I don't think I've ever seen them open (check the location history on google maps - the shutters are always down). But I see from the website that the opening times are quite staggered.
We have a lot of these at the libraries in Portland! You can borrow all sorts of stuff for free - board games, puzzles, baking stuff, tools, a huge gamut. They also have 3d printers, button making machines, tshirt presses, sewing machines, cricut machines, and all sorts of stuff like that that you can use for free (but not borrow).
That's really cool to hear. We used to make use of the toy library in Bristol when we lived there, it was a great way to get toys the kids could play with for 2 weeks then return them when they got bored :)
My friend borrowed a tent from Frome's equivalent over the summer. When he unpacked it at the site there were no pegs. He managed to borrow pegs off other campers and got it set up. It rained heavily that night and he quickly discovered the waterproofing had worn off and his tent was actually absorbing instead of repelling water. The water pooled in their tent and gradually soaked all the bedding and possessions. He gave up and went home in the morning.
A similar thing in Norway is BUA:
https://bua.no
Focused on outdoor equipment and for children / young people being able to try out new sports for free. Adults can rent stuff too though for a very reasonable price.
The major difference is that it operates nationwide, nearly every bigger city has a BUA location.
We got Ski equipment from there as students and it was actually super high quality. They seem to look after the equipment carefully and also sort out half broken stuff.
Obviously would like to be able to enter my zip/postcode and get a list of links to tool/thing libraries local to me. Does this exist already? Googling it seems like these are few and far between except some hardware/auto parts stores will lend some tools, and there are commercial tool rental places for a fee. I once borrowed a post hole digger on Craigslist, and lent a stapler on Facebook.
I live near this and looked into it a year or two ago. They didn't really have anything difficult to get (e.g. I don't need to borrow a drill or hand saw) but it looks like they've expanded quite a bit since then!
This is very cool. I'd love them to open source everything they could to help kickstart as many people as possible to open such libraries in their own cities/ neighborhood/ area. This is much needed.
I think the main difficulties here will be social, and a story of how this all started and the cultural, legal, and operational barriers they've overcome would be a valuable contribution. I am reminded of pg's advice to "do things that don't scale".
So how well do you expect this to survive long-term? Surely there's a reason I can find a rotary hammer drill rental, but not a library-like borrowing?
But here we have something that's less than 3 miles from where I live.