AURORA | Have tome, will travel.
Employees of Aurora’s Library and Cultural Services Department have recently learned to embrace that snappy saw thanks to a new program that is flipping the traditional library script. Instead of asking library card holders to come peruse the stacks in a central brick-and-mortar location, members of the library’s outreach and programming team are now bringing books directly to residents.
“We’re pretty much like a miniature, fully-functional library,” said Sara Van Cleve, an assistant with the library’s outreach and programming team. “We really want to focus on getting books into the hands of people who otherwise may not have that opportunity.”
Coined Info2Go, the new library program began driving a revamped city van filled with about 800 books and a portable checkout system to elementary school students and residents of several senior healthcare facilities around Aurora last year. Every three weeks, Van Cleve drives about a dozen pine-colored courier boxes teeming with titles to residents at the Veteran’s Community Living Center at Fitzsimons, Kindred Healthcare of Aurora, Aspen Place Apartments Senior Living, as well as several third grade classes at Tollgate Elementary School. Participants are given library cards and are allowed to check out one book per session.
The program started taking shape two summers ago after Megan Ellis, programming and outreach coordinator with the library, noticed a city van was sitting unused and inquired about securing funds to re-equip the vehicle for mobile book distribution. Soon after, Ellis received funding from Friends of the Aurora Public Library and started driving the van to farmers markets around the metro area to check out books and dole out city library cards.
“We had so much fun with it, and when that season ended we started contacting schools to see if we could go there,” Ellis said.
Tollgate Elementary was the first school to work directly with the Info2Go team, after teachers asked if the van would drop by as part of a unit on alternative ways to deliver books around the world. When the unit ended, both the library personnel and the third grade teachers at Tollgate wanted to see the program continue, so the two organized the three-week schedule and the relationship blossomed from there.
“It’s a really awesome connection for us to have,” said Chelsea Wagner, one of the third grade teachers at Tollgate whose class participates in Info2Go. “It really gets the kids excited about books, and sometimes they return the books directly to the public library, which allows them to then explore that.”
The Info2Go collection is constantly rotating, according to Ellis and Van Cleve, who both said that they’ve strived to tailor the kinds of books they bring to the populations they’re serving. For their senior readers, the pair has accrued a collection of large-print and audio books, and for the children at Tollgate, they’ve compiled books with a range of reading levels and a cache of bilingual titles for the school’s many English language learners.
Currently, Ellis said that anything Minecraft, Legos or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is in high demand at Tollgate, and Van Cleve pinpointed the popularity of westerns, Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel novels at the senior communities.
Whatever happens to be flying out of the Info2Go courier bins, Wagner at Tollgate said that the program’s early success has been tied to its ability to stir excitement around reading.
“With the new ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ book, (Info2Go) had copies and the kids were so excited because they were brand new books and because they were relevant,” Wagner said. “There’s such a buzz about the books that they bring because the kids want to read all of them. Now I have kids sharing books with each other because it’s such a special treat for them to come.”
Going forward, Van Cleve said that after the library fills a current staff vacancy, she expects the program to expand to more area schools.