Most of us take libraries for granted, without appreciating what amazing
things they are. Imagine having to buy even a fraction of the books, CDs and movies we can borrow freely from even the most meager local
branch, whose total inventory might be worth millions.
They also
serve you and your neighbours in other, less appreciated ways. Many
offer free internet access to everyone, including the millions who are not online. They often act as a community centre,
hosting meetings and events of everything from the Boy Scouts to the PTA
to the local Tidy Town volunteers.
Your branch might offer
weekly storytelling for children or night courses for adults. I knew one
library that featured the art of local painters, perhaps their only
recognition, and another that published short-run collections of local
students’ fiction, giving aspiring teen writers like myself a start. A
library might offer bound volumes of now-extinct local newspapers,
records and other information forgotten in an age of Google.
Even
more useful than the books or activities, though, is the principle
behind libraries, that we and our neighbours can pool our resources and
hold things in common that all of us occasionally need. Most of the
Western World, however, adopted this principle for books and then
stopped, never extending it to other obvious areas of life.
In
fact, the trend of the last few decades has been the opposite – people
bought more and more of their own private stocks of anything, no matter
how expensive or little-used: a row of ten family homes might have ten
rakes, ten chainsaws, ten barbecue pits and ten Dora the Explorer
videos, each of which is used for only a few hours a year.
Those
same neighbours could save a lot of money, though, if they pitch in and
buy a shed full of tools together – a rake, shovels, saws, hammers and
so on. Most of the tools would be there when needed, but each
contributor would spend only a tenth of the price on them. There might
be more wear on the tools, but there might also be more people taking
care of them and making them last longer.
Any small community
could also keep a library of seeds. Many garden megacenters carry only a
few varieties of anything, often shipped from around the world,
sometimes genetically engineered to yield only a single year’s crop. A
seed library would be inexpensive insurance against unforeseen events –
drought, fuel shortage, worsening economy -- that might make seeds might
be harder to come by and more urgently needed.
Everyone needs
medical care sooner or later, and while prescription medicines should
not be casually traded or used past their sell-by dates, many other
first aid items could be kept together in a neighbourhood or apartment
building – bandages and plasters of various sizes, surgical spirits
(rubbing alcohol to Americans), hydrogen peroxide and painkillers, as
well as thermometers, blood pressure wraps, swabs and other basics.
Food
doesn’t exactly lend itself to re-use, but cooking supplies do, and
many people have things like steamers, pressure cookers, woks, fryers
and other expensive equipment that they use rarely and that could be
kept in a common stock.
Any parent knows that children love new
toys but are quickly bored with them, and they gradually accumulate in a
child’s room until digging through them becomes an archaeological
project. If each family were to frequently clean out the toys their
children don’t use, however, they could create a toy library for the
community, whose toys could be used and re-used.
Finally, to come
full circle, you could keep books that might be useful in times to come
– gardening, home health care, water filtration. You can recommend such
publications to public libraries, and perhaps consider joining your
local library board – I used to cover the library board as a reporter,
and they are usually a small group of elderly people whose hard work and
subtle power goes unappreciated.
One
easy way to start would be for you and your colleagues to engage in a
spring cleaning together – books you finally admit you aren’t going to
read, clothes that might come back in style in ten years and rarely-used
tools from the garage. People have more than they realise, and find
less clutter a relief – and since many might fear abuse of the system,
it’s often best to start with things people won’t miss anyway.
Such
abuse – members not giving back what they borrow – can happen, but it
happens in public book libraries too, and it is rarely fatal. Things
like power tools, of course, are more expensive than books, so members
might have to keep them secure and enforce membership fees, security
deposits or late charges to make sure everyone plays by the rules.
The
details will depend on your group, of course, and “group” here could be
almost anything. It could be you and a few neighbours sharing a shed,
your congregation storing some common goods at the church, the Girl
Scouts asking to store a cabinet of seeds at City Hall, or the town’s
4-H Club keeping a shed of equipment for members to check out. It could
be poker buddies going in on a chainsaw, or people in a college
dormitory time-sharing their textbooks. The principle is the same – most
of us have more than we need, and not enough.
Whatever the
circumstance, though, try to gradually open it up to more and more
people, even at a greater risk. A few scattered libraries create tiny
pockets of assistance in a troubled culture, but an overlapping network
of such collaborations would help restore something the culture has
lost.