Fully Electric and On the Road – BIBUS Now in Action / A Bus Ready for Adventure, Knowledge and Happy Ends

Since 2019 the City Library of Saarbrücken, in Saarland, and its French partners have jointly operated the transborder »BI-BUS« with the aid of EU funding. During stops at primary schools in the Euro district known as Saar-Moselle, the bookmobile's language promotion programme has already had contact with 12,000 children. In December 2022, a vehicle that runs entirely on electricity was put into service. Transborder projects, bolstering European cooperation and maintaining good relations with France are an integral part of Saaland's identity. At multiple levels one finds cooperative projects and points of contact between Saarland's capital city, Saarbrücken, and its European neighbour. At the end of 2018 the city library followed a call for projects under the programme »Interreg V A Grande Region«, an instrument of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), to implement with its neighbours a project entitled »The Bi-Bus as an element of a borderless urban society of libraries« (short form: BI-BUS). The goal of the Interreg project was to establish and operate a bookmobile which would be able to cross national borders and offer a programme in both German and French during stops at primary schools, with the intention of promoting language acquisition and social inclusion while overcoming mobility barriers. The project was designed to enable the purchase of a new electric vehicle, equipped with the optimal resources for offering language, reading and media didactics. Furthermore, with its environmentally friendly electric motor, the bookmobile would set an example for sustainability. The abbreviation »BI« in BI-BUS stands for bi-national and bilingual, as well as for the German terms »Bibliobus« (book bus) and »Bildung« (education).