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.
I have worked in a bike shop as a mechanic, and we periodically ended up misplacing the various adapters. This is in a place where everybody using the kit is getting paid to do the job and has been trained. The librarians would go nuts just replacing O-rings and adapters that people had lost.
If you need one for your specific bike, you're probably as well off just buying the one you need from e.g. bleedzone.com [0]. Most of them are around or under $25, and if it's your kit, you always know who the last idiot to use it was :-)
[0] I haven't bought from them, but probably will when I need one. The shop I worked in has sadly closed.
With the right gear, the job is still horrible. SRAM brakes give me an unlimited number of maintenance chores.
I recently learned that if you live in a place where Citroën LHM is readily available, it's a less-expensive and compatible substitute for Shimano mineral oil brake fluid. Conversely, if you're in a place where LHM isn't available for love or money, you can substitute Shimano mineral brake oil instead of going on a wild goose chase of the Citroën product.
Usually the way it works is you "buy" the tool and then "return" it.
It’s a lending program, for free. With a deposit for full value so it becomes a purchase if you don’t return it in time. Same structure but the phrasing matters.
Cool idea.
Really great way to test before you buy.
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 ..
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.
Reading the fine manual and making sure the machine is threaded correctly.
Replacing the needle.
Adjusting the tension, starting with getting the bobbin tension grossly correct, then balancing it with the top tension. <- This is not hard; it's just that most people haven't been taught[0].
Removing the accumulated lint from the bobbin driver and feed dogs.
Lubricating the machine.
If none of those work, have it serviced. If the service person tells you the machine is crap, go to a thrift shop and buy a Singer 66, 99, 15 or equivalent Japanese clone for $25-$100. For a little more money, you can get a 201. A Featherweight is a joy to use and takes up no space in storage, but is much costlier than any of the above options.
Don't buy a slant shank machine (400 or 500 series); that was an evolutionary dead-end. If you absolutely need a machine that zigzags, ask the service person what they recommend.
[0] This is applicable to Singer class 15 machines and their clones, but the general principles apply to any lockstitch machine:
https://ismacs.net/singer_sewing_machine_company/manuals/ha-...
If you have a transverse shuttle (you almost certainly don't) or a vibrating shuttle (you probably don't), you may need to look up information specific to your machine.
We have a few sewing machines that are finicky. Tension goes off rapidly, binds a lot, lint buildup constantly has to be cleaned, clunks mysteriously sometimes. We also have a Singer manufactured in 1899 that just does what it's supposed to reliably (and you can still get parts for it!). Now mind you, it doesn't do fancy stitches or buttonholing or anything but straight stitching and a basic zigzag and you do have to keep the treadle properly lubricated but it even works during a power failure.
Sewing machines, like stand mixers and vacuum cleaners, in the end are power tools as much as radial arm saws, hammer drills, and routers are. It's great to have all the fancy features, but sometimes lowest tech is the best.
I’m also a complete sewing machine noob. We have a sewing machine at our hackspace, someone gave me a minute long tutorial and I had zero trouble with it afterwards. I think the whole “tutorial” was just: follow the arrows when threading it, don’t push down the pedal when your finger is under the needle. And it just worked as it should.
Maybe i just got lucky! But my experience was so different from yours that it made me think that maybe your sewing machine is either bad quality or has some hidden defect.
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.
I guess it must have been dependent on the school then?
It was useful - I'm quite sure I wouldn't have gotten any exposure to those subjects without it.
Housework, sewing, knitting and stuff I'd been exposed to at home due to a pretty large family already. Though otherwise I would have probably benefited from it, and it did strike me even at the time that it would be best if we could do both classes, rather than having to pick only one.
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.
15 years ago I lived in East London, and when I came to borrow books (e.g. to the "Idea Store Whitechapel"), I felt some sort of proudness seeing homeless people hanging out there, listening to mp3, having a coffee in the cheap cafeteria or - yes! - reading: True inclusion seemed to work in so few places in the country - at least there it was tangible. I live in Marseille/France now and haven't noticed this here; but a homeless person is not necessarily obvious - next time I visit, I'll have a look!
Library staff in my city are instructed not to do anything themselves about homeless. If there's a problem then they just call the police, who are equipped to handle it. Same as the city bus drivers are not going to enforce paying fares or making sure no riders are causing problems. They just pull over and call the police.
Their is no polite "middle ground" where a librarian can just confidently ask a disruptive homeless person to vacate the library. 9 times out of 10 that confrontation will escalate into a full blown incident. That's why the rule is always just to call the police.
The problem is not homeless peoples' reaction to the world. The problem is societies place for them.
Homeless people have always existed and likely always will. The problem is in the last 45 years we've built a brittle, zero slack society. We've optimized around a particular vision of middleclass life while steadily eliminating the margins that once allowed vulnerable people, those prone to homelessness, and increasingly young adults who just need a place to start from, to exist on the periphery without being put in constant crisis. We removed the pathways that allowed unstable people to find enough footing to maintain a place to live.
We've embraced an economic model that requires continual growth and ever more housing. We've destroyed via economics and regulation many of the housing options that once existed for the very poor such as boarding houses, residential hotels, man camps. Demanding that everyone fit into a middle class model at all stages in life is cruel. It's even crueler when we act surprised or judgmental toward people whom society has systematically left with nowhere to go.
In AI speak 'we optimized away the edge cases and then blamed the people who (always had/always will) lived in them'.
Imagine regulating that everyone must eat a meal individually prepared in an industrial kitchen, with a mandated recipe from the community (any missing ingredients and the meal can't be cooked) and approved by inspectors post cooking, and capped the total meal kitchen capacity. Not everyone would be able to afford that. For peoples' largest expense (housing) that is what we have done and today 50% of young adult Americans are living at home with parents because that is our current housing model. What happens to young adults that don't have parents to live with? In part, homelessness.
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.
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.
If someone doesn't go to the library because of homeless people, the problem is with the person who doesn't go to the library.
If someone doesn't go to the library because they are being harassed, the problem is with the library. Let the library know about specific incidents so they can handle it.
I'm not saying the situation is ideal. Yet plenty of homeless people go to the library to access the services they offer, or simply to have a safe place to read a book (even if the book part is incidental). If people sleeping in the library is disturbing, well, let's just say that library security would be kicking out a lot of university students in my area.
Library staff is not equipped to kick homeless people out for fear that it will cause a scene and possibly escalate to an aggressive situation. They will just call the police. So then the police will come and remove the person, but they will come back the next week, or maybe the next day. So then what happens? Call the police again? This time maybe they get charged with trespassing and put in jail? This goes on and on. The library is supposed to be a safe place but that also means that it is somewhat of a helpless place for staff and quiet citizens. And over time it slowly becomes more and more uncomfortable to the point that regular people just stop going.
It's nobody's "fault". It's just a tragedy of the circumstances.
"In 8 states, over 50% of unsheltered homeless individuals are registered sex offenders.
National average: ~13% when including those with “unknown addresses.” "
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.
These are regulars at that library who never caused enough disruption to be banned, and aren't dangerous enough to be in jail. They also have more to lose by getting banned than housed patrons.
That's the whole point of that post.
I've had this idea for a business kicking around for awhile, basically a private library with membership fees. It would have all the accomodations you wish a library would have but that it can't have due to being public commons, like free coffee, private reading rooms, locker storage, and of course no vagrants.
Did you know, by the way, that the Nazis also targeted the homeless (whom they called "asocial") and people with mental illness?
I’ve had experience with two university libraries with 3d printers. They both advertise them similarly, and they were nominally similar services, ostensibly letting students and staff both 3d print and learn about 3d printing.
At one, the arrangement was that they’d show you around the machines, give you a link to a list of notes and rules, and then you could come in and use the printers. If you wanted to do something unusual or use an exorbitant amount of filament, they asked that you talk to them first. That service is what initially introduced me to 3d printing.
At the other, the library staff decided they’d rather handle everything themselves. You’d submit an stl, then they’d print it at some point, potentially weeks later. Random color pla only, no slicing and providing gcode or even requests for settings. In practice staff decided they would only accept links to popular stls online; submitting your own stl would be rejected. They printed at such bad settings that everything would come out horribly. The service was worse than useless, taught nothing, and may well have turned many students off 3d printing entirely, if they thought the results were indicative of what 3d printing could do. We essentially have to warn students that the service is not practically usable.
But both, of course, say they have 3d printers.
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
104 * (4 * 7 * 24 * 60 * 60) /2 /(((365 * 24 + 5) * 60 + 48) * 60 + 45)
Edit: getting asterikses * right
Easy way to verify this: assume only 1 person in the queue and only 1 machine. Then the original calculation yields 4/12 of a year, even though the actual wait time is (about) 1/12 of a year.
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 ...
Some ideaLAB locations (like my local one) have fancy machines like embroidery, quilting, and industrial sewing machines. There's also lots of other tools, from basic hand tools to laser cutters and 3d printers (again, location dependent.) There's always staff on hand to help during open lab hours. All free to use. Really an impressive system that I use frequently.
… hopefully the effective wait time is considerably shorter if a long line is taken as a demand signal, leading them to buy more.
Also laminated fabrics tend to be much easier to sew since they are so rigid
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.
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.
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.
You can even check out a banjo, which seems like the sort of decision that says a great deal about a community's acceptance and tolerance.
Electronics: https://alpl.org/equipment/ Instruments: https://alpl.org/musical-instruments/ Bikes: https://alpl.org/borrow-a-bike/
Users in the UK can read it without ads, but it's not generally promoted or linked to by bbc.co.uk
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.
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.
The purpose of a library is what it does.
They used to lend books, to promote literacy & education. For youngsters to explore fields of knowledge & discover what they're interested in. Offer a selection of newspapers & magazines nobody can afford on their own.
Fablabs, places for students to work on their laptop, workshops etc fit right into this.
But the community center aspect has always been a thing. These days that might be extended in hosting a repair cafe, puzzles / board games, whatever that local community regards worthwhile.
If you think that's a no-go, maybe public libraries aren't for you. Or just stick to the book area.
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
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.
The libraries in Belgium at least are absolutely amazing!
They are filled with :
- books (obviously) beautifully curated
- comics
- magazines
- sometimes even audiobooks in the form of CDs
- sometimes also events with authors on absolutely important topics like ... what it means to be human
and they are also
- basically free (few Euros per year, at most, and if you cannot pay)
- staffed with people who absolutely love the mission
... and empty.
It's totally nuts. They are basically full of top materials with dedicated staff, but nobody goes there. We even have toy libraries and... it's the same. Sure during some moments of the week it's relatively busy but mostly empty. Meanwhile we can order online any book or toy or video games for very little money... but also we don't use them for very long.
It's a very strange tension that we somehow manage to setup a very inclusive infrastructure for knowledge in few centuries, or arguably decades, yet in few years we totally cancelled ALL that effort.
Now libraries are looking for events because nobody "needs" content anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also it's an incredible women magnet :)
SFPL used to have tools until it got ruined.
GASP, SHOCKER!
This article is also directly related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48596911 "The room the economy can’t see"
Capitalists won't willingly fund 3rd spaces without a demonstrable profit. So they're at the behest of public funding (read: government). And when the new ruling party gets in, they can demand their bullshit on threat of funding or be shut down.
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.
(If the argument is that subsidizing books helps the poor, I’m all for it, a nonprofit or a charity would be a much better framework)
This is the public sector M.O, instead of admitting something is obsolete they grab more scope and funding.
My local post office now sells iPhones. And why shouldn’t they? Nobody stopped them when they just sold SIM cards, and then cases and chargers. It’s like a law of nature.
> a nonprofit or a charity would be a much better framework
Why?
I do agree that libraries (in the UK at least) have mostly failed to see the writing on the wall and diversify. I used to live near a library that was on the edge of a super popular park. They had a "give us improvement suggestions" thing and I spoke to them about taking advantage of the park - it would have been a prime spot to open a cafe attached to the library. They actually couldn't comprehend that idea. Like, that's not what libraries are.
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.
- glue gun
- Crikut cutter
- pots and pans
- tape measure
- bike repair kit
- bolt cutters
- musical instruments <3
Adapt or die is the way of life.