo Moyes (‘The Giver of Stars’) describe in their novels the horse-drawn library in Kentucky at the time of the economic crisis in the 1930s, where books were delivered on horseback by librarians to remote mountainous areas to raise the level of knowledge of workers in an attempt to tackle high unemployment. In this case, the library building acted merely as a storage depot, from which books were delivered. The bibliobus or book bus is a similar phenomenon; also a mobile library that goes to places where a library branch is missing or difficult to reach.

At first glance, the library looks like an immobile building with books, rooted to a spot, but there is a world of mobility behind it. Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells wrote ‘The rise of the network society’ in the 1990s, in which he argued that ‘spaces of places’ - physical places where people work, live and reside - are increasingly influenced by ‘spaces of flows’ - flows of goods, services, capital and information. This also applies to the library. First of all, by reading, you yourself travel to all sorts of places; you may be sitting on your couch - or even trapped in a cell - but in your mind you are in another country or city. Concepts and designs of the library (e.g. the library staircase or living room phenomenon) also travel around, as we described earlier in our column on library tourism. But it is mainly the material flows behind the scenes that make the library possible, such as the interlibrary exchange system that ensures that books circulate within the regions.

The Wise app, the transport crates, the bus that drives between library branches, the sorting machines some libraries have and, of course, the library staff; they all ensure that books are mobile, especially when borrowers are not. Like many other libraries, Rotterdam offers a free pick-up and drop-off service called ‘Library at Home’ for those who cannot come to the library independently. But with the ‘Library for sailors’, they also have a subscription withspecial lending rules for the very super-mobile borrowers: inland shipmasters. They can borrow products for longer periods (up to two months) and return them elsewhere. 

 Libraries are thus both places and flows; it is not one or the other, but they need each other to exist. Flows of books, information and concepts connect different libraries, organisations and people - and vice versa.  

Originally published in Dutch at:
https://bibliotheekblad-microcontent.maglr.com/column-rianne-van-melik3