Lee Jones
Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
“Libraries of Things” are tangible collections of borrowable objects. There are many benefits to Libraries of Things such as making objects and skill-building accessible, reducing waste through the sharing of items, and saving costs associated with purchasing rarely-used items. We introduce the first HCI study of Library of Things by interviewing 23 librarians who run a variety of collections such as handheld tools, gear, and musical instruments – within public institutions and more grass-roots efforts in the private sector. In our findings, we discuss the challenges these collections experience in changing behavioural patterns from buying to borrowing, helping individuals `try new things', iterating to find sharable items, training staff, and manual intervention throughout the borrowing cycle. We present 5 opportunities for HCI research to support interactive skill-sharing, self-borrowing, maintenance recognition and cataloguing `things', organizing non-uniform inventories, and creating public-awareness. Further in-the-wild studies should also consider the tensions between the values of these organizations and low-cost convenient usage.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581094
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2023.acm.org/)