Jumbie Library

Jumbie Library is a shelf in a Mas camp. It is an analog and digital library maintained by the collective Alice Yard (https://aliceyard.blogspot.com/), in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.

It was initiated by one of the collective members, Kriston Chen, as a pavement project with the local community. Makeshift shelves are installed outside the Alice Yard space and stocked with donated books. Neighbours and pedestrians are invited to pick up and leave books, or stay for coffee and read.

Kriston describes the library:

In keeping with the values of our space — sharing, relationships, collaboration, play — the library was formed in hope to re-introduce a semblance of a reading space in Belmont, Port of Spain — an historical neighbourhood currently experiencing a widening literacy and cultural gap between the old and young generations. In addition, Alice Yard has a Riso set up in the space to slowly imagine and create a version of a Belmont library in years to come.

During the workshop series Parallel Library Services, the Jumbie Library was extended to include a digital library running on Bibliotecha. The appeal of using Bibliotecha was to maintain the locality of the original project while sharing digital texts.

The term jumbie can mean, to just appear.