Level Emphasis (local, state, national): Local
Location Emphasis (rural, urban, suburban): Any

Incentivized Behavior
Current: Community members have to own or rent tools at high prices from business (often large business).
Goal: Library expand their offerings to include tools, allowing community members short term access to them without cost.

Potential Financial Effects
Costs could be negligible to low cost. Depending on how much of an overlap current librarian staffing can handle a potential influx of new community members and how costly acquiring tools are. See In Practice section for more details on how this could be potentially achieved without increased costs.

Introduction
When a community member needs to do maintenance or renovation of their home or belongings they either need to own the required tools or rent them.

As tools, especially specialty tools, can be quite expensive to buy and for most people only need to be utilized a single or few days out of a year or even decade, it doesn’t make sense for them to buy and store them. Tool rental businesses take advantage of this and charge exorbitant prices (prices can be 1/3 the purchase price per day rented).

Proposed Solution
A set up to solve this already exists in libraries. They lend books (possibly other things depending on the library) for short durations to community members. The goal would be to expand library services to include tools (can be expanded beyond tools as well). [Ref 1]

In Practice
Community members would be able to reserve tools for desired days (within reason). With a ‘librarian’ checking them out and in. The checking procedure would ensure they were in good condition and functional, any damage or breaking of the equipment would be charged to the community member.

To reduce implementation costs, librarians could set distinct hours for tool lending and return. Outside of those select hours librarians would be focused on their typical work (books). From my experience working at a location that rented equipment, returning is typically within the first hour of opening (ex. 0800-0900, 8-9am) and renting equipment was in the last 2 hours of the day (ex. 1500-1700, 3-5pm).

For obtaining the tools to lend, there is the potential that libraries could receive discounted or free equipment from manufacturers. This would be in the vein of how software companies often provide their software free or discounted to students, to get the students into their ‘ecosystem’ so they become lifelong customers.

Risks/Mitigations

1. Risk (“Reservation Abuse”): Someone reserves an item to the point that it essentially becomes a personal item. Mitigation: If someone has checked out an item in the last (x) days, they can’t reserve the item. However, they would still be able to check it out, if available.

Sources
Ref 1: https://lacountylibrary.org/tools/