 I'm going to talk about libraries hosting bicycle rides and why I think libraries and bicycles are a natural fit. So I'm going to start with a quote from Pete Gulkin. He's a librarian from Arlington, Virginia. And he says, my two favorite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day riding a bike to the library. For many people, it's easy to sympathize with libraries and bicycles. Many people like to read in their free time or ride their bicycles, or they remember a time from their childhood when they liked riding bicycles. Libraries and bicycles also have long been seen as symbols of democracy, emancipation, empowerment, equality, and advancing social change. Here's the Ribbington Street branch of the New York Public Library holding a lecture on citizenship to a newly organized group of immigrants. Here, the library is acting as an agent of education and empowerment. And here we have suffragettes fighting for liberation and emancipation on their freedom wheels. So libraries and bicycles, they strike a similar chord in people's psyche. They're two classic ideas and institutions. So what can we do to maximize this harmony? I say, mash them together and have a library bicycle ride. Do something unexpected. You never know where it will take you. As we look for new models of service, library bicycle rides are one model. They're a new way to market, advertise, and bring publicity to libraries. They promote access to information in a new and different way. It shows the library does not only have books, we have unusual and interesting events also. It demonstrates that libraries are open to change and progress. But before I get ahead of myself, I'm going to look at what's going on locally that would suggest a library bike ride would or could be successful. San Jose public library system has 23 branches. Most of them are around less than five kilometers apart, which makes them a little bit too far to walk to, but close enough to bike. San Jose is also seeing an increase in bicycle infrastructure. We have more bike racks. We have more multimodal public transit options. We have lots of bike trails. We have the buffered lane, the green lane, totally off the street lane. We have the Silicon Valley Bike Coalition, San Jose Bike Clinic, San Jose Bike Party, a sister ride, the East San Jose Bike Ride. We have Bay Area Bike Share. We celebrate National Bike Month, and it's accompanying program, Bike to Work Day. In May, the state of California hosts the Amgen Tour of California, and San Jose has hosted a stage all nine years of the bike ride's existence. The city of San Jose also has a green vision, which was adopted by city council in 2007, encompassing 10 aggressive goals related to job, water, energy, transportation. So I found a lot of momentum and progress at the local level. So I wanted to see, were any libraries doing this around the country? And yes, I found some examples. I didn't find a lot, and I know there's more out there than what I found, and I know there are some people in here who have hosted some library bike rides as well. One of my favorites is the Brooklyn Public Library. They hosted their second annual Bike the Branches ride. This is a cycling bonanza. They get over 600 participants visiting 60 neighborhood branches, and it's a fundraiser. They raised over $50,000. It's part of their annual Support the Branches campaign. And their event consists of 12 themed rides visiting local points of interest and libraries. This is a scene of a librarian dressed for the Underworld tour, which visited scenes of infamous crimes, childhood homes of famous gangsters, former speakeasies, and of course, libraries. And I love this idea of librarians as tour guides, creating guided tours, highlighting significant landmarks, and of course, libraries. Another ride I found is the Hayward Library in Wisconsin. They hosted their 11th annual Fall Century Tour this September. They have different length routes for all ages and ability, ranging from 15 to 100 miles. It's promoted as a social group ride where you can meet new friends, and it too is a fundraiser sponsored by their Foundation and Library team. It coincides with their city's annual Fall Festival. Another ride I found, the Arlington Public Library hosted their seventh annual Tour to Bibliotech. They hold it during National Library Week in April. It visits seven of the county's eight library sites. They do limit participation, and their ride is free. And that's what I most closely modeled the Giro de Libro at San Jose after. The Giro de Libro at the San Jose Public Library is free. I did limit participation, but I was able to get up to 75 participants. Another ride I'd like to mention is the Austin, Texas Cycling for Libraries ride. Cycling for Libraries is part of a much larger international event, which I'm going to talk about in just a moment. It's a conference on a bicycle for librarians. The Austin ride was about 20 miles. It was a chance to network and visit local libraries. So I found hope and inspiration locally that a program would be successful. I found some interesting events at the national level, and now I brought in my scope to the international level. And I found Masse and Yuka, very cool. They're part of a group of Finnish librarians who founded Cycling for Libraries in 2011 as an alternative model to the traditional librarian conference. It's an international visiting multi, visiting several countries tour for librarians and library lovers. It aims to advocate libraries, increase awareness of the valuable services and resources libraries offer to their communities. And it also promotes the professional well-being of participants through networking and physical exercise. And I have a big dream is to do a Cycling for Libraries route that circumnavigates the San Francisco Bay, and I'll bring that up again at the end of my presentation. But the European rides that Masse and Yuka help plan, they typically last nine to 12 days. They cover about 400 to 700 kilometers. They get about 80 to 100 people to participate. They typically end at an international library conference like EFLA. One year they ended in Brussels where they met with European Parliament MEPs to discuss the importance of libraries. There have since, since 2011, when Cycling for Libraries was founded, there have been weddings and babies from Cycling for Libraries. And it's jokingly been referred to as the Woodstock for Librarians. One thing that they've really capitalized is great media coverage. And two things about this slide, there's actually a video podcast library theme talk show called This Week in Libraries. This is really cool. It's based out of the Netherlands. The host is in the middle. He's a very gregarious character. So Cycling for Libraries has been on This Week in Libraries a few times. They also create their own documentary each year. They hold the ride. It's about 30 minutes in length. You can find them online if you're curious as to what a library bike tour, librarians on a bike tour look like. I do warn you though that 2011 kind of inaugural documentary does include naked librarians. For some reason they decided to include the librarians who went skinny dipping. So this, I think it was during this interview that Masse mentioned the following program, BicyCool. This is a nationwide Polish library bicycle event. It was created in 2010 to fight against stereotypes about librarians. And they have a website in English with information about how to organize a library bike ride from the large urban system to the small rural system. They give you suggestions who to contact, your city council, police department. They give you examples of what you can do when you have rest stops like read or write poems, sing songs, play charades, have a picnic. So I found inspiration at the local level. I found great examples at the national and international level. Now I wanted to convince my colleagues at San Jose that we should do this in San Jose. I wrote a program proposal. I am focused on three areas, visibility, community and environment. So for visibility, obviously, it increases the visibility of the buildings that you're visiting. During the San Jose ride, we stopped at seven of San Jose's 23 libraries. I hadn't even been to all those branches. So some of them were new to me. It also focuses the attention on the proximity of the libraries to their constituent neighborhoods. And this picture is a snapshot of about 12 of the 75 participants on the Girode Libro ride. And you can see people of all ages. There's a young family. There's a young mother with her son who's standing on the public art. There are two young adult couples. There's some library staff. And the foreground, there's a representative from San Jose's Office of Cultural Affairs of Public Art. She and a colleague talked about all of the public art at the branches we stopped at, which was actually one of the highlights of the bike ride. It also increases the visibility of library staff. So often we hear that, oh, people think the libraries are cool as an organization, but sometimes the benefits of the library are hard to see. But when you're riding your bike, you're a physical active manifestation of library staff moving through and directly interacting with the community. And we're cool. We're out on our bicycles. It shows the library's innovative, multifaceted, not only are we a center for knowledge and reflection, but also for recreation. The second area I focused on was community. The sense of community and togetherness is very strong when participating in a group ride. It automatically brings people together. And holding the ride highlights the library's role in bringing people together to have a bike ride is also an encouragement activity. It encourages people to embrace an active lifestyle. It invites people to action, exercise, and enjoy taxpayer-funded resources such as their libraries or bicycle infrastructure. It also gets people thinking about their community. And all the passersby we encountered were cyclists, pedestrians. So all around it was good publicity. The third area of my proposal I included was the environment. A library bicycle program gets people out of their cars and moving. It shows that cycling is a viable means of transportation to the library and everyday use. It also ties in with the city of San Jose's Green Vision Goals. It promotes the use of bikeways. It shows off the new and retrofitted green buildings, some of which are LEED certified. As far as planning, I won't talk too much about that, but I did meet with San Jose's Department of Transportation Representative, John Brazil, in October, which with seven months before I planned the ride, I was planning the ride for May of 2014. He recommended that I meet with a group that already holds their own bicycle rides. He gave me a list of about eight to 10 bike groups. I selected the San Jose bike clinic and I met with them in November. So six months before I even planned the ride, I was already meeting with the bike clinic. And they were thrilled with the idea, they loved it. So we planned the ride for 2014 May, and San Jose bike clinic's role was to create the route, which is the map we have up here. It was about 15 and a half miles long. They acted as ride leaders during the event, and they also provided an ABC safety talk, kind of rules of the road before the ride began. There were about eight San Jose bike clinic volunteers the day of the event, and I had about eight San Jose public library staff. I created a blog post to advertise on the library's website. I created an event-brite page for people to register so that way we could keep track of how many people were signing up. And then the San Jose bike clinic created a Facebook event page. I had an in-house graphic designer, Galen Obak, create the poster and artwork for the ride. And I really hit the jackpot with San Jose public library's communication strategist, Stephen Brewster. He sent out multiple press releases, email blasts, social media posts. He also garnered a partnership with a tour of California and the San Jose Sports Authority, and they advertised for us and gave us free swag. We had bags and sunglasses to give away. I have a short video. I'll play just a minute or two of it. One thing I liked on the ride that we did have a diverse group of people, all ages, we had families, we had teenagers, but also the types of bikes people chose to ride. It was really the sense of personal expression. There were lots of different kinds of bikes out on the road with us that day. One of my favorites is coming up at the end of the clip here, something like out of Mad Max or something here we come, and his teenage son kind of dancing along with him. Just a lot of fun. So as we move forward in our profession, extending and expanding services, and as we look for new models of librarianship, I see libraries and bicycles in the mix. Sorry about that. So if you wanna see one of these bike rides in person, I invite you to join the library to library bicycle tour. It's happening this weekend, this Saturday. It's starting in the San Jose Rose Garden branch. It's traveling to Santa Clara City Library, then to Sunnyvale, then to Mountain View. So please come out and check it out if you're interested. And as I promised, I will mention my big dream is to have a cycling for libraries ride, circumnavigating the San Francisco Bay. There's already a team of people formed to work on this. I think everyone on the team is in this audience. We have people from Oakland, Berkeley, Mountain View, and San Jose. We're looking at a three-day, two-night bike tour, finishing at ALA in San... Bring a sign-up sheet, but I don't have a place to put it. So if you're interested, find me afterwards. We can get your name and contact information. And with that, I conclude my presentation. Thank you. And next up is Paul Sims with the Mountain View Bicycle Fix-It Station.