LibrarianInBlack: Book Mob at the San Francisco Public Library

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November 17, 2008

Book Mob at the San Francisco Public Library

Through a conference contact a little while back, I got in touch with Rosie Merlin, the Program Outreach Librarian for the San Francisco Public Library. She organized a Book Mob (flash mob) to coincide with the library's "one book" program that was super-successful and something other libraries could easily model. I heard about and saw the success of the program through their Flickr photos, so asked Rosie some questions. Here is the result of our email interview.

Can you tell us what a flash mob is, and how a book mob fits in?
Quoting Wikipedia, if I may, a flash mob is “a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse.” In San Francisco we see lots of flash mobs including zombie mobs, pillow fight mobs, dance mobs (Thriller in Dolores Park was a special one), and others.
The idea for a book mob came up when we were trying to brainstorm new and crafty ways to launch our One City One Book program. 2008 is our fourth year hosting a citywide book club and we knew we wanted something public and exciting and that went beyond more traditional “set up a table and hand out materials” type outreach (though we did some of that during the morning on mob day). With the help of Mary Abler who works at Friends of the SFPL, Jon Worona, SFPL’s BLIP Bookmobile Manager, and a variety of other smart thinkers, we came up with the idea of San Francisco’s first book mob.

We googled “book mob” early on and didn’t find anything along the lines of what we were plotting. I’m happy to say that if you google “book mob” now, you’ll find LJ’s blog post about our event.

Where did you get the idea to add a book mob as part of your book event publicity?
For One City One Book in San Francisco we’ve hosted a variety of really wonderful events and discussions at the library and in partnerships with local bookstores and literary organizations. For the book mob, we really wanted to get out on the street and be visible to people who may not have come across the program otherwise. Although we have advertising outside (street banners, billboards), we knew that creating a real public spectacle would be new and eye-catching. We also wanted to do something that felt a bit more whimsical and spontaneous than our traditional programs.
We adapted the Bookmobile with decals so that it said “Bookmob” and set up near the Ferry Building, where our One City One Book author Tamim Ansary would be doing a radio interview on West Coast Live that morning. (The radio program was streaming on a laptop, connected to an amped speaker in the window of the bookmobile, and played Afghani music the rest of the time for people within earshot.) We had 50 copies of the West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story (courtesy of Picador, the publisher) to give out to book-mobbers and each book is tagged as a Bookcrossing book, to encourage people to pass the book on to others after reading it. A number of people brought their own copies of the book to the book mob. Of course, we also had all of our program guides, bookmarks, and buttons that said “I’m Reading It. Are You?”

How did you publicize the book mob to library users?
We set up a yahoo group to get people to sign-up in advance so that a bit of anonymity about the organizers was maintained and used mostly online outreach: staff emails, our One City One Book Facebook and MySpace page, various library blogs, personal blogs, lots of email outreach to friends and contacts, posting on web calendars and sites like Laughing Squid, craigslist, upcoming, etc.

Were there any resources that you found helpful in holding a successful book mob?
A great team of organizers that was really excited about creating something unique for the library and the city!
We also checked out a variety of web sites for background and ideas including:

What did you like most about your book mob?
It was a really interesting process trying to figure out how to do this – what exactly did we want the mob to “do” after they showed up? Sit down and read the book quietly all together? Read out loud from any part of the book? A little of both? We decided we definitely needed to make some noise.
We handed out instructions to everyone that told them to wait till the final bell tolled at noon and then begin reading from pg. 15 (first page of the book) and continue reading for 5 minutes, tell the air horn blared.
We had about 60 people reading aloud around the Book(mob)ile and on the plaza. It was really interesting how people formed these little distinct groups to sort of read the book aloud together; I guess the book group is an organic mob. The sound of so many people reading aloud together was terrific.

What would you do differently if you were going to hold another book mob?
Test out the air horn first :) We ended up using a combo air horn/bell/voice process to end the mob.
I would also think about more finely tuning the outreach during the 3-4 days right before the mob so that a concerted online push really hits all at once, rather than rolling it out as far in advance as we did.

Is there anything else you want to tell us?
It was really a blast! And I highly recommend it as a way to promote reading and library events by being outside of the library, and by being visible and vocal. People strolling by were very intrigued, locals and tourists alike.
Here are some fun links about One City One Book & the book mob – if anyone has questions about it, please let Rosie know. She's happy to take email questions at rlevy@sfpl.org!