What can you actually borrow from your library besides books?
Public libraries lend tools, seeds, museum passes and Wi-Fi hotspots, and run free classes too. Here is what is waiting behind the door you have never opened.
You have probably walked past your local library a hundred times. Maybe you go in twice a year to return something, or you have never gone in at all since you got your own bookshelf. Here is what that habit hides from you: the building is not a room full of novels waiting quietly for retirees. It is one of the last places in most towns where you can walk in with nothing and walk out with something useful, for free, no questions asked about your income.
In the United States, roughly half of people aged 16 and over visit a public library or bookmobile at least once a year, according to a national survey by the Pew Research Center. Among those visitors, most borrow printed books, but nearly a third also use the computers and internet connection, and about one in four attends a class, program or lecture. The library that shows up in that data is already busier and stranger than the one most non-visitors imagine.
A shed, a garden and a museum pass, all under one roof
Start with what librarians now call a ’library of things’: collections built around what a neighborhood actually needs, not just what a publisher printed. The Berkeley Tool Lending Library in California, running since 1979, holds more than 5,000 tools for plumbing, carpentry and general repairs, alongside workshops on using them safely. Elsewhere, the catalogue gets stranger and more local: sewing machines, cake pans, telescopes, musical instruments, Wi-Fi hotspots you can take home for three weeks, even state park passes and museum tickets, depending on what your particular library and its partners have arranged.
Then there are the seed libraries, which are worth a longer look because they teach something you cannot buy in a shop. The idea started in 1975 at a seed library in Bocking, in Essex, built by the gardener Lawrence Hills, and it crossed into American public libraries in 2004 at the Gardiner Public Library in New York. The concept has since spread to more than 450 seed libraries around the world, most of them in the United States. You borrow a small packet of seeds in spring. You grow the plant. At the end of the season, you save some of its seeds and bring them back, so the next borrower gets a variety already adapted, generation after generation, to your local soil and climate.
A seed library is the rare place where returning the loan late, by a whole season, is exactly how the system is supposed to work.
Skills, not just objects
None of this touches the part of the library that looks least like a library: the classes. Depending on where you live, a branch might run free computer literacy sessions for older adults, homework help for children after school, language conversation groups, résumé workshops, coding clubs, or talks by a local historian on a Tuesday evening. Some library systems give every card holder free access to online courses and skill-building platforms that would otherwise cost real money: photography, a new language, spreadsheet basics, whatever your library has negotiated a license for. None of it requires you to already know what you are looking for. You can walk in with a vague itch to learn something and leave with an actual plan.
This is where the habit of ’the library is for books’ quietly costs people the most. Families skip the homework help desk because they assume it is only for children who are struggling. Retirees skip the tech workshop because they assume it is only for people who own nothing. Neither assumption tends to hold up once you ask at the front desk, where staff are generally used to a much wider range of questions than ’where is the mystery section.’
- Tools and home repair equipment
- Seeds for your garden, returned as new seeds at harvest
- Wi-Fi hotspots and laptops for home use
- Museum, park or attraction passes
- Free classes: languages, computer skills, crafts
- Homework help and tutoring for children
- Meeting rooms and quiet study space
- Online press, magazines and course platforms
Pushing the door with no plan at all
What all of this has in common is that it is massively under used. A library does not advertise the way a shop does. It does not send you reminders that the seed packets arrived, or that this week’s repair workshop has two spots left. The information sits at the front desk, on a noticeboard, in a newsletter you may never have signed up for, waiting for someone to ask. So the most useful thing you can do with a library card you already own, or with the ten minutes it takes to get one, is to walk in one afternoon without a specific book in mind and ask a single question: what do you have here that I would not expect?
The answer will be different in every town, and that is rather the point. A library is built out of what its neighborhood asked for over the years: the seed swap someone organized, the tool collection a retired carpenter donated, the coding club a teenager begged for until it existed. Walk in without a plan, and you are not wasting anyone’s time. You are doing exactly what the building was designed for.
Sources
- Library usage and engagement (Pew Research Center) (pewresearch.org)
- Ten unexpected things to check out at public libraries (Mellon Foundation) (mellon.org)
- Seed library (Wikipedia) (en.wikipedia.org)