I spent Thursday on a bus in Lapland hopping between tiny towns in Finland and Norway. It looks like a regular bus, but decked out with Nordic flags and quotations. Inside there’s a full library, complete with shelves, magazine racks, benches, and a librarian’s checkout desk.
As the above video explains, the library on wheels was originally funded in the 1970s as a public service, with the idea of giving information access to people in these tiny northern towns that don't have permanent libraries. The bus offers books in Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and the indigenous Sami language that a lot of people in Lapland speak. It does a three-week tour, so you can hop on when it comes to your hometown, check out a few books, and return them when it stops again three weeks later. You can also order books from bigger libraries. The bus travels such huge distances that the staff sleeps on the road two nights a week.
I was there with a local radio journalist and at a lot of stops she would get out and talk to people while we waited for people to use the library bus. She caught up with some Sami actors, local librarians, schoolteachers in rural Norway, and the three bus staff. It seemed like an efficient way to cover some serious ground, find new stories, and reach verrry small communities that otherwise not be visited by a journalist at all. It also seemed like a good information trade: a book in exchange for a conversation with a journalist about what's going on in their community/lives/schools. Food for thought.
