From horse-drawn library wagon in the United States in
1907, to the 21st Century ‘Malaysian Mobile Internet Unit,’
people have been finding innovative ways to provide educational access to all, despite difficult conditions or scarce resources. For example, we heard about Zimbabwe t carries 10 computer workstations
over rough rural terrain to underserved populations. Big
Blue can operate the computers for a week at a time using
power supplied by its own generator, and it connects to the
Internet using dial-up or wireless connections as available.
More than a library, Big Blue is essentially an extension of
rural public schools that cannot afford to all be equipped with
a computer lab, and is just
One example
of the innovative
ways that educational and technological jordan phone number library resources can be
brought to specific audiences. This article takes a look at
some examples of mobile libraries, and the variety of ways
they can be enhanced and operated using the newest communications technology. You will find that there are as many
ways to design mobile library services as there are communities to benefit from them, and more and more mobile libraries are becoming global libraries.
Why Mobile Libraries?
The underlying assumption that drives these ambitious projects is that people have always had need for information and
a desire for literacy. The importance of library services in
particular has been proven in international comparative surveys that rank the educational achievement of countries according to various indicators such as test scores, teacher
qualifications, completion rates, etc. According to
UNESCO, the factors that distinguished high-performing
countries on these tests were “large school libraries, large
classroom libraries, regular book borrowing, frequent silent
reading in class, frequent story reading aloud by the teachers
and more hours spent teaching the language.”2
To debate the
worth of information or the need for knowledge is less useful, however, than to bring awareness to an old but
underused and understudied innovation, and that is the purpose of this article. Additionally, new technologies are expanding the potential for mobile libraries to offer more than
just books and periodicals, but also Internet and computers.
With the new technology comes new information for new
needs, such as training or retraining for teachers and health
care workers.
The rationale for providing mobile library services is illustrated well in the case of Mongolian “Mobile Resource Centers.”3
These to the unique conditions of Mongolia’s culture and geography in the following
ways:
• The population is disparate enough that very few libraries could be located in areas accessible by everyone in a
reasonable amount of time.
• Resources are too scarce to build permanent stationary
libraries for limited use.
• Populations are nomadic, and so demographics are constantly changing, which affects the demand for fixed library services.
Though separated
by large distances, populations are
dense enough to provide a reasonable demand for library
services in most major towns.
• There is a desire for october 2024 results – 94k turnover and 21k profit communication and education
among rural populations, demonstrated by Mongolia’s
high literacy and new government policy related to ICTs
and education.
A study
comparing the crawler data cost of mobile library service in Zimbabwe with that of the fixed-library equivalent found that
although initial capital costs and recurring costs (fuel and
repairs vs. cleaning and decorating) were higher, savings
were made in staffing and book stock such that the mobile
libraries were about a third of the cost to operate.4
Mobile Resource Centers in Mongolia were actually
not designed to function solely as public libraries, but rather
as teacher training units a