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FW: [alis] FW: Who wants a bookmobile photo archive?



Please contact Carol Hole directly if you are interested in this collection.

Thanks,
Linda

-----Original Message-----
From: Carol Hole [mailto:chole@EXCHANGE.ACLD.LIB.FL.US]
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2002 11:04 AM
To: BKMOB-L@LISTSERV.CLARION.EDU
Subject: Who wants a bookmobile photo archive?


When my husband, Bookmobile consultant Russ Topping, died last Feb, he left
me a huge collection of photos of bookmobiles. I don't know what to do with
them so I'm appealing to List members for help.

Russ had been taking pictures of bookmobiles all over the country since
about 1983,  On consulting trips he would visit libraries and drive around
behind the buildings.  If he found bookmobiles he took pictures.  He would
even chase down bookmobiles out on the road to get pictures.  So your
bookmobile may be in his collection and you don't even know it.

He also took pictures of bookmobiles at many, many conferences; old
bookmobiles now used as other things; and even burnt-out bookmobiles, which
he used as examples of safety hazards.

Since we only bought a digital camera recently, almost none are digitized.
Some are labelled but most are not.  In a lot of the photos the library name
is written on the truck, but some exteriors show no indication of who they
belong to and of course the interior shots don't.  So it would require
detective work, research and/or appeals through the Listserv or library
publications, to find out what library they are from.  However the pix could
be useful even without knowing what library owned them, as a source of ideas
about planning interiors, exterior graphics etc.

There are hundreds and hundreds of them.  Although they don't, of course,
cover all the bookmobiles in America, they have got to be the closest thing
we have to a record of American bookmobiles in the last 15- 20 years.
Throwing them away would be a crime --but so would just keeping them where
nobody else can use them.

What to do with them?  The best idea I've had so far, is to create an
official or quasi-official online bookmobile museum/archive we can all
access.  It could use these photos as a base and continue to add others --
historic or current -- sent in by libraries around the country, or around
the world for that matter.

 I don't have the time or the abilty to digitize them and organize it
myself, but  I'll be happy to donate them to any organization that has the

skills, time and dedication to do the necessary research and organizing and
make them available.

If there's an individual willing to do it, that would be great too, but I

can't imagine a single person having the time to devote to it -- they'd have
to be as big a bookmobile nut as Russ was, because once you got it organized
--a huge job in itself -- you'd have to maintain it for years and years, or
there's no point in starting it.

Since these pictures are --besides being history --part of my husband's
legacy, what I desperately don't want to happen is to give the pictures to
anybody who has good intentions, but then can't follow through and make them
available on a continuous basis -- I don't want all that work to be lost.
So an organization seems like the best bet, but any reasonable proposal will
be gratefully received.

Ideas, anyone?

-carol

Carol Hole
Alachua County Library
Gainesville, FL
chole@exchange.acld.lib.fl.us
352-334-3991


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