Not sure how many will read this but hopefully we can spread the word.
As you may know, the Centre has a lot of assets that are uncatalogued, and therefore under utilized and perhaps not so easy to access. To solve this and provide value for membership dollars a number of us are working on creating a lending library for all our stuff (books, scopes accessories and everything in between).
Abigail laid some great groundwork for the book library side of things and we're going to use that to expand the offering. There's a lot of work to be done to take our existing inventory and update it so that it can serve as the basis for what members can access.
I've found two websites that work together to reach the objective of a user friendly library reservation system. One of the site is called TinyCat (
https://www.librarycat.org/) that acts as a cataloging system for small libraries. While it is book centric, I believe we can make it work for our purposes as it shows an item, description, status and few other fields.
The other site is LibraryThing (
https://www.librarything.com/). It's the database backbone from which TinyCat provides the lendable assets. All of this for an almost ridiculously low cost.
Over the coming months we'll be building on the work of Eric Goldring and Bob Speck, who created an Excel catalogue of many of the scopes and accessories we own. From there we'll cross check to see what we still own, what's been sold or missing and/or unaccounted for. Once everything is properly inventoried we can load items into the library database and mark them for checkout. We'll do a bit of testing to make sure everything works and hopefully do the big reveal towards the end of the summer.
Some of this work will also include earmarking equipment that isn't immediately useful or necessary in carrying out maintenance on other Centre equipment. Such equipment we'll look at giving members first access to acquiring them. The rest will be sold through various channels so we can reinvest in loaner scopes or other equipment.
This is very exciting and I think much needed.
