After six decades on road, bookmobile for western Massachusetts is halted by budget cuts

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Mary King, regional librarian for the Western Massachusetts Regional Library in Whately, sits in its bookmobile, which will cease to serve the small towns in the four counties in the western end of the state at the end of the year.

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Bookmobiles have transported books and other items between area libraries for some 60 years.

Over the years, the small community library in Whately has been able to refresh its collection without spending any money because of the regional library system's bookmobile service.

For about six decades, bookmobile trucks have transported books and other items to libraries all over western Massachusetts. The libraries could keep the rotating collections for about 11 weeks.

"Our budget and our building do not allow us to grow large and ever-changing collections," said Tiffany Hilton, director of Whately's S. White Dickinson Library.

But, the small library will have to go without this service at the beginning of next year as the Western Massachusetts Regional Library System has decided to stop the bookmobile service. The last day will be Dec. 31.

Hilton said the service allowed the library to stock items that are hard and expensive for them to have, like large-print books, audio books, DVDs and videos.

"But times are very tight and I understand that something has to give," she said. The Western Massachusetts Regional Library System held onto these services for as long as it could. The funding simply is not available to continue the same services they have in years past."

The mobile service is different than the other main function of the regional library system, which facilitates the sharing of the region's collections. Library patrons will still be able to request materials from different libraries, which will then be delivered to their home libraries.

Mary King, WMRLS regional librarian, said the decision was made to stop the service because of budget reductions over the last decade.

King said the bookmobile service, in operation since the 1940s, has been around longer than the regional library system, which was established in 1961.

The regional library system will maintain its delivery service, which now transports about 2 million books among the four counties. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the system was averaging about 250,000 deliveries annually, according to Regional Administrator John Ramsay.

The library system has eight drivers - three of whom are bookmobile/delivery specialists and drive both the bookmobile and delivery trucks. Six of the drivers are full-time and two are part-time. King said. In 1985 when she started at WMRLS, there were three drivers who did all the bookmobile and delivery driving.

She said the supplemental collection and bookmobile service have been underfunded for nearly a decade.

"Lack of money for new materials and the gradual dismantling of the technical services department by attrition have had a significant negative impact on our ability to buy new materials and process them for circulation," she said.

The bookmobile service has been eliminated already to some small libraries in the past five years because the regional library system's delivery service has expanded with the increase in libraries sharing resources. The delivery of these materials now requires most of the scheduled hours of its eight staff members in the bookmobile/delivery department.

"They filled a gap in these libraries' small budgets ... they could borrow things from us for 11 weeks, then return them when the bookmobile visited and borrow more things that their patrons hadn't seen, read or listened to before."

"It saved them money and also saved them shelf space," she said "It was a cost-effective and very sensible way to share resources, when we had the budget to do it well."

She said the bookmobile service also kept the staff at the regional library in contact with the librarians in small town libraries. She said a decade ago the regional library had a budget of $200,000 to spend on books, videos and books on tape for its member libraries; and it had two bookmobiles on the road, one out of the Pioneer Valley office and one in the Berkshires.

Last year, the regional library had a line item of $17,000 for materials in the budget.

WMRLS has a $1.5 million budget as of now, which includes the most recent reduction by the governor last week of $54,000. She said the regional library is scheduled to take a cut of 28 percent next year and faces a likely merger with other regional library systems.