OAKLAND — The city’s library is finding new ways to connect to residents, adding bicycle bookmobiles that staffers pedal to community festivals and hand out free books, while also documenting people’s recollections of a neighborhood quickly changing.

Librarians and supporters rolled out two new bicycle-powered bookmobiles Saturday at the Main Library on 14th Street for a ride down Grand Avenue along Lake Merritt to the Lakeview Branch.

The bookmobiles have a trailer hitch easily attached to a bicycle rear axle. Staff already has ridden the bike-powered bookmobile to the Laney College Eco Fest, Bike to Work Day events outside City Hall, Latham Square celebrations and book festivals.

The books librarians give away are from the library’s “Share the Love” collection. On a good day, the trailers, with racks on two sides holding a couple of dozen books each, have to be restocked several times, librarian Emily Weak said.

“Librarians just want to give people free books. That’s all we want to do,” she said. Most of the books are donated, though some are paid for with a library children’s department fund.

“We want to make sure that (not) having a library card is not a barrier to library services,” Weak said. With the bookmobiles, the program can expand from the Main Library to sites more easily reached from the West Oakland branch at 18th and Adeline streets or East Oakland’s 81st Avenue Branch, where the Scraper Bike team holds Friday repair clinics, she said..

Library aide Reginald “RB” Burnette II, who oversees the repair clinics, was on hand at the Lakeview Branch during unveiling of the bookmobiles Saturday. Burnette helped make smoothies with a bike-powered blender.

At present, the bookmobiles go out only about once a week, Weak said.

“It’d be cool to see different styles, for Oakland to have a big fleet,” said Carlos Hernandez, a city Department of Transportation worker who built the trailers in his spare time. The first took him about 30 hours, the second half as long, he said.

The wooden racks are built onto a welded steel frame. They have lights, and one includes a small music amplifier; another has a small basketball hoop and Warriors logos.

Later that day, the 99-year-old Golden Gate Branch on San Pablo launched its Commons Archive to collect stories of the fast-changing neighborhood. The library held a block party, with barbecue, a band, face painting and tables staffed by community organizations.

“The library is not just a place to check out books; it’s a reflection of the community,” branch librarian Erin Sanders said.

Though still-working-class, the neighborhood has seen a lot of change over the decades. A 19th-century black-and-white image over the library stairs shows a section of San Pablo Avenue, unpaved, with just a few wooden houses in sight.

It began in the 19th century as the home primarily of European immigrants: Portuguese, Italians and Scandinavians. It later became home to African-Americans in two migrations in the first half of the 20th century, Commons Archive project coordinator Sue Mark said.

Now, as with so much of Oakland, the neighborhood is changing again, with prices too high for families to resist selling and moving away or selling when dividing an estate between members of succeeding generations, Mark said.

“In the long view, decade by decade, it’s always changing,” she said.

Overseeing the barbecue was Mark Lasartemay, now retired after 26 years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He cheerfully described the work of his grandparents Eugene and Ruth Lasartemay, whose collection of historical artifacts became the foundation of the East Bay Negro Historical Society, now part of the library’s African American Museum and Library Archives.

“That’s what made them click; they enjoyed working together, were interested in the same things and that’s how this came about,” he said of his grandparents.

In addition to the material they donated to the archives, he said as he grilled chicken, tri-tip and sausages he donated for the kickoff block party, they collected so many items that “it took three months to go through their house on Hearst Street that I’m remodeling.”

The Commons Archive project intends to encourage the neighborhood to develop an archive of its own history. In the library’s downstairs computer lab, visitors will be welcome to drop by to share memories and artifacts, Mark said.

She is scheduling two-hour sessions in early June to scan snapshots, scrapbooks and other paper items people might like to share. They also will be encouraged to record stories to “let future generations know what it is like to live in this neighborhood.”

The project will continue for two years.

Mark, an independent cultural researcher, is doing the Commons Archive work with the Kala Art Institute with grants provided by the California Arts Council and the Creative Work Fund.

“The library’s never had something like this before,” she said.