Palmesano and Buckley Instrumental in Bookmobile Project: Come Celebrate
From HPL,
The Hornell Public Library has been busy working on some very large projects. Thanks to Assemblyman Phillip Palmesano and Mayor Buckley, along with the Hornell Public Library Board of Trustees and many community members and businesses, our Bookmobile is officially on the road and ready to serve the Hornell area. The Hornell Public Library would like to invite the community to join us Tuesday, September 16th at 5:00 PM at the library for an official unveiling of the Bookmobile. The Bookmobile, along with library staff and Friends of the Hornell Public Library will also be at the Maple City Fall Festival and available to give tours at that event.
The idea behind a bookmobile started from the realization that we were outgrowing our regular vehicles to meet the growing need to make Homebound Deliveries and provide monthly outreach services to local assisted living facilities. As we started planning for these services, we started dream-building ideas that could serve even more areas of our Community. It became quickly apparent that we would need a larger vehicle to bring our ideas to fruition.
With the $20,000 grant secured by Buckley and Palmesano, the library was able to purchase and convert a small passenger bus into a mobile library on wheels. As soon as the bus was delivered earlier this year, Norm Ellis got to work creating the bookmobile from pictures and sketches collected by Denise Chilson, Director, and Eba Klindt, Programming Assistant. According to Chilson, We researched all different kinds of Bookmobiles, picking elements from many different sources and Norm brought our vision together in a very short amount of time. His background in teaching also came into play, because he was able to break down the tasks and instruct other Library Board members and staff in both the teardown and the reconstruction. Volunteers from the Board and library staff removed seating and built the shelves from old shelving we found in storage during a library shed clean-out.
Once the inside structure of the Bookmobile was completed, Mitch Cornish, Superintendent of Department of Public Works, was able to get the bookmobile into the City garage for an inspection, oil change, and some additional wiring so everything is in tip-top working condition. Cornish, along with Donny Mosher, Department of Public Works, and many other City employees is instrumental in keeping the aging Carnegie Library in fantastic shape. Their kindness and hard work are essential in keeping our library up and running, too.
To start filling the Bookmobile with books to circulate to the community, the library applied for and was granted funds for Large Print books through the Foundation for Southern Tier Libraries. The Director will continue to pursue grant opportunities to stock the Bookmobile with high-interest materials. The library will also accept new or like-new book donations to supplement the core collection.
The finishing touches on the Bookmobile were made possible by multiple city businesses, including Maple City Collision, Stephens Auto Supply, and several private donations. Additionally, the lettering and graphic design for the outside of the Bookmobile were designed and provided at a deep discount by Logo Print.
The Hornell Public Library looks forward to serving the community with this newest addition to outreach services. We will be adding new stops on our monthly runs. If you would like us to stop at your organization or community hub, please contact us at hornellpubliclibrary@gmail.com or call us at 607-324-1210.
$20, 000 donation from the David A. Gray Legacy Foundation kicks off fund-raising campaign to Digitize Newspaper Microfilm at the Hornell Public Library
Thanks to a substantial donation by Penny Gray, the Hornell Public Library can kick-start the costly but necessary project of digitizing, applying Optical Character Recognition (for Boolean and keyword searching), and uploading content to the New York Newspaper Project. Additionally, the library applied for and successfully secured a $5,000 grant through the 2025 Technology and Digitization Grant funded by South Central Regional Library Council.
According to Hornell Public Library Director, Denise Chilson, the project will cost just over $100,000 to digitize and making the local newspapers available to anyone researching local history. Along with the actual process of converting the physical microfilm to the digital format, making these resources keyword searchable and available to everyone is paramount to the vision and mission of the library. We often get requests for newspaper articles, but unless a specific date can be provided, it is nearly impossible to locate information in the over 500 reels of newspapers on microfilm. Well over 100 years of painstakingly hand-written recording and indexing does allow for finding most obituaries, marriages and births. However, if anything happened to those paper index cards, the papers would be impossible to search unless they are converted.
If you would like more information on this lofty project, or if you would like to contribute to this important project, please contact the library at hornellpubliclibrary@gmail.com, by phone at 607-324-1210, or through the Friends of the Hornell Public Library at friendshornell@gmail.com.
