A Glimpse Inside MidPointe’s Library on Wheels

Many of you know about our six outstanding locations and patron and enjoy them year round with the many programs and services that we have to offer. What some of you may not know about is our sixth location that is known as “Library on Wheels.”

Some of you are aware from your children being in a school about our Bookmobile “LOWise.” Lowise currently sees 21 schools and 2 Daycares and 2 teen after school programs in our service area of Middletown, West Chester, Monroe, Liberty, Madison, Trenton, as well as 1 stop monthly at Central Connections Senior Center in Middletown. We are very excited with 2020 and adding new and exciting adventures to the Bookmobile’s routine. We are adding pop-up preschool this summer to get littles ready for the school environment. We will do this with reading, sensory activities, crafts, practical social skills, hands on themed activities and much more. We are also wanting more people in the community to experience the bookmobile so we are wanting to hit the road this summer with pop up community stops! If you have any suggestions on where you would like to see us please pass this on to the librarians so that we can make that happen. 

Behind the scenes things that happen at LOW that you may be unaware of is the programing and outreach for our seniors in the communities we serve. We have dedicated staff members who work tirelessly to make sure our seniors are not forgotten about. 

Here is a sneak peak of some of our LOW employees:

Karen is our Senior Services Specialist. She is the well-oiled machine that makes sure that our nursing facilities and home bound patrons receive library materials. She currently sees 18 nursing facilities and many home bound patrons. For 2020 we are also increasing the amount of “Books by Mail” patrons we have to further our reach to this group. Not only do the patrons receive materials that cater to their individual needs, she shops for them based off of a survey they submit to her yearly with the titles of book, authors, and genres they enjoy. If they want something special she will go out of her way to find it for them! 

Daniel is the behind the scenes of LOW! He is the reason the Bookmobile looks awesome and in order and that our collection at the Depot (the Bookmobile garage) is in order and easy to access for our amazing homebound and school patrons. He is super hard working and always willing to help! He is our shelf elf that we just could not do without! 

Beka Brate is superwoman of the depot! She is always on the move and making sure everything comes together as it should. She is the amazing go between for all our programing and working with our community contacts. She heads up our book club responsibilities and is always thinking of ways to reach out to more of our amazing patrons. We could not do anything without of fearless leader! 

Debbie Carrol is our extraordinary outreach librarian. Her primary focus with the outreach department is to visit and create crafts with and for our seniors. She currently has 29 programs monthly at 18 of our local nursing facilities. She has a passion for creating projects that the seniors feel proud of making. She is an avid recycler and loves to put that message into her projects! She currently has around 300 patrons in her programs and is able to make beautiful homemade crafts for $.33 per patron. Her creativity and passion for these seniors is so appreciated by them and you can see it when she walks in to the room.   

LOW is so excited for the summer! We are looking forward to new programming opportunities. We are launching our pop-up preschool this June. This is programing for our patrons ages 3-5 pre-kindergarten who need some additional help to prepare for the giant leap into kindergarten. This program will be 2.5 hours long with a prepared lesson plan full of fun, counting activities, science projects, sensory games, circle time, and so much more. The best part is the Bookmobile is bringing pop-up pre-school to you! Stay tuned for more details! 

We have a ton of fun at LOW we enjoy coming up with ideas for our community and making outreach a service for the people! We hope you enjoy this insight in to our small but mighty world at LOW. We look forward to making 2020 the greatest adventure yet! 

We need your feedback! We want to be out in the community and engage with you. The Bookmobile wants to gain miles this summer. Do you have a suggestion of a community stop? Where in the wild would you love to see us? Let us know. You never know we may be at your corner someday very soon!