Superpatron - Edward Vielmetti is Mobilizing the Friends of the Library

New Orleans tool library at Hands On New Orleans

from Hands On New Orleans

Here at HandsOn New Orleans we are firm believers in sharing the wealth. That is why we created the Tool Lending Library, because we would like to make those items which we are not currently using available to the community. Years of organizing volunteer projects has caused us amass an impressive collection of landscaping, painting and construction tools. So instead of allowing the vast majority of these tools to sit and gather rust we have decided to make them available to you. These tools can be borrowed by any community member, non-profit partner, or volunteer with the hope that with access to tools you will be able to make your personal service or home projects a reality.

culinary implement library: cake pan collections

The Chicago Tribune runs an AP wire story on the new-found social trend that it's OK to share expensive, single use objects like wood chippers in your neighborhood - or cake pans.

At the library in Galesburg, Ill., a dozen cake pans shaped like hearts, dinosaurs or footballs sit behind the counter, available for checkout. Karen Marple, the children's librarian, keeps track of the pans, which she buys on sale or at yard sales for library cardholders to share.

"They don't want to spend so much money on a cake pan that they're going to use one time," Marple said. "It's free. It's economics."

they have quite a selection

Need to bake a fun cake for a special event? The library has cake pans available for checkout. The shapes include a book, heart, ghost, Big Bird, teddy bear, truck, rag doll, dinosaur, lamb, cat, train, football, batman and Winnie-the-Pooh.

Pop Goes The Library ran a piece last summer on the Reed Memorial Library Cake Pan Collection in Ravenna, OH

A friend in Ohio informed me recently that her local public library, Reed Memorial in Ravenna, has a collection of cake pans that it loans out to its members. Not only that! They provide OPAC access to them, too. Alf! Playboy Bunny Head! Elmo! Diego! He-Man! NASCAR! R2-D2! The list goes on! You can't place holds online, but there's a friendly note in the record directing interested patrons to the Children's Desk, where you can flip through the book of photos of the pans, and place a hold in person. According to the library's Policies page, cake pans (like DVDs) may be borrowed for 7 days, and the fine for overdues is $1/day.

note that no one, to my knowledge, is doing inter-library cake pan loans.

Santa Rosa, CA tool library

from bohemian.com (Napa/Sonoma/Marin County, CA)

Free Tools

Like a good neighbor, the Santa Rosa Tool Lending Library is there

By Gabe Meline

Six years ago, Dustin Zuckerman was working a routine landscape job. The client wanted a stone pathway that required a tool called a tamper, and, not owning one, Zuckerman went to the hardware store with a familiar quandary. "It was about $35 for a tool that I was going to use once," he says, sitting at his kitchen table. "So I went online to see if anyone loans tools, and I ran into the Oakland Tool Library and the Berkeley Tool Library. And I said, 'This just makes too much sense.'"

Zuckerman, 37, who has worked in book libraries for eight years but calls reading "not my favorite thing to do," has founded the Santa Rosa Tool Lending Library, and in the past two months alone, with only word-of-mouth directing people to the library, he has loaned out tools from his shed to over 50 patrons.

Their web site, borrowtools.org -

The Santa Rosa Tool Library (SRTL) offers over 200 hand and power tools for landscaping and home repair, free of charge, only an overdue fee if a tool is returned past the due date; Just like borrowing a book from your public library. 

There are a few simple steps to start borrowing tools, you must:

1) Be at least 18 years of age

2) A resident of Sonoma County

3) Fill out the Borrowers Agreement

    Click here to print out, and return to us 

4) Provide recent utility bill and valid

    California ID at your first visit.

and the final suggestion at the bottom of all checkout pages:

Safety First  •   Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosy  •  Think Three Times, Measure Twice, Cut Once

Chicagoland MG Club's tool lending library

I got a search hit for "tool lending library Chicago", and didn't know of one. Here's some results of a bit of research.

The Chicagoland MG Club is a membership organization for owners and restorers of MG cars. In addition to keeping a library of books and videos for their members, they manage a tool lending library with items like an air-acetylene torch, an engine hoist, an exhaust gas analyzer, and an MG-specific panel nut wrench.

Their guidelines for which tools they share (and which they don't) are instructive for anyone thinking about putting together a similar program:

The Club is also open to suggestions for additional tools to add to the Program. Keep in mind the standard philosophy, moderately expensive, to be used only occasionally by any one person for very short term, easy enough to be used by an average shade tree mechanic, portable, and requiring no special adaptations for power supply, exhaust connections, and so on.

Check out a pedometer at the library!

from the Pakennam (Australia) News:

PAKENHAM Library is giving residents the chance to put the spring back into their step this summer.

The John Street library is now lending pedometer kits as part of Casey-Cardinia’s Step into Summer at Your Library program.

Pakenham Library branch manager Melissa Martin said the kit provided locals with the perfect opportunity to improve their health and fitness.

This library is a branch of the Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation, which has a blog Invisible Ink which is a year old in December 2007.

Walkers who want to keep track of their progress can look at Walker Tracker- I'd love to see a library host a community walking program.

Technorati Tags: library, pedometer, australia

Tool libraries (and cake pan libraries) in Michigan

The Detroit Free Press has a story about libraries with unusual collections in Michigan:

Libraries lend out art, tools and more

November 25, 2007

BY CHRISTINA HALL

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Need a wrench? Check out the Grosse Pointe Public Library.

How about some art? Try the Ann Arbor District Library.

Looking for a fishing pole? The St. Clair County Library System can help.

And if you're in the Upper Peninsula and need to borrow a cake pan, well, visit the Manistique School and Public Library.

Libraries aren't just repositories for books and CDs, they house collections that help cardholders do everything from fix their homes to create different shapes of cookies.

It's a nice story - including some sense for the history of these collections and how they have accumulated over the years.

Tool library at Grosse Pointe Public Library (Michigan)

In a continuing series on tool libraries this from Grosse Pointe MI:

Tools are located at the Central Library and are loaned free with your library card. We are constantly adding new tools. If you don’t find what you are looking for on this list, please contact us.

Provided and maintained by THE GROSSE POINTE ROTARY CLUB
as a continuing memorial to Robert M. Orr, Director, 1949-73.

some examples of tools loaned: in the A's there's ADJUSTABLE WRENCH; AUGER, EARTH; AWL; AXE; the N's have NAIL PULLER, NAIL PUNCH SET, NEEDLES, NIPPLE EXTRACTOR, NUMBERS.

TechShop: Build your dreams here

I've written about tool libraries before, but this is something a bit different:

TechShop is a fully-equipped open-access workshop and creative environment that lets you drop in any time and work on your own projects at your own pace. It is like a health club with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment...or a Kinko's for geeks.

TechShop was founded in 2006 by Jim Newton, a lifetime maker, veteran BattleBots builder and former MythBuster.

TechShop is located in Menlo Park, California, on the San Francisco peninsula 25 miles south of San Francisco.

Anyone can come in and build and make all kinds of things themselves using the TechShop tools, machines and equipment, and draw on the TechShop instructors and experts to help them with their projects.

They were featured in Inc Magazine, and they're riding on the success of Make Magazine.

This is not-quite-a-library (or even a "tool library"), but it has some of the characteristics of a collection of creative tools that libraries are trying to build. It is for profit which lets them do some things that libraries can't.

Technorati Tags: techshop, makezine, workshop

Incoming search report for 16 August 2007

Thanks to a report from 103bees I get a snapshot overview of the week's search queries. Here's what people are finding on Superpatron.

SUPERPATRON (http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron)
> book espresso machine nypl
> ann arbor employment weird
> friends of ann arbor
> used ladders shovels foster tools portland
> new publishing system for books new york library
> boston museum of fine arts membership reciprocity
> net zed
> wall bed, "wall of books"
> librarian gifts
> open source library catalog

SUPERPATRON QUESTIONS
> how special library is helpful in research?
> how to arrange books in a home library
> how to take care of library books color sheets
> how to run scripts in firefox
> how a librarian can run for office

Any answers or more feedback to any of these welcomed.

Technorati Tags: 103bees, search, feedback

Berkeley (CA) Tool Library

One in a continuing series of clippings and stories about tool libraries, this one from a 2005 Berkeley Daily Planet:

On a recent Wednesday morning at 11:45, two pickup trucks and a station wagon had already pulled into the drive in front of the Berkeley Tool Lending Library at the corner of Russell and Martin Luther King Way.

Adam Broner, who maintains the library, and Bud Burleson, a retired city electrician who is filling in that day, wheeled out several containers holding an assortment of shovels, posthole diggers and other garden tools. On the wall Burleson hung the pole saws and below them he arranged several aluminum step ladders.

When Broner opened the two doors to the library, another busy day began. Some patrons came in returning tools, others were checking them out. Broner checked library cards and IDs while answering the phone that never seemed to stop ringing. Burleson tried to find a minute to attend to the ongoing job of sharpening a few tools.

Even though folks are often lined up several deep, Broner, who has been working at the tool library for 14 years, manages to be full of good humor and ready to dispense advice.

“This time of year, our garden tools are most in demand. In fact, I’m going to order some new weed eaters. We just can’t keep up with the demand,” he said.

There was a 2004 NY Times story - Library Science, Home Depot Style - here picked up at Sivacracy:

On a sunny Saturday this fall, patrons were lined up four deep at a public library branch in Berkeley, Calif. But they weren't there to check out best-sellers or a stack of videos.

"I'm returning the chop saw and a spade and a wheelbarrow I already put back in the shed," said a young woman in shorts and a T-shirt, hefting the saw onto the counter.

"You owe 20 bucks in fines," said a librarian, Jason Armstrong, whose wire-frame glasses fit the bookworm stereotype but whose chest tattoo suggested a less cerebral side. "Fifteen bucks for the chop saw and five bucks for the wheelbarrow."

Such is a typical exchange at the Berkeley Tool Lending Library, a branch of the library system started with a $30,000 federal community development block grant in 1979. Since then the budget has grown more than three-fold, and borrowers number in the thousands.

Beth Kohn in the San Francisco Bay Guardian has a bit more:

Berkeley and Oakland have made tool-lending services available through their public library systems. In 1979 the Berkeley Public Library started the Berkeley Tool-Lending Library (1901 Russell, Berk. 510-981-6101, www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/tool), the first of its kind in the Bay Area, with a grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The program still functions as part of the public library and continues to maintain personal relationships with the people borrowing its cement mixers and Sawzalls, even with an estimated checkout rate of 6,000 tools a month. "[It's] different than when someone checks out a book," tool-lending specialist Adam Broner says. "Someone's drain is clogged, or they need to do something before their mother comes to visit. Each tool has a story behind it."

The Berkeley library has served as an example for fledgling tool-lending libraries in other towns. Broner trained a colleague to establish a library in Portland, Ore., and at the invitation of the Berkeley Rotary Club, he gathered a collection of donated tools and set up a library in the small town of Chacala, Mexico.