My local library which is part of the Washington county Library system (next to Portland). It's where Hillsboro is, which is where Intel's manufacturing is, also called Silicon Forest, has a Library Of Things!
I've checked out a KitchenAid stand mixer, synthesizer, guitar, stud finder, drum machine, ukulele, air quality detector, and many more things.
They also have a sewing machine and a. Vitamix.
It's amazing! I love being able to check out new things from our library!
I think there's an effort towards tool checkout as well in the future! There's a tool library in a couple cities east of us as well that I keep hearing about!
Libraries of Things are a thing now. The items that are most useful are those that lend things that you use from once a year to every couple of years.
My local library (PEI Library Service) has a telescope, radon detector, a basic (and I mean basic) toolkit, some gardening tools among other things. The collection has a couple of surprises, but mostly underwhelming.
I did request something more practical, like a bicycle disc brake flushing kit, but this has not happened yet.
Our little town in Minnesota has some of these too (https://winona.lib.mn.us/library-of-things/) it's really cool! There's also a new maker space getting set up now which will have a tool library open to the community.
That's my library system too! I go to tualatin and it has a dedicated room for their makerlab and have classes every day for all kinds of stuff. Whenever I go in its pretty well attended.
My library has something similar. Sewing and embroidering machines, 3D printers and even a CNC machine. Most are free to use as long as you bring the material, the only one that I can remember having a cost is the laser cutter but even then it was under 10 bucks an hour. They have a bunch of other things like being able to check out a pass the the state parks and some museum passes.
The Greene County Ohio Public Library (Xenia, OH) did something like this a few years ago and other libraries in the area (Dayton Metro and Troy-Miami County) started similar spaces, too. They all have a similar array of machines-- CNC, 3D printing, dye sub printing, laser engravers, vinyl cutters, sewing and embroidery, video and photo editing, etc. It's amazing to me that within a five year timespan all of this became available to anybody in the community for the cost of materials.
I remember a day, long, long ago in a dusty, lonely outback Australian town, when Mum would send me down to the library on a Saturday morning to loan the iron, a kettle, and the last weeks’ papers, which she’d return on the very early Monday morning after putting me off on the .. two hour .. bus ride to school.
Now I’m sitting in a room full of hard core technology, wondering if I shouldn’t talk to my local technical museum about setting up an 8-bit lending library with a catalog of fully operational machines ..
Libraries around me have just become a homeless shelter. Pretty sad because the buildings themselves are actually quite nice and I'd use them often if it weren't for the high likelihood of being harassed.
I hope wherever you live can pull out of the dive.
Libraries are amazing and I would say that the fact they are so under funded and eventually turn into little more than a place to sleep, is very unfortunate.
I have woken up so much, sitting in a library for days, reading, reading, reading ..
If it weren’t for libraries, I’d have only read 1984 and not Down and Out in Paris and London, nor the one about Aspidispira, works with gravitas which fundamentally changed my opinion about personal responsibility at a respectable age.
I wonder if any of those homeless folk get a chance to talk to the ghosts of those aisles. Probably the library worked, once.
I understand it's tough for them but some of the homeless people are not people you enjoy you want to be around. I don't understand this need to spread this sentiment.
You will encounter homeless people in libraries, because it's one of the few public spaces that won't kick them out. Your reaction to that shouldn't be to hate and avoid libraries though. It should be to appreciate them more.
I don't go to libraries very often anymore because so often they're effectively homeless shelters. Should I not mind this? I don't know, 'should' is doing a lot here, but the truth is I used to love going to libraries, browsing books, and soak up the general scholastic atmosphere.
Homeless shelter just isn't that much fun for me. If I want to be virtuous and go to a soup kitchen or otherwise try to interact with and help homeless people, I'll just do that.
What people in general don't seem to realize by taking things that almost everyone likes (libraries, as one example) and requiring one to go through some virtue test to go is that in the end, public support for the good is going to collapse, it will lose funding, and then no one can have it.
The guy didn't said he hated it, you did. He just said he avoided it. I would too. The same way I wouldn't want to hang out at a homeless shelter (and why many homeless themselves avoid any places with many other homeless people).
I would avoid homeless shelters because I have no reason to be there. But I won't avoid libraries because I do have a reason to be there, and I know there's no reason to be scared of interacting with homeless people.
They're just people and the library is for them too.
They're not just average people, they're people with a particular condition which is more than likely associated with mental health issues, lack of social skills and several times more likely to be dealing with an addiction problem than a normal person.
Plus all the trust issues of having lived in the street. Only someone who hasn't interacted a lot with the homeless would say they are just like everyone else. Even if the reason they became homeless was just random by the time they've been homeless for a couple of years they are a different person.
There's a reason many of the homeless avoid shelters, if you talked to one you'd know why, and it's not because the other guests are lovely kind people to be around.
The bottom line is they have as much a right to be there as you do and you're free to ignore them or interact with them as much or as little as you want to.
That's not the bottom line, the law is the law nobody is arguing to kick anyone out. This thread was just about why someone might not want to go there and then being gaslighted that homeless people are somehow not a risk group in any way lol
In my experience it will also make you appreciate aspects of physical production that don't apply to programming. For example, how precisely you need to cut fabric and join/pin/baste fabric together before you sew such that it looks nice. I'm glad I don't need to reckon millimeter precision on a ruler for my job.
I started sewing because I wanted to make a Guybrush Threepwood costume for Halloween. I'm currently making a bag and the next item on the pipeline are a couple summer shirts and a custom cover for a camera lens I have. I also brought my sewing machine to a kid's birthday party to make small plushies with the kids.
I've also repaired a non-insignificant number of clothes from friends and family. I know I used to roll my eyes when people used terms like "upcycling", but I have to say that I've come around since.
My family has one. I'm not sure we'd get one if we didn't already have it. With that said, I've repaired clothing, backpacks, and a fairly expensive musical instrument case. For the latter repairs, I broke a few needles, and had to work the mechanism by hand, a stitch at a time, because the motor wasn't strong enough, but it got the job done.
As for making things, curtains. They're not hard because they're rectangular, and mainly just need cutting and hemming, but the result is sizes and materials that would require buying something custom made.
Denver has this... nominally. 3 machines (2 in circulation, one is a "Display"). 4 week checkout period. 103 current holds. 103*4/2/12 ≈ 17 year wait time.
That theoretical wait time doesn’t usually end up being so long. Between borrowers returning things early, people on the wait list giving up and most importantly, the library deciding that the current inventory is insufficient, the wait times usually are much less than that (I’ve observed this with books and other materials at my local library and the wait on in-demand times is never as long as the queue would imply).
But we can check out a Netflix Roku, and the wait time really is what it says on the tin + a bit more; which works out to about once a year, which is about what we need ...
103 - number of ppl in queue,
4 - up to X weeks per person,
2 - number of machines
12 - ??
Maybe you initially wanted to use full months for how long a person can hold an item, but then switched to weeks, and accidently still used number of months to get the number of years?
Anyway, for an imprecise number, you can do with months - 104*1/2/12 ~4.3y.
For more precise result, use seconds, as that's the unit used for the precise length of the year. Year is not 365 days. It's actually longer, quoting Wikipedia for (tropical) year,
> Approximately 365 solar days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds
I am not very fond of this idea. I think libraries are for books, or possibly media. I can see the utility but I think it distracts from the actual purpose.
I used to think this way too. When I was growing up, libraries were for books.
And that one room where they had periodicals (magazines, newspapers, and such) but you had to read those there in that room.
And encyclopedias, for kids to use for their research reports.
And a story hour for kids (and, let's face it, for the parents).
And that one computer in the back that had Oregon Trail and Summer Olympic Games on it.
But mostly I remembered the books, and that's what I felt like libraries should be about.
Now I feel like a library's purpose is to support it's community. Mostly they lend books because that's what they're known for and they're very good at it. They're expanding into eBooks because that's another big thing people read today. And music CDs and DVDs which is very similar to lending books, and people like those.
Expanding out to lending things is a bit of a mind-bender for me too, but I think it's in line with what libraries have always done - help the community.
I'm torn on this. Often I feel like the parent, but I recognize maybe I'm being stubborn.
You say libraries purpose is to help the community. If that's true, what you're saying makes sense. On the other hand, if their purpose is to promote literacy and reading, well, this is off mission.
I think of the former mission as more being a community center. My mother loves this form and spends a lot of time at her local library. I'm a curmudgeon and an intellectual snob apparently. I don't even like them having popular books, but I'm trying to be less rigid and more honest here and admit that some scope creep is probably healthy and the question is just where you draw the line.
My local library has a few interesting things like this including a podcast kit (i.e. professional microphones and mixers) you can book in conjunction with a room booking and also a thermal imaging camera you can check out to "identify energy efficiency in the home by finding gaps in insulation, comparing the performance of different walls and rooms in the home, finding air leaks and identifying water leaks or damp issues". I approve wholeheartedly of these and similar initiatives.
I'd argue that sewing machines are among the most complex, high skill items found in a typical home, above the laptop and car. I find it very hard to keep mine operational. I struggle with it a lot more than I sew with it. They require fine motor skills and scads of parts and supplies. If you plan to rent them, plan for a repair staff or frequent replacements.
Compared to a book, a sewing machine is a space ship, and you should see what people can do to a book. To be sustainable it needs a replacement value deposit, which isn't easy for someone who can't afford an entry level model.
I bought a sewing machine a five years ago and I haven’t had to do any maintenance or repairs to it. What kinds of things are breaking on your machine?
I only use it a couple of times per year, and simply threading it is a genuine challenge for me. So is keeping a stich running. People who sew more or have good fine motor skill may just not remember the noob experience. I expect a lot of new renters to have a learning curve to climb.
I’m almost 40 and educated in the UK. I don’t think sewing has been taught in UK schools for quite many generations now - although no idea what the state of affairs is today.
It might be you need to make a choice to choose it; I know that when I was at school in the UK I got to choose between "CDT" (craft, design, and technology) or home economics, which was sewing, cooking, & etc.
I picked woodwork, as 95% of the boys did, and about 80% of the girls picked the home-lessons instead.
I do recall doing some sewing lessons outwith the home-ec classes, but it was very irregular. I know I skipped some stuff because my grandmother had already taught me to knit when I was six-eight years old. Only at home did I use a sewing machine, never at school.
it helps to have a good sewing machine - the difference between a poor quality one and e.g. a nice bernina is dramatic. even an old one thats been well maintained will give you many years of reliable use with minimal maintenance, and they're very affordable used
Sewing machines are complex, but ive had experiences both ways with them. One model I had endless troubles with both getting to run and keep running well, but then ive had others that are seemingly bulletproof. At my family's cabin my great-grandmother had a foot powered one that to this day works flawlessly and has never seen any maintenance or repairs ive ever seen and she use to make tons of quilts on it. I don't use it much these days but I do squirt a bit of oil on it every few years and make sure it is still working.
Yes and no. I can stitch. I regularly do adjust clothes. I am a bad amateur. It's crazy what my neighbor does (She has a industrial sewing machine) and does piece finish work. It's a real skill.
However, I highly recommend everyone get and learn how to perform basic stitches because hand stitching is a lot hard to get a good quality stitch out of, especially for doing things like repairs in areas that wear.
I’d love to be able to borrow a sewing machine, tools, etc. I live in a small flat and I don’t need permanent ownership of those things. They spend 99.5% of the time sat taking up space. What good is that? For a lot of machines it’s not good to leave them idle, or sat in a shed collecting mould and rust.
You are being unfair to the spirit of the original quote.
Yes, the quote is naive in expecting a world where those who own share with those who rent without nefarious motives. But sharing, particularly in this context when profit is out of the equation, is a great idea. I don't have the money nor space for my own 3D printer, but thanks to my local library I own objectively more 3D printed stuff than I would without them.
The Deichman Library in Bjørvika, Oslo, Norway (they named their public library after a businessman/book collector who donated his books to the city) is basically a hangout space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT1xI7SSdLo
My very small town growing up had sewing machines and they eventually even got a 3D printer. In high school I sewed a heart shaped pillow for a valentines day present; the library provided a bin of free fabric/stuffing as well as the machine. Libraries are awesome.
I'm sorry, but that's not a library. It is useful, but calling these centers "libraries" just accelerates the death of actual libraries, and distracts from copyright reform.
I'd argue the opposite: because they are focusing on knowledge acquisition they are trying to separate the medium (the books) from the objective.
40 years ago books were the only way to obtain knowledge. Nowadays even those who come for the books do so with a laptop for taking notes. If I were a librarian, it would be naive of me not to ask the question "if all the books are online, then why are we here?"
Anecdotally, on the topic of "knowledge acquisition", I used to run a drawing group. Finding a place to do so was a major problem because nobody wanted to invite strangers home and not everybody could afford the ~$20 it would take to stay at a cafe for long. A library with a meeting room would have been our dream solution and perhaps would have kept the group from dissolving.
Libraries have been renting non-books for a long time. Different communities have different needs. It's not a big deal. Some libraries in the Los Angeles area lend sewing machines, bike tools, and other useful stuff. The main branch library has 3d printers and other tech stuff ordinary folks can't afford. And of course, they have various workshops on numerous topics for adults and children.
Given all the stuff I've taken advantage of, if the libraries here were only for borrowing books, they would seem kind of useless. And this is from someone who has the max 30 books checked out right now.
It’s easier to take time to pick up a book and learn something if your life is going smoothly in other areas. If all your clothes need mending it can make a barrier of embarrassment to go to a public place like a library. With the hollowing out of the middle class, people live in smaller housing and move more, lose their inter generational resources. If there’s a trusted social institution that is knowen for borrow and lending, and people have a need to borrow tools for their everyday life it seems not such a deviation from the purpose of libraries
Andrew Carnegie funded 2,500+ public libraries and many were built with lecture halls, auditoriums, and meeting rooms on purpose. The public library was a civic institution from day one.
Libraries might not be a business but they still have to compete for funding. If those funding them think they are no longer relevant, the alternative is to slowly lose funding and die. People don't care about books anymore, so if the library must dangle an enticement to keep people engaged enough to retain the instilled indeed that knowledge should be freely available instead of siloed (and the other benefits of libraries), so be it.
My local library has been running a tool lender library for quite a while. It's quite popular as it rents out both manual and electric tools. This is great when you need an extension ladder but don't want to own an extension ladder.
The main library here in Montreal has a sick makerspace with 3D printers (plastic and resin), wood CNC machines, a digital embroidery machine, button maker, shirt press, hole driller, laser cutter, vacuform and vinyl cutter:
https://square.banq.qc.ca/fablab
It's a pretty dope library. They also let you borrow movies, videogames for all consoles and even board games, vinyl records and a few music instruments.
One of the libraries near me has kayaks for loan as well as picking up the slack when all of the funding for after school programs was slashed. The value of third spaces is slowly creeping back into the public mindspace, but not enough.
I signed my daughter up for a library card when she was two. She can't read yet.
I believed you can't teach a child to love libraries. You keep taking them, and let the room do the rest. That room do wonders and it did that to me and I am sure will do that to her too.
I really wish my local libraries would offer things like this. I do own a sewing machine, and even if I didn't, I could probably call on a friend if I did need one, but there are several other categories of things this doesn't apply as much too: gardening tools, ladders, skis, a wheelbarrow. If I could just pop in a library and come back when I'm done, that'd be really convenient.
I can borrow CDs, DVDs, records, sheet music, games, but those were probably a pretty logical continuation of lending out books, so the jump to random items is probably one that needs justification to the people higher up the chain. Hopefully this will serve as a good example.
There are some tool libraries where i live specifically for big or expensive stuff like ladders, power saws, etc; stuff most people need once every few years but don't want to keep in their apartment
Tool libraries rock, i think this model could work really well for lots of things especially in big cities.
I am blessed with a huge apartment but even i have to make decisions about what tools to keep around given the space. Yeah i could buy something from harbor freight and use it once and donate to the thrift store, but how much better if my neighbors and i could just share a big collection of stuff we all might need once every year or two
I’m trying to privately build a public library in a rural Idaho community. Borrowing sewing machines has been a popular request, as soon as we have space for them. It’s exciting to see that it’s a worldwide desire and not just a rural trend. Very cool to read about how Finland is doubling down on investing in libraries and skill building tools like sewing machines!
Luckily a few others here in Idaho have done it by way of a Friends of the Library official non-profit 501(c)(3), so I have a model to follow that works in our region and for our rural conservative conditions. The standard non-profit benefits apply: we apply for a lot of grants, we set up endowments, accept land or stock as gifts, take on capital projects like building a library. The public library can then lease from us (probably for $0) or if we put a large enough endowment fund together we would very much consider taking it all private vs just a purpose built building for the library.
Why do the pictures with this article feel so weird? Like, the first one is of a guy in Finland reading a book with an English title while standing in front of a shelf full of books with English titles.
Oodi is at least equally community / maker space and library, very distinctively and attractively designed, quite new, and in the middle of Helsinki, so there are a lot of non Finnish speakers visiting so there is a large English section.
I moved to Finland, and starting when my child was about three years old I took him to Oodi every weekend.
The soft-play area was heaven for him, and he liked flicking through the donald-duck comic books.
Even now, when he's nine, I go every month or two with him for an afternoon. He has no shortage of books at home, but he gets to run around, look at books, and play with other kids. He enjoys himself enormously.
I live in Finland and even I am sceptical of this figure. Maybe that’s because I go once a year.
I will say it’s very very common for folks to use the library for its primary purpose of renting books - which of course requires a visit twice in a month - once to collect and once to return.
I always wanted to start a musical instrument library. I loved working in a music store, helping people pick out the right instruments for what they're trying to accomplish, but always constrained by their budget. We had a per-semester rental program for school band students, where we'd take a deposit and rental fees but we'd handle the maintenance and families could save a ton versus buying. Something similar where like, you want to loan out a particular amp or pedal or synth or cymbal or something to go record a record for a week, the library would be there to help you access gear you couldn't normally afford, and I'd be there to keep everything working and help you find the right tool for the job.
I think musical instruments, especially digital ones like synthesizers or effects but also guitars and other acoustic instruments, have become a lot more affordable the last decade without severely impacting quality. You don't really need the expensive stuff anymore when you can record a quality recording with a second hand iPad and a below $100 microphone.
Rental of expensive stuff will always be expensive too due to insurance, maintenance and fraud. It's not really helping to make stuff more accessible, more a convenience for the pro's that need stuff for a gig.
Hilarious. Tool libraries exist and are quite successful here in capitalist US of A (and, apparently, in capitalist Finland. You didn't think they were communists or something, did you?)
> 1 point by timonoko 67 days ago : A Tour of Oodi
These are just echoes of Soviet Era "Cultural Palaces" aka "Folkets Hus" in Socialists-run Sweden.
For the "Culture" no one wants to pay their own money for.
I visited it only once, using the Toilet. Kinda Scary. It was gender-free, consisting of large locked cubicles, which were mostly occupied as kiosks for drugs and sexual services. Romanian Romas also had permanent presence there. But sadly this gender-free dream was destroyed by the order of the Nazi Polizei.
I've checked out a KitchenAid stand mixer, synthesizer, guitar, stud finder, drum machine, ukulele, air quality detector, and many more things.
They also have a sewing machine and a. Vitamix.
It's amazing! I love being able to check out new things from our library!
I think there's an effort towards tool checkout as well in the future! There's a tool library in a couple cities east of us as well that I keep hearing about!
PDX has it going on!!!
My local library (PEI Library Service) has a telescope, radon detector, a basic (and I mean basic) toolkit, some gardening tools among other things. The collection has a couple of surprises, but mostly underwhelming.
I did request something more practical, like a bicycle disc brake flushing kit, but this has not happened yet.
With the right gear, the job is still horrible. SRAM brakes give me an unlimited number of maintenance chores.
Usually the way it works is you "buy" the tool and then "return" it.
This is the Charleston County library system.
Now I’m sitting in a room full of hard core technology, wondering if I shouldn’t talk to my local technical museum about setting up an 8-bit lending library with a catalog of fully operational machines ..
I hope wherever you live can pull out of the dive.
Libraries are amazing and I would say that the fact they are so under funded and eventually turn into little more than a place to sleep, is very unfortunate.
I have woken up so much, sitting in a library for days, reading, reading, reading ..
If it weren’t for libraries, I’d have only read 1984 and not Down and Out in Paris and London, nor the one about Aspidispira, works with gravitas which fundamentally changed my opinion about personal responsibility at a respectable age.
I wonder if any of those homeless folk get a chance to talk to the ghosts of those aisles. Probably the library worked, once.
I understand it's tough for them but some of the homeless people are not people you enjoy you want to be around. I don't understand this need to spread this sentiment.
"In 8 states, over 50% of unsheltered homeless individuals are registered sex offenders.
National average: ~13% when including those with “unknown addresses.” "
Homeless shelter just isn't that much fun for me. If I want to be virtuous and go to a soup kitchen or otherwise try to interact with and help homeless people, I'll just do that.
What people in general don't seem to realize by taking things that almost everyone likes (libraries, as one example) and requiring one to go through some virtue test to go is that in the end, public support for the good is going to collapse, it will lose funding, and then no one can have it.
I think we're going to lose libraries.
They're just people and the library is for them too.
Plus all the trust issues of having lived in the street. Only someone who hasn't interacted a lot with the homeless would say they are just like everyone else. Even if the reason they became homeless was just random by the time they've been homeless for a couple of years they are a different person.
There's a reason many of the homeless avoid shelters, if you talked to one you'd know why, and it's not because the other guests are lovely kind people to be around.
I've also repaired a non-insignificant number of clothes from friends and family. I know I used to roll my eyes when people used terms like "upcycling", but I have to say that I've come around since.
As for making things, curtains. They're not hard because they're rectangular, and mainly just need cutting and hemming, but the result is sizes and materials that would require buying something custom made.
But we can check out a Netflix Roku, and the wait time really is what it says on the tin + a bit more; which works out to about once a year, which is about what we need ...
103 - number of ppl in queue, 4 - up to X weeks per person, 2 - number of machines 12 - ??
Maybe you initially wanted to use full months for how long a person can hold an item, but then switched to weeks, and accidently still used number of months to get the number of years?
Anyway, for an imprecise number, you can do with months - 104*1/2/12 ~4.3y.
For more precise result, use seconds, as that's the unit used for the precise length of the year. Year is not 365 days. It's actually longer, quoting Wikipedia for (tropical) year,
> Approximately 365 solar days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds
That gives
Which results in 3.986 years. At maximum. Much less than 17!Edit: getting asterikses * right
And that one room where they had periodicals (magazines, newspapers, and such) but you had to read those there in that room.
And encyclopedias, for kids to use for their research reports.
And a story hour for kids (and, let's face it, for the parents).
And that one computer in the back that had Oregon Trail and Summer Olympic Games on it.
But mostly I remembered the books, and that's what I felt like libraries should be about.
Now I feel like a library's purpose is to support it's community. Mostly they lend books because that's what they're known for and they're very good at it. They're expanding into eBooks because that's another big thing people read today. And music CDs and DVDs which is very similar to lending books, and people like those.
Expanding out to lending things is a bit of a mind-bender for me too, but I think it's in line with what libraries have always done - help the community.
You say libraries purpose is to help the community. If that's true, what you're saying makes sense. On the other hand, if their purpose is to promote literacy and reading, well, this is off mission.
I think of the former mission as more being a community center. My mother loves this form and spends a lot of time at her local library. I'm a curmudgeon and an intellectual snob apparently. I don't even like them having popular books, but I'm trying to be less rigid and more honest here and admit that some scope creep is probably healthy and the question is just where you draw the line.
Compared to a book, a sewing machine is a space ship, and you should see what people can do to a book. To be sustainable it needs a replacement value deposit, which isn't easy for someone who can't afford an entry level model.
I picked woodwork, as 95% of the boys did, and about 80% of the girls picked the home-lessons instead.
I do recall doing some sewing lessons outwith the home-ec classes, but it was very irregular. I know I skipped some stuff because my grandmother had already taught me to knit when I was six-eight years old. Only at home did I use a sewing machine, never at school.
My overlocker was made in West Germany (when that was a country), and is still going strong.
Threading was a bit tricky the first few times, but the manual is really exceptionally well written.
However, I highly recommend everyone get and learn how to perform basic stitches because hand stitching is a lot hard to get a good quality stitch out of, especially for doing things like repairs in areas that wear.
I’d love to be able to borrow a sewing machine, tools, etc. I live in a small flat and I don’t need permanent ownership of those things. They spend 99.5% of the time sat taking up space. What good is that? For a lot of machines it’s not good to leave them idle, or sat in a shed collecting mould and rust.
Yes, the quote is naive in expecting a world where those who own share with those who rent without nefarious motives. But sharing, particularly in this context when profit is out of the equation, is a great idea. I don't have the money nor space for my own 3D printer, but thanks to my local library I own objectively more 3D printed stuff than I would without them.
Libraries are a place of possibilities and fun, and it makes people want to be there. You can imagine the long-term positive impact this has.
Libraries should be places where people pickup books and read them, that's it.
They should not be community centers, DYI hobby centers, convention/exhibition places.
I feel they have been co-opted by people who have no interest in knowledge acquisition.
40 years ago books were the only way to obtain knowledge. Nowadays even those who come for the books do so with a laptop for taking notes. If I were a librarian, it would be naive of me not to ask the question "if all the books are online, then why are we here?"
Anecdotally, on the topic of "knowledge acquisition", I used to run a drawing group. Finding a place to do so was a major problem because nobody wanted to invite strangers home and not everybody could afford the ~$20 it would take to stay at a cafe for long. A library with a meeting room would have been our dream solution and perhaps would have kept the group from dissolving.
Given all the stuff I've taken advantage of, if the libraries here were only for borrowing books, they would seem kind of useless. And this is from someone who has the max 30 books checked out right now.
Adapt or die is the way of life.
It's a pretty dope library. They also let you borrow movies, videogames for all consoles and even board games, vinyl records and a few music instruments.
I believed you can't teach a child to love libraries. You keep taking them, and let the room do the rest. That room do wonders and it did that to me and I am sure will do that to her too.
I can borrow CDs, DVDs, records, sheet music, games, but those were probably a pretty logical continuation of lending out books, so the jump to random items is probably one that needs justification to the people higher up the chain. Hopefully this will serve as a good example.
some of the libraries I've seen have morphed more into like makerspaces and/or meeting spaces rather than just places to get books
I am blessed with a huge apartment but even i have to make decisions about what tools to keep around given the space. Yeah i could buy something from harbor freight and use it once and donate to the thrift store, but how much better if my neighbors and i could just share a big collection of stuff we all might need once every year or two
https://oodihelsinki.fi/mita-oodilaiset-lukevat-syyskuussa/a...
Wait what? That seems insanely high even for a progressive society.
As a reference point UK is at 30% on YEARLY STATS NOT MONTHLY
>In England, 30% of adults aged 16 and over used a public library service at least once in the previous 12 months.
The soft-play area was heaven for him, and he liked flicking through the donald-duck comic books.
Even now, when he's nine, I go every month or two with him for an afternoon. He has no shortage of books at home, but he gets to run around, look at books, and play with other kids. He enjoys himself enormously.
I will say it’s very very common for folks to use the library for its primary purpose of renting books - which of course requires a visit twice in a month - once to collect and once to return.
SFPL used to have tools until it got ruined.
Also it's an incredible women magnet :)
Maybe someday.
Rental of expensive stuff will always be expensive too due to insurance, maintenance and fraud. It's not really helping to make stuff more accessible, more a convenience for the pro's that need stuff for a gig.
They’re decidedly NOT productive to business. They’re yours as a person. They’re your time, your leisure, your enrichment.
I suppose they’re productive to business in the long run because the create more thoughtful and effective people so maybe they’re not all good.
Still, a good reason to lean into them.
These are just echoes of Soviet Era "Cultural Palaces" aka "Folkets Hus" in Socialists-run Sweden. For the "Culture" no one wants to pay their own money for.
I visited it only once, using the Toilet. Kinda Scary. It was gender-free, consisting of large locked cubicles, which were mostly occupied as kiosks for drugs and sexual services. Romanian Romas also had permanent presence there. But sadly this gender-free dream was destroyed by the order of the Nazi Polizei.