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Starting a tool library
Hi everyone, I'm feeling inspired to start a tool library out of a community space. I am resisting the urge to roll the software myself and I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions about existing projects that I might look into, ideally leaning towards the lightweight side of things.
What say you, Tildes community?
I think you might find Librarika to be interesting. It’s normally used for books, but the broadmoor tool lending library uses it for their backend. You can read more about how they use it in practise at https://www.broadmoorimprovement.com/toollending and as a 501c3 non-profit neighborhood organization I bet they’d be receptive to answering questions about how you might go about adapting it.
Hey, I am volunteer at my local tool library. We use MyTurn, which has both paid & free versions. It's got its flaws, but is reliable and gets the job done, and is used extensively by other tool libraries, at least the ones I know about. Happy to answer any questions!
On the flip side, people like that make it possible for the rest of us to find a "mitre saw (barely used!)" for 75% off the original price on FBMP or Craigslist.
Among friends and family it is just a bit difficult sometimes to keep track of tools and not being able to use them yourself if you want to. At least that is my experience. I also own a few tools I rarely use, but good quality tools will also last you a lifetime (or at least a good number of years) so I am okay with not using them for prolonged periods but having them on hand when I do need them.
Having said that, a miter saw is something I wouldn't buy for cutting baseboard trim. That is a waste of space imho. If people have to buy a tool for that I'd say they are much better off buying a Jigsaw which with a simple guide works just as well for short straight cuts and takes up much less storage space.
But... that is also a complete digression from the main topic :P
As long as we're digressing, I think it also depends on how many cuts I need to make. Baseboards for a single square room with two doors is already 20 cuts, more if also casing the door frames or windows. There's a lot to be said for the repeatability of the miter saw, even before getting into the compound cuts for something like crown molding. I've used my miter saw for a ton of different projects, though I will admit it's rather bulky to store.
My personal way of managing my tool sprawl is I'm not allowed to buy a tool because I think it's neat or it is on sale. There has to be a specific project that I need it for, and the project has to be in the "actually started" phase.
That said, a tool library sounds like a great option if the tool was very specialized or if I thought it's something I miter-might-not use again.
I have no experience from the management side, but the one local to me uses https://www.lend-engine.com/ and it seems to do the job well from a user perspective.
It looks to be a non-profit organisation with volunteer developers, and they make it available as a (low cost) hosted service, alongside an MIT licensed github repo with the disclaimer: "There are no plans to extend Lend Engine to be available to host on your own servers, though the code is available as-is (without support) should you wish to try."
Seems a bit of an odd take for a piece of software that'll be disproportionately used by maker / hacker / community organiser types and probably could've benefitted significantly from those people rallying around and improving the platform, but either way the source being available is something I see as a necessity to avoid the risks of lock in with a proprietary platform, so that at least makes it a viable option IMO.
Why not just a spreadsheet? Maybe two spreadsheets and a Google Form?
I wish there was a tool library where I live. I would like to offload some of the things that I only use only once every few years to free up space in my tiny house. How are you managing the physical space?
for now, the space is going to be rooted out of my neighbor's garage - my garage has already been converted into a community cafe. Space will be tight but I haven't even started so we've got no clue how to manage it yet.
I am actually working on the exact same thing right now. I've been volunteering with a local library of things for nearly three years now and am now doing all of their design, comms and a good bit of IT as well.
The quick answer is: Do it yourself. None of the existing solutions - including my own - is ideal. MyTurn is commercial software, so for a small operation out of the question, and also in my opinion that just goes against the point of a library like this. There are other options, like a WordPress based solution whose name escapes me at the moment, but those also lock you into their way of thinking. At my library, we used a spreadsheet to coordinate along with physical kanban cards, but that got unwieldy quickly. Stuff like Koha requires a literal degree in library sciences to use (MARC bibliographic framework, anyone?), and are more meant for media than for objects, although I have seen people bend it into shape. It's not ideal, though.
At its core, you just need three databases: Users, Items and Signs. They're interconnected and should impose stuff on each other - Signs should be visible from Users, when an Item is Signed Out it shouldn't be able to be Signed Out again, and so on. You're smart, I'm sure you can figure it out. But a bigger stock makes it more complex. How do you deal with copies of items (something we call Instances)? Can item 1 have two of it? Or would that be item 1-A and 1-B? Or item 1 and 2?
These kinda questions you can really only answer for yourself once you've actually started working at your library and figured out the usage patterns of your users. Make no mistake - this is not a trivial problem. In fact, it's mind-bogglingly complicated once you even hit 100 items and 500 users, and with ones on the scale of my library (1000+ items, 5000ish users) it's damn near unmanageable unless you roll your own, bespoke solution. For smaller libraries, I guess a simple SaaS-deal like Notion or Airtable could work reasonably well, but in the long run, custom is the only option, IMO.
But it's doable. And if you need help, I'm always here for a DM. Best of luck!
Thank you for validating my thoughts that rolling my own might be the way to go.
I've actually spent quite a while battling the complexity demon and have some theories about how to keep it from rearing its ugly head.
One of my weapons of choice is the event log. Deriving application state from an immutable series of events allows you to completely sidestep a lot of potential issues. I think one of my favorite things about this strategy is that if you decide to change how an event affects the app, you can completely re-derive the application state without migrating.
I've been building the infrastructure for this for a while now, in fact. I might make a post about it in the "what have you been working on" thread later.