[wplug-board] WPLUG Library

Pat Barron pat at lectroid.com
Mon Oct 14 00:12:55 EDT 2013


I just wanted to share some notes regarding the idea of maintaining a 
WPLUG Library, as we discussed during the GUM on Saturday.

If we can (finally...) get into the O'Reilly program, we will end up 
with a fair number of hardcopy books (far as I can tell, two hardcopy 
books per quarter).  According to the terms of the O'Reilly User Group 
program, these books can be used for any purpose the group feels is 
appropriate.  I would concur with the implied point that it would be 
better to make these available for borrowing by any member, than to 
raffle them off or something like that.  (The User Group program also 
includes free e-books, and unfortunately I can't think of any way we can 
make these available to borrow without running afoul of the author's and 
publisher's intellectual property rights, so these would probably need 
to be raffled off or otherwise distributed - if you have any ideas to 
solve that problem, I'd love to hear about them...)

Unfortunately, maintaining a lending library presents some logistical 
challenges...

The first challenge is, where to maintain the library?  I know of one 
local group (CPUser) that maintains a formal lending library right now, 
and one group (PACC) that maintains sort of an informal library.  Both 
of these groups can do this because they have a permanent home base 
where they can store things semi-permanently - CPUser at the church 
social hall where they meet, and PACC in one of the science labs at 
Point Park University.  CPUser in particular has an entire tall metal 
cabinet chock full o' books - many of which, I would assume, obtained 
from publisher relationships.  The closest thing we have right now to a 
permanent home base is WSCC, and I'm not sure to what extent we'd be 
"welcome" to store more stuff at WSCC than we already do.

As was noted, we do have things stored at people's houses (out of 
necessity).  We could try to keep the library at a member's home. One 
problem with this (as you're no doubt aware, if you have a large 
quantity of books in your home - I can vouch for this... ;-) ) is that 
books are bulky, heavy, and can take quite a bit of space. Assuming 
we're successful in gathering books, after 2.5 years, the library would 
consist of at least 20 books - maybe more since (if we maybe sign on as 
associate members with APCUG) we might find ourselves with relationships 
with other publishers.  So as an optimistic estimate, we can guess that 
the contents of the WPLUG library could take up at least two shelves of 
a bookcase in someone's house, so the person would need to be willing to 
give up that much space (or, I guess, the books could be stored in 
plastic totes or something and put somewhere, and not on shelves at 
all). Of course, they'd also need to be moved if the person moves, or if 
the person falls away from WPLUG.

Access to the library is another challenge.  I know in the notes in the 
meeting minutes, there's an idea that if the library is the the care of 
a member, that member could bring the library books to each meeting.  
This would let the members browse the books and decide if they want to 
borrow any.  But there would (hopefully) be a lot of books - even if 
there were just five or six, I personally would not agree to taking 
custody of the library if I knew I had to cart the books around to 
meetings.  Probably the strategy I would suggest, if the library were in 
the care of a member at their residence, is that the custodian would 
bring only the one or two newest book(s) to each meeting (so that 
members could browse them), and also any books that a member has 
requested to borrow.  For all other books, a list of these could be kept 
online, and if a member was interested in borrowing a book, it would be 
requested in advance of the meeting and brought to the meeting upon the 
request.

There is also the question of who gets borrowing access, and under what 
terms.  I would think that borrowing privileges would be restricted to 
members in good standing only.  We'd have to think about what we'd do in 
order to assure the return of the books - like, do we require a 
(refundable) deposit to borrow a book - even if it were just a 
"nuisance" amount like $5.00?  If we thought we needed to require a 
deposit, would this be an impediment to a significant number of members 
in terms of using the library?  If a book doesn't get returned as it's 
supposed to, what happens then? If it's lost (or simply not returned), 
do we just write it off?  It probably wouldn't be productive to try to 
recover the cost of the book, given that it was provided at no cost to 
WPLUG, and if the person just goes MIA and doesn't return a book, there 
would be no leverage to recover the cost of the book from them anyway 
(unless, as I say, we held a deposit for borrowing - in which case, the 
deposit would be forfeited).

Those are my immediate thoughts - I'm interested in what yours are....

--Pat.


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