It’s a bike, it’s a library, it’s a bookmobile! This library on wheels was born when Erin Hollingsworth, adult services coordinator at the Carbondale Library, reached out to the Carbondale Bike Project (CBP) to build a delivery bike for their Homebound Delivery program.
CBP was started in 2009 by Aaron Taylor to recycle and fix up discarded bikes. Taylor created the program in Aloha Mountain Cyclery’s basement which is where he met Jim Githens. When Taylor became executive director of the Way of Compassion Dharma Center, CBP moved its office to the Third Street Center, where it remains today.
Now, CBP rents the space for folks who wish to fix up their bikes and it also sells bikes and bike parts. The Bike Project has also taught students from the Carbondale Community School simple bike maintenance that they can apply at home.
Even though Githens was retired when Taylor left the project in 2022 to move to Crestone, no one wanted to see the bike project go away, so he took it on with Valerie Gilliam. Colin Laird and Mark Taylor from the Third Street Center decided to sponsor the project to keep it running.
Githens wasn’t ready to take on a full-time commitment, so when Erik O’Connell walked into the shop looking for ways he could volunteer, Valerie Gilliam asked him if he wanted a manager’s position. Erik has now been the manager of the Carbondale Bike Project since mid-January of 2024.
O’Connell found that the bike project had some challenges, especially in the funding department. Because it’s volunteer and donation-based, they have to rely on donated bike parts and other generosity. The bikes in the shop today were given to the project by the community and were fixed up with other parts that CBP salvaged from irreparable bikes. The rebuilt bikes are then sold or given to Bikes for Humanity, which donates these to community service workers, like teachers and healthcare workers, in districts of southern and eastern Africa.
Hollingsworth joined the Carbondale Library in November 2023. She works primarily to serve adult and senior patrons. The Garfield County Public Library District has a service called Homebound Delivery which delivers books to anyone who can’t leave their house and doesn’t have someone else who can bring them books — for example, someone who just had surgery or some other injury. This program also helps seniors who live in an assisted living home like Sopris Lodge. The program allows patrons to call the library and ask for books to be delivered to their home.
Hollingsworth wanted to improve the Carbondale Librady’s Homebound Delivery service, because it hadn’t been very active before, so, in true Bonedale-fashion, she started to use her own bike to deliver books. “Once a month, I go over to Sopris Lodge and take books to their assisted living facility.” She would take several books every month to create a pop-up library for the people living there to browse, then she would then take them back a month later when she brought new books. For patrons outside of Sopris Lodge, there is a short application to ask for the library to deliver specific books, music, audiobooks, movies and anything else the library has available. All they need is a valid Garfield County library card.
Unfortunately, Hollingsworth’s bike didn’t have enough room for all of the books in her basket, so she emailed the Carbondale Bike Project about making a library on wheels. Luckily, O’Connell found the perfect Xtracycle frame for this project. “The other cool aspect of it is that the library is a community, right? And everybody uses it. The bike wouldn’t be possible without the community, because the community donated all the parts,” O’Connell said. After adding wheels, file folders and the other stuff that a bike needs, he came up with this: the bookmobile.