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Need a tool? Libraries lending more than books
Sets, drums and rotary tools: Libraries across US lending way more than books
GROSSE POINTE FARMS, Mich. (AP) -- Books and DVDs weren't what Ralph Mandarino wanted when he went to the Grosse Pointe Public Library.
The 75-year-old retired businessman checked out a tree lopper and a tape measure, two of the more than 100 tools available to patrons of the suburban Detroit library.
In a number of communities across the U.S., it's possible to borrow tools, musical instruments, fishing poles and much more from the local public library. The trend expands the traditional role of the library as a community resource for free knowledge. Libraries see the programs as a new way to offer residents a chance to learn — just not necessarily with a book.
"It doesn't make sense to buy it and then to have to store it," said Mandarino, who used the lopper to trim branches on his nearby property.
Libraries in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Oakland, Calif.; Burlington, Vt., and Skokie, Ill., among others, feature what Ann Arbor District Library Associate Director Celeste Choate calls "unusual collections."
"What we want to do is provide an added benefit to the community and provide them with things they might not have access to otherwise," said Choate, whose library offers telescopes, art prints, energy meters and drums among its varied holdings.
According to Carolyn Anthony, president of the national Public Library Association, libraries are not offering specialty items as part of an effort to stay relevant in an ever-changing world. Rather, she said, they simply are adhering to the long-stated mission of the public library to have jointly owned resources available to the community.
While that pool at one time may have consisted almost exclusively of books and periodicals, it now might include a heat gun and a putty knife, both of which are available at the Oakland Tool Lending Library.
"This has been going on for a long time. It's not like we're suddenly threatened and have to do something about it," said Anthony, who also is the director of the Skokie Public Library.
Still, the growing popularity of e-readers and online resources probably has played some role in spurring libraries to get creative with their offerings.
"I can tell you this: You can't download a telescope," Choate said.
Anthony likes to tell the story of how her library's non-book offerings aided a girl's entry into the entrepreneurial world.
Lily Born noticed that her grandfather — who has Parkinson's disease — kept spilling his drink, so she created a non-spilling ceramic cup at a local pottery studio.
Encouraged by her father, Joe, to take the cup into wider production, Lily and her dad created a video using the tools (video camera and editing software) available at the Skokie library's Digital Media Lab.
That video was posted to the crowd-funding site Indiegogo, which helped the Borns raise the necessary cash to make their Kangaroo Cup business a reality.
"We can't be everything to everyone, but we can provide a lot of opportunities to people to try out new things," Choate said.
That's exactly what happened at the Oakland library following a 1991 firestorm that ravaged the Oakland Hills section of the San Francisco Bay area, destroying 3,000 homes and killing 25 people.
The library's Temescal branch established a small Home Resources Collection to help residents with their rebuilding and repair projects following this disaster.
A tool-lending library was considered as an extension of those efforts and was launched in 2000 thanks to seed money from a community development block grant.
Of the 5,000 tools available to patrons, the most popular items by far are the weed whackers, said Sharon McKellar, community relations librarian, who added that hedge trimmers and lawn mowers also are in seasonal high demand.
Tools — more than 130 of them — also are available to patrons of Burlington's Fletcher Free Library, which additionally offers tennis rackets and world flags.
The 2-foot-by-3-foot flags came in handy recently for the Hartford (Vt.) High School class of 1978, which used them to decorate a float in the town parade.
"The patrons who use the tools are always very grateful, and we do have a small budget to replace worn and broken items each year, so the tools are definitely here to stay," said reference librarian Robert Resnik.
Mike Householder can be reached at email@example.com and http://twitter.com/mikehouseholder


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Barack Obama has "enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either of his two predecessors," according to the analysis of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. That is not really surprising. Bill Clinton's early months were chaotic, mainly because his White House staff was weak and his personality, while engaging, was, well, untidy. George W. Bush scrambled into office after a contested election that left more than a residue of bitterness and fatigue all around. A better measure of comparative coverage for Obama so far is with Ronald Reagan. Both administrations were/are led by charismatic and popular men with a clear vision that sharply differs from the presidents they replaced, who were from opposing parties and left economies in a mess and crises in Iran and Afghanistan.
The Obamas are dignified but cool and contemporary, in sync with the cultural touchpoints of the people who cover them.
To get a sense of how the coverage stacks up, I reached Sam Donaldson, ABC's superb and irrepressible Reagan-era White House correspondent—who has, I gather, just signed a new contract—and The Washington Post's great White House team of Lou Cannon and David Hoffman.
Their comments and the recollections of other White House watchers whose memories span the decades conclusively support the sense that Obama is getting more favorable press than Reagan did in the same period, with one big caveat. Only 70 days after his inauguration, Reagan survived an assassination attempt that lodged a bullet one-quarter of an inch from his heart. Reagan's gallantry ("Honey, I forgot to duck," he quipped to Nancy Reagan) sent his popularity soaring, wiping out grumbles about the Reagans' imperial style and limning the policy debates for a time.
But overall, Reagan's "honeymoon" was mainly with the voters who gave him a landslide victory. Reporters for the major print and broadcast outlets—their dominance of the news agenda was far greater than it can be in today's blog and bloviation culture—approached the new administration with ingrained skepticism, although there definitely were murmurings of untoward deference, as there are now. Donaldson emailed me from his New Mexico ranch that, for all the assets of personality that Reagan shared with Obama, many reporters tended to accept the late Democratic Party savant Clark Clifford's dismissal of Reagan as an "amiable dunce" whose "age put him out of touch with new social trends and ideas whereas the youthful Obama is seen as smart and 'with it,' characteristics that appeal to reporters."
Reagan's policies in most areas, Donaldson wrote, appealed less to the natural instincts of reporters than Obama's do: "Reagan was seen as a hide-bound, cold-warrior conservative while Obama is seen as a moderate liberal, open to policy innovation whose flexible approach to problems is more realistic in today's world."
As for style, Reagan's White House veered toward grandeur, with a distinct preference for buttoned-up staff and elite entertaining. By contrast, the Obamas are dignified but cool and contemporary, in sync with the cultural touchpoints of the people who cover them. Finally, in Donaldson's view, Reagan was an establishment figure whom reporters were expected to treat with respect (one of his first press initiatives was to impose decorum on press conferences; no waving of hands for attention), whereas Obama manages to seem casual and aloof, which gives the impression of informality that is, in fact, highly disciplined.
Cannon, who became Reagan's premier biographer, and Hoffman, who is about to leave his position as assistant managing editor for foreign news at The Washington Post, essentially would agree with Donaldson. But they place greater emphasis on changes in the way White House reporting works, a result of the increasing sophistication of spin and greater control over the access that enabled deeply reported stories about process.
Cannon, Hoffman, and their peers would write regular "tick-tock" stories that diagrammed decision-making, including internal dissension and discrepancies. Clearly, some of that kind of reporting happens now, they say, but the barriers that surround senior officials are more formidable than they used to be, and it is harder for reporting to break through the accompanying chatter of cable-television and Web-based commentary.
All these masters of the journalism arts agree that Obama is as accomplished a political figure as they've ever seen and, as the first African-American president, has an advantage of goodwill that transcends policy. Moreover, reporters are still coming to terms with a president as skilled at handling the egos and inevitable turf battles that surround him as Obama has turned out to be.
The verdict on Reagan as "the great communicator" and as one of the most successful presidents of the 20th century in political terms is a retrospective one. While in office, he endured a number of significant downdrafts; during the recession of 1982, for example, when his poll ratings sagged, and later in the Iran-Contra scandals of his second term. So far, Obama largely has glided through the crises and challenges at hand, and he says he's done reasonably well in accommodating the media, with the exception of Fox News.
"I've got one television station entirely devoted to attacking my administration" he said on CNBC, "that's a pretty big megaphone."
But reporters are neither comfortable nor accustomed to being seen as enamored of the White House. I side with the other old hands who expect things to get tougher for Obama over time, almost no matter what happens, and share the belief that scrutiny of the president benefits him and us by piercing the armor that so often turns leadership into arrogance.
Peter Osnos is a senior fellow for media at The Century Foundation. Osnos is the founder and editor at large of PublicAffairs Books. He is vice chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, a former publisher at Random House, and was a correspondent and editor at the Washington Post.

subset: commoncrawl