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Summer vacation time has come and gone again. And just like the people who read them, books collect a lot of miles traveling during the Summer.
Lots of people pack a book when they travel, and checking out a library book for that long plane ride or lazy beach day is one way to save a little money on your vacation. What most people don't consider is the many shared adventures a library book gets to experience in its lifetime. I completely believe that there are library books out there that have traveled more miles than a typical NASA astronaut, being checked out repeatedly year-after-year, simply because they are good beach reads.
That's what inspired this passive program. The idea is simple: if you travel with one of our library books between Labor Day and Memorial Day, pin the places where you've traveled with that book. It's a self-reporting map, just pins and locations and no other information about the patrons or the book titles. We calculated the distance from the library to the locations, then added in the return trip before including it in a comprehensive miles tally.
The response in our community was overwhelmingly positive (we have many well-traveled patrons). We have no idea what took people to the many, many places they traveled to. What we do know is that our books went with, and the statistics quickly became everyone's favorite part of this program. Patrons would regularly check in with the map, either to add new pins or to see what new places had been added by others.
Patrons loved tracing along the ever-expanding routes and we loved adding-up all the round-trip miles.
We watched all Summer as the cumulative miles climbed and climbed. We eventually set benchmarks we hoped to pass, such as "How many trips around the world does this equate to?" and "Have the books traveled farther than the distance from the Earth to the Moon?"
Some books found their way to very remote parts of the world. They managed to visit every continent except Antarctica (makes sense this time of the year). As you can see, some of our farthest distances included South Africa, Argentina, and Australia:
And how did our stats do in the end? Not only did we cover the distance from the Earth to Moon, we also covered the return trip, too!
How do we top this next year? Maybe I'll petition NASA to add one of our books on an upcoming Artemis mission (could you imagine!). Until then, give this one a try in your library. I know your patrons will have as much fun as ours did!
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