Digital Bookmobile at ACLD

This past weekend (November 8 & 9) the City of Gainesville hosted the Annual Downtown Art Festival. This is a lively festival where artists from all over the state, musicians, dancers and even circus acts gather to celebrate and have a good time.

This year Alachua County Library District heard that Overdrive was sending a Digital Bookmobile on tour around the country and ACLD signed up to be part of the fun. Overdrive liked the idea of coming in November when the weather would be cooler in Florida and the Downtown Art Festival was the perfect occasion. The Digital Bookmobile is an enormous vehicle with lots of high tech features inside. It parked across the street from the Headquarters’ library downtown on the perimeter of all the festivities. As people were walking to and from the festival, library staff would hand them an ACLD Frisbee or other promotional material and encourage them to take a tour on the Digital Bookmobile. Patrons were really excited to learn about the new technology, especially to learn that downloads are free with a library card. ACLD had over 30 people sign up for library cards on Sunday alone and according to the Overdrive staff, over 350 visitors touring the bus on Saturday and Sunday. Staff had fun mingling with patrons, watching the circus acts, listening to music, eating delicious festival food and we all had fun seeing some of the popular MP3 and reader products in action such as Sony Reader, Zune and Creative Zen X-fi. ACLD had a terrific and successful visit with the Overdrive Digital Bookmobile and expect to see a lot more Overdrive downloads in the near future.