And now dear readers, it is time to reveal all!

I should have mentioned, on the 4th of April, that I did become a Doctor! The Thesis was duly defended and passed, subject to corrections which are not too many or too difficult. It is now time for me to tell the world about what I found. I will do this by breaking down the findings into small, post sized pieces and when I have done all those, I will do case studies of each vehicle that I observed, anonymised of course. This task should keep me occupied for a while!

Today's contribution is about the thing that is special about children's mobile libraries (CML). I defined a children's mobile library as a vehicle that provides all the services of a static children's library, but I felt that as I was specifically investigating mobile, not static children's libraries, I needed to find the element that made them special. Otherwise I could just have observed any children's library. I admit that what I discovered was blindingly obvious, children's mobile libraries work because they are mobile, they come and go away again.

This transience has a number of effects. It makes children and their parents or carers excited about visiting the vehicle. The excitement that children feel stimulates their brains into the right sort of state to absorb information therefore they learn better. The coming and going ensures that customers "Catch" the vehicle, they know when and where it is coming, so they make the effort to go, unlike a library that is always there, so you could choose to go whenever you want to but end up not going. I had not done very many observations when I noticed that one phrase was repeatedly told to me by many people. They liked the CML because it was "Different".

It was different because it was "Like a trip out", because the books were different, because the stories were different, told by a different person in a different way. The idea of this different thing that turned up out of the blue every fortnight, or three weeks, or month captures the imagination, and the anticipation of the event makes people, especially children, excited. Now, as an ex-teacher, I know that half your battle in controlling a class is stopping them from getting too excited, but it turns out that to learn well, you have to have certain amount of adrenaline and nor-adrenaline flushing around your brain. This wakes up the brain, relaxes it but also makes it alert, just what you want when trying to get the little dears to learn something. So, if you have all these children coming onto a vehicle stacked with everything to do with literacy (books, videos, stories, computers, pictures, words), their brains are picking up all the clues they need to piece together the jig-saw of reading ability.

But what happens if the brains are constantly stimulated? There is no time for feedback, for reflection, for setting down the experiences into memory, so you need a time of calm.This happens when the CMLs go away, and life returns to boring reality of the classroom, or nursery, or home and dinner. That sort of time lets children sort out and make sense of the things that they have just seen and heard. Remembering the story, for instance, or recalling a picture in a book, or thinking about the book they want to borrow next time or the enjoyment of the one that they have in their hand, just borrowed.  I have a diagram to explain all this, which I will put in here.

"Build up" is what happens when customers are expecting the vehicle, "Occurrence" is what happens inside the vehicle and "Release" is the moment of calm and thought after the vehicle has left.

There is also a theory by someone called Carmelli, that travelling shows, which seem to appear overnight and disappear just as quickly, attract people because people feel that they have a brief moment to experience a small part of something eternal, that keeps circling around forever. Mobile services certainly seem to attract the human mind, just think of ice-cream vans, and what a treat it is to have one in your street. It takes a mean parent to refuse a child an ice-cream when the van comes into your road, even if it is nearly lunch-time. Children's mobile libraries feed off this sort of attraction.

If you want to follow up Carmelli's work the reference is "Carmelli, Y.S. 1987 Why does Jimmy Brown's Circus Travel?: A semiotic approach to the analysis of circus ecology. Poetics Today, 8(2). 219-244". There are many books available on education and the brain.

Methodologies

Today I was at a course on Qualitative Analysis, just for me to confirm that I really understand all the things I have read. While I was there I was having thoughts of how my methodology has changed from the initial thoughts, and realised that it important to write all this down to log my reasoning. The Question "Are Children's Mobile Libraries expensive toys or investments for the future?" could very well be answered simply by using government statistics, Ofsted figures for reading and literacy, library target figures and library visitor figures matched against local government expenditure on libraries, specifically the running costs of a mobile library. This sort of Quantitative research would give an answer, but not explain the reasons behind the answer. It would not show that at one particular stop, where only ten children come aboard, that the mobile library is visiting a special school and that it is the only place where those children can access appropriate books, for instance. It would not be able to tell simply by the school figures in a specific area that there are certain pockets of disadvantage in that area, certain families that have a poor literacy background and their children are benefiting by the actions of library staff and access to books and ingformation. The point is that the children's mobile library has the opportunity to access people who otherwise would not be able to have the chance to become self learners, would not thave the chance to develop their literacy skills.

This in turn leads to lower self esteem lower achievement and a less informed workforce. It becomes difficult and costly to improve these people's literacy as they become adult, is it more efficient to use the money when they are children? My aim is to asses the social and economical value of children's mobile libraries. In fact is there an impact on the literacy of parents and other family members when children borrow books? The answer to these sorts of questions can be better found by Qualitative research. There are still a variety of ways that I could choose to do this, and I have not completely made up my mind yet. I am certain that I will be a participative observer, visiting, watching and experiencing children's mobile libraries at first hand. I think I will use ethnographic methods to do that part of the research joining in storytelling and informally talking to the children. I need to find which mobile libraries will give me the best opportunity to do that so the type of sampling I use is important. I first thought that random sampling would be the fairest way. This was when I guessed that I would have a large sampling frame, say fifty or more children's mobile libraries operating in Britain. As I have discovered a much smaller number, and uncovered some of the stories of these mobile libraries I realise that each seems to have a certain uniqueness, and some stand out for various reasons. To get a well rounded sample across the range of types of Children's mobile library, then I must use purposive sampling, choosing the best ones to provide an answer.

I am not only sampling the Mobile library, however. I need to learn more about the subject. There is little literature, so I need to talk to people who know about working on children's mobile libraries, and people who have had the experience of monitoring children's literacy before, after and during the experience of regular visits to children's mobile libraries. These people will be chosen by theoretical sampling, because the will provide theoretical insights. I will use these key people to them lead me on to other people who I can interview or form into a focus group (to investigate the Reading Rocket phenomenon, teachers and nursery staff), or to gain access to mobile libraries (Mobile library staff). Could this then be Snowball sampling. I feel that an insider approach will get better, more sympathetic results that If I "Cold Called" mobile libraries.

I need to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of these methods, including my own previous experience, the experiences of the staff, the children, and any bias that could creep into the study. It could all become very subjective. I must remember to write up the experience I had of working on a children's mobile library, the experience I have had of teaching children to read and the part the experiences have to play in the research. This is Reflexivity. I need to write some advantae and disadvantage lists. Perhaps it is too early to make methodological decisions, but noot to early to have the disussions with myself. this bit of refelxivity is probalbly a bit botring for anyone following this blog, I apologise, but I need to record my thought processes, because I will forget them by my third year and wonder why I chose to do things in the way I will have done. (There are a lot of tenses in that sentence).