By Marcy Swan
The Utah County bookmobile is a traveling library anyone can use.
Residents who do not live within city boundaries of the county must pay a fee to use the local city library. The fees range from $25 to $50 a year.
State and county dollars fund the Utah County bookmobile, a division of the Utah State Library system.
There are no cards to carry or fees to pay; just register name and address at the bookmobile or its home base in Mapleton.
The Mapleton location, 305 N. Main, is open Monday through Friday with varying hours.
The bookmobile isn’t called MOBILE for nothing.
Bookmobile technician, Ellen Starr, said it travels to locations on a two-week rotating schedule. The 22 sites include towns from Benjamin to Genola and Palmyra to Cedar Valley.
The stops last from 30 minutes to half a day, Monday through Thursday.
The bookmobile can usually be found in the local church or elementary school parking lot, Starr said.
The mobile library has over 40,000 titles. Last year it received an award for the best collection of books of any of the 13 bookmobiles in the state.
Starr said it is a “reading library” with research materials limited to elementary age level.
An average of 500 books are checked out each day and replenished from the selection in the Mapleton center, Ed Walker, bookmobile librarian, said.
“The biggest misconception is that a bookmobile is just for children. That is just not true. We carry books for all ages,” Walker said. “We carry the cream of the crop, the most popular and highly reviewed books.”
When asked how many Harry Potter books he has, Walker said, “Five of each one, about 496 too few.”
Walker said he limits copies of books to five in order to keep a wide variety of titles.
“If the author is popular, we carry all of their books,” Walker said.
The bookmobile carries fiction, non-fiction, fantasy and science fiction, a large selection of self-help books, and classics, Walker said.
Literature not available locally may be ordered through the interlibrary loan service from the state library.
“We can get any book that is not on the rare book list,” Walker said.
The bookmobile operates on a budget of $100,000 with 90 percent of the funds coming from county general funds. Cities that use the traveling unit pay the county according to the length of time it is there. The Utah State library pays 10 percent, Walker said.
The bookmobile was allotted $13,500 to purchase inventory this year, Starr said.
To put that amount in perspective, Provo City library allotted $60,000 for books from their $1.83 million budget, said Provo Library Executive Assistant, Terry Ann Harward. The city of Mapleton trades the benefit of the library service for free rent of the building and utilities.
The county’s commissioners and library personnel have expressed a desire to have an integrated county library system similar to others in the state.
This program would allow all residents to check out books from any library in the county. An agreement has not been reached to make this possible.
The county on a year-to-year basis renews bookmobile service. Walker has worked as the librarian for 24 of its last 26 years.
“I enjoy my job,” Walker said. “I do enjoy seeing people read.”
