Books To Go
To distribute books in rural areas where people can’t easily reach the library, Nancy Brockman, Gulf County Library Coordinator at Northwest Regional Library System (NWRLS), created Books to Go.
NWRLS supplies the books, while community members and organizations provide boxes and locations. For instance, high school art students decorated six Books to Go boxes as a community service project.
As of June 2016, Gulf County hosts 17 Books to Go sites.
“Ten are in the Books to Go boxes and the other seven are shelves at various sites: the work camps, an assisted living facility, our hospital, the local pediatrician’s office and a child development center,” says Brockman.
Books to Go has proved popular enough that it has expanded into adjacent Liberty County.
Different sites attract different types of readers, so sponsors from each location help choose which books to include. Each box contains 30 to 40 titles.
While Books to Go bears similarities to the Little Free Library, borrowers may keep their books and do not need to replace them with others.
Each book also contains information about the library, such as services provided and upcoming events.
For more details, take a look at a PDF of Nancy Brockman’s Sunshine State Library Leadership Institute presentation:
Images courtesy of NWRLS.
