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The library's official timeline; Davis et al., "Bookmobile Service in Indiana," Indiana Libraries 20(1) (2001); the library's Library History collection
Mobile service came first for ground like Clay Township: the timeline's 1953 entry reads, entire, "The Bookmobile — The Library's first Bookmobile served residents who were not served by a branch." The vehicle cost nearly $8,000, carried 2,000 books, and was built by the Studebaker Corporation and finished by Dallas & Mavis — a South Bend truck for South Bend's unserved edges. The course runs three vehicles deep: the last, the Readmobile, debuted in 1996 and was decommissioned in the 2000s — by then a children's service visiting schools, parks, and daycare centers, which in 2003 absorbed the library's neighborhood deposit sites (its young readers borrowed 21,705 items in 2002 against the deposit sites' 7,162). For this town the honest statement is narrow: mobile service existed from 1953 for exactly the class of resident Roseland held before 1977, but no named Roseland or Clay Township stop was reached in any route record, and neither the second bookmobile's dates nor the exact end year of mobile service (G-LB-3). The bookmobile is therefore Roseland's probable first library and its unproven one; the branch is its proven one.