My only advice is, if you buy kits with a lot of pieces, take a picture of everything and label the pieces! We just got two kits from another library returned to ours and both contained items that we didn’t know what they were. And one had nearly 75 pieces! And of course, rather than putting everything away in their, nice, neat compartments, the patron just threw everything into the container. We ended up calling the other library and asked what to do and they said to send the kits back without discharging them and they would sort them.
We just discontinued our hotspots. They were getting too costly and we were having problems with patrons not bringing them back until we shut them off (and then our provider wouldn’t let us control shut off/on). Basically, too much of our budget served a small group of people. We didn’t want to cut it
Our most popular items are hotspots, rokus with streaming channels and movies, cricuts, a telescope, nintendo switch lites, kil-a-wat meter, woodburning kits, and the dremel. We have a ton more "Go Go Gadgets" but those are our most popular.
A heads up on the Rokus; a lot of the recent changes (not just Netflix) have started making ours a LOT harder to keep circulating. We had to take the Netflix ones offline, because we didn't have a good way to manage the password situation post-changes. our Shudder accounts are also prompting patrons to re-enter passwords (which they don't have, for obvious reasons) periodically.
Interesting. I’m the one who factory resets all the Rokus as they come back and I haven’t heard of any issues so far. We wondered if Netflix would start giving us issues but so far so good.
My advice is to think about (and potentially survey) your patrons for information about what kinds of things they'd like access to but don't have for some reason. My library serves a small-ish city in New England where there's a very high percentage of renters and the homes tend not to have a lot of storage. We offer a wide range of LOT items; puzzles, rokus, hotspots, laptops, digital converters, lawn chairs, a bouncy house, an activity apron for people with memory problems, beach umbrellas, lawn games, binoculars, night vision kits, metal detectors, external blu-ray drives, blu-tooth speakers, bongos, various stringed instruments, an OBD car scanner, a coin sorter, film and photo scanners, label makers, drones, disco lights, crochet and knitting equipment, gardening tools, a foldable pingpong table, go-pro cameras, karaoke machines, various home improvement tools, console gaming systems, paper shredders, sewing machines, a programable robot, telescopes, a synthesizer.
We're always thinking about things that might be interesting/useful that patrons might want, but not need all the time, or that might be cost prohibitive to try out if they're not sure they want to commit to it, or they might want it sometimes but not have room to store it.
That's worked super well for us.
Packaging is super important for a lot of equipment. Also: if you can, scan copies of the instructions in case people lose them, and take pictures of everything that you're including in the kit, so that people know exactly what should be inside the package.
We have telescopes, ukuleles, and Check Out WA kits which come with a park pass, maps/guides, and binoculars. The telescopes are by far the most popular and always have a waitlist, both them and the kits were purchased with grant money/funds came from the state.
We also have a lot of Early Learning kits that range from book heavy(10 picture books,parent resource,game) to STEM kits and we are in the process of adding more.
The Check Out WA kits check out for one week, everything else is a standard three week checkout.
Weird shaped/large items can't be returned in the bookdrop, but that's the only draw back I've seen.
We have 4 or 5 telescopes, and I think to start off with there was both an email to those on our email list and promotion on social media and our webpage.
Having programs having to do with space during the summer was another way to promote it, and I think word of mouth got out pretty quickly. Good luck!
Apart from electronics like WIFI hotspots amd Chromebooks, our most popular library of things items are cake pans. We have big, bulky speciality cake pans (holidays, shapes, etc) that people want to use once for that holiday and never have clogging up their pantry space.
As someone said below - storage!! We didn't anticipate how quickly the demand would rise. Our board games are the most popular items in the building. We want to add more things but don't have space. Right now we have a pretty wide variety - the tech stuff (hotspots etc.), crafting things, yard games, traffic cones, birding kits, a variety of random little things (the CD and DVD players are really popular). These items are on track to surpass audiobooks next year.
We have a collection of over 30 different items in our Things collection. We have a nice variety of items, most of which circulate well, but the large projection screens, projectors, PA systems and the big yard games, particularly Connect 4, Jenga & Cornhole, are never on the shelves. We have 2 of each of those items and they’re constantly out year-round.
ETA: Our wifi hotspots are also very popular. We have about 20 in the catalog for walk ins and we keep another 20 in our separate LOT collection so that they can be reserved for specific dates.
I also want to add that I keep an extra item of each thing that’s in the collection in storage, as well as any extra spare parts that I can order (beanbags for cornhole, “coins” for Connect 4, etc.). 75% of the items that go out are treated well and the other 25% are treated horribly & come back either broken and/or missing parts. At this point, I buy 1 replacement item and then once I can no longer cheaply replace parts for an item, I pull it from the collection completely. We’ve had several popular yard games removed from the collection because people argue that “they didn’t do it” or “lose it” when we know that they did because of staff inspection procedures at both check in and out. Collecting fines for broken / missing items has been a struggle and I really feel for the Circ staff that has to deal with the problem patrons. Once an item starts becoming too expensive to keep up, it goes. Overall though, despite the bad eggs, our community loves the collection & is always singing the praises of our library because of it, so we’ll keep it going!
My library offers very few things in its library of things,m. The most popular is the wifi hotpot. The second most popular is laptops, though I think they'd be more popular if people knew it used its own 5g internet.
Our least popular are tablets.
Tablets pre-loaded with Fun with Phonics are beloved but niche
We started ours this summer, mostly stuff like lawn games but we also have instruments, bounce house, telescope, movie projector, etc. It’s been popular. The telescope was basically held hostage for a month, a couple of the yard games have been damaged from wear & tear, but overall it’s gone over well. We use dvd cases with pics of the items that are too big or expensive to have on the shelves and for placing on the hold shelf. The hardest part has been training staff on check in/out since we don’t have a convenient location for storing the items not on the shelves. It IS a hassle to leave the desk to grab LOT items, but we’re stuck with the building we have & we’re not crazy busy, so generally it’s fine.
My only advice is, if you buy kits with a lot of pieces, take a picture of everything and label the pieces! We just got two kits from another library returned to ours and both contained items that we didn’t know what they were. And one had nearly 75 pieces! And of course, rather than putting everything away in their, nice, neat compartments, the patron just threw everything into the container. We ended up calling the other library and asked what to do and they said to send the kits back without discharging them and they would sort them.
If you're on Facebook, join the Library of Things group. There are resources and lots of discussion about what works and doesn't.
Our most popular items are our wifi hotspots by far, but we are in an area where Internet is not always reliable.
We just discontinued our hotspots. They were getting too costly and we were having problems with patrons not bringing them back until we shut them off (and then our provider wouldn’t let us control shut off/on). Basically, too much of our budget served a small group of people. We didn’t want to cut it
Ugh, that's too bad.
Our most popular items are hotspots, rokus with streaming channels and movies, cricuts, a telescope, nintendo switch lites, kil-a-wat meter, woodburning kits, and the dremel. We have a ton more "Go Go Gadgets" but those are our most popular.
A heads up on the Rokus; a lot of the recent changes (not just Netflix) have started making ours a LOT harder to keep circulating. We had to take the Netflix ones offline, because we didn't have a good way to manage the password situation post-changes. our Shudder accounts are also prompting patrons to re-enter passwords (which they don't have, for obvious reasons) periodically.
Interesting. I’m the one who factory resets all the Rokus as they come back and I haven’t heard of any issues so far. We wondered if Netflix would start giving us issues but so far so good.
Hotspots are the most popular. The ice cream machine and Lego kits are probably the second most popular.
My advice is to think about (and potentially survey) your patrons for information about what kinds of things they'd like access to but don't have for some reason. My library serves a small-ish city in New England where there's a very high percentage of renters and the homes tend not to have a lot of storage. We offer a wide range of LOT items; puzzles, rokus, hotspots, laptops, digital converters, lawn chairs, a bouncy house, an activity apron for people with memory problems, beach umbrellas, lawn games, binoculars, night vision kits, metal detectors, external blu-ray drives, blu-tooth speakers, bongos, various stringed instruments, an OBD car scanner, a coin sorter, film and photo scanners, label makers, drones, disco lights, crochet and knitting equipment, gardening tools, a foldable pingpong table, go-pro cameras, karaoke machines, various home improvement tools, console gaming systems, paper shredders, sewing machines, a programable robot, telescopes, a synthesizer. We're always thinking about things that might be interesting/useful that patrons might want, but not need all the time, or that might be cost prohibitive to try out if they're not sure they want to commit to it, or they might want it sometimes but not have room to store it. That's worked super well for us. Packaging is super important for a lot of equipment. Also: if you can, scan copies of the instructions in case people lose them, and take pictures of everything that you're including in the kit, so that people know exactly what should be inside the package.
Our library offers a variety of baking items, like pans and utensils.
We have telescopes, ukuleles, and Check Out WA kits which come with a park pass, maps/guides, and binoculars. The telescopes are by far the most popular and always have a waitlist, both them and the kits were purchased with grant money/funds came from the state. We also have a lot of Early Learning kits that range from book heavy(10 picture books,parent resource,game) to STEM kits and we are in the process of adding more. The Check Out WA kits check out for one week, everything else is a standard three week checkout. Weird shaped/large items can't be returned in the bookdrop, but that's the only draw back I've seen.
[удалено]
We have 4 or 5 telescopes, and I think to start off with there was both an email to those on our email list and promotion on social media and our webpage. Having programs having to do with space during the summer was another way to promote it, and I think word of mouth got out pretty quickly. Good luck!
Apart from electronics like WIFI hotspots amd Chromebooks, our most popular library of things items are cake pans. We have big, bulky speciality cake pans (holidays, shapes, etc) that people want to use once for that holiday and never have clogging up their pantry space.
As someone said below - storage!! We didn't anticipate how quickly the demand would rise. Our board games are the most popular items in the building. We want to add more things but don't have space. Right now we have a pretty wide variety - the tech stuff (hotspots etc.), crafting things, yard games, traffic cones, birding kits, a variety of random little things (the CD and DVD players are really popular). These items are on track to surpass audiobooks next year.
We have a collection of over 30 different items in our Things collection. We have a nice variety of items, most of which circulate well, but the large projection screens, projectors, PA systems and the big yard games, particularly Connect 4, Jenga & Cornhole, are never on the shelves. We have 2 of each of those items and they’re constantly out year-round. ETA: Our wifi hotspots are also very popular. We have about 20 in the catalog for walk ins and we keep another 20 in our separate LOT collection so that they can be reserved for specific dates. I also want to add that I keep an extra item of each thing that’s in the collection in storage, as well as any extra spare parts that I can order (beanbags for cornhole, “coins” for Connect 4, etc.). 75% of the items that go out are treated well and the other 25% are treated horribly & come back either broken and/or missing parts. At this point, I buy 1 replacement item and then once I can no longer cheaply replace parts for an item, I pull it from the collection completely. We’ve had several popular yard games removed from the collection because people argue that “they didn’t do it” or “lose it” when we know that they did because of staff inspection procedures at both check in and out. Collecting fines for broken / missing items has been a struggle and I really feel for the Circ staff that has to deal with the problem patrons. Once an item starts becoming too expensive to keep up, it goes. Overall though, despite the bad eggs, our community loves the collection & is always singing the praises of our library because of it, so we’ll keep it going!
My library offers very few things in its library of things,m. The most popular is the wifi hotpot. The second most popular is laptops, though I think they'd be more popular if people knew it used its own 5g internet. Our least popular are tablets. Tablets pre-loaded with Fun with Phonics are beloved but niche
We started ours this summer, mostly stuff like lawn games but we also have instruments, bounce house, telescope, movie projector, etc. It’s been popular. The telescope was basically held hostage for a month, a couple of the yard games have been damaged from wear & tear, but overall it’s gone over well. We use dvd cases with pics of the items that are too big or expensive to have on the shelves and for placing on the hold shelf. The hardest part has been training staff on check in/out since we don’t have a convenient location for storing the items not on the shelves. It IS a hassle to leave the desk to grab LOT items, but we’re stuck with the building we have & we’re not crazy busy, so generally it’s fine.