Biblioburro
The Biblioburro (dt. Biblio-ass ) is a traveling library ( mobile library ), which gives the backs of two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, guide books to customers. The project was started by Luis Soriano in La Gloria , Colombia .
Soriano's enthusiasm for reading began as a child. He obtained a degree in Spanish literature after studying with a professor who visited his village twice a month. As an elementary school teacher, Soriano came up with the idea for this project after seeing that reading books had the power to transform his students, who were facing more conflict than he had experienced as a child. In the late 1990s, Soriano began traveling to communities in the Colombian hinterland of the Caribbean with a portable library that started with 70 books .
After Soriano heard how Juan Gossaín read excerpts from his novel The Ballad of Maria Abdala on a radio program , he wrote to him and asked for a copy of the book for the Biblioburro . In response to the details that Gossaín then published on his radio program, Soriano received a flood of book donations. Soriano's book collection has now grown to 4,800 copies. The construction of a small library building, donated by a local finance company, is only half finished due to a lack of funds. Soriano has also received funding for his project from the director of the Santa Marta Community Library , nearly 180 miles away in the Caribbean, by hiring Soriano as a staff member and sharing a share of his annual budget of $ 7,000 with him.
Adventure stories for children are among the most popular media distributed by Biblioburro . In addition to encyclopedia volumes, novels and medical texts, Horacio Quiroga's animal fable Anaconda , the dictionary of the Spanish language of the Royal Spanish Academy ( Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española ) and a number of travel photo books are among the other objects distributed by the Biblioburro . Books lost to the collection include a sex education manual and an edition of Laura Esquivel's 1989 novel Bittersweet Chocolate ; both were no longer returned by users. A copy of Paulo Coelho's 1990 novel Brida was stolen by bandits after they tied up Soriano during a robbery and found out he had no money.
The Colombian documentary filmmaker Carlos Rendón Zipagauta made a film that tells the story of Sorano and the books donkeys.
Web links
- Literature by and about Biblioburro in the bibliographic database WorldCat
- Biblioburro's weblog
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Romero, Simon. "Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs" , The New York Times , October 19, 2008. Accessed October 20 of 2008.
- ↑ a b c Reel, Monte. "A Four-Legged Drive To Help Rural Readers" , The Washington Post , September 5, 2005. Retrieved on October 20 of 2008.
- ↑ 'Biblioburro' documentary made into feature film " , Colombia Reports , February 8, 2010. Retrieved November 5, 2012.