Pop-up libraries help communities hit by Sandy keep reading


Aside from losing homes, fraying community bonds and just getting cast into a miserable situation, communities that got hit by Sandy also lost their libraries. Which, yeah, in the grand scheme doesn’t sound like much, but reading kills time even better than watching panda videos on YouTube, and it doesn’t require power. Now there’s a group of librarians helping out Coney Island, Red Hook and Gerritsen Beach with free books from newspaper box-sized libraries.

Urban Librarians Unite, a professional organization of library staff around the city, have set up the mini-libraries outside library branches that were washed out because of Sandy. Not the ULU is trying to set up shop to compete with the brick and mortar libraries. The mini-libraries are there more to remind people how important a library is to a community and to provide a way for people to read. According to the Brooklyn Paper, they have permission from the Brooklyn Public Library. Because the books were all donated themselves, when you take a book, you don’t have to check it out, you can keep it forever, or give it to a friend. But it probably couldn’t hurt to give it back, so they don’t run out of books in like two weeks.