Somewhere, somehow you’ve been introduced to the idea of a “living books lending library,” a private library operated by a librarian who wants to give the gift of living books to her community. Perhaps you were once a patron of a living books library, but now you are in a new place where there is no such library available. Or maybe you heard about living books libraries on the podcast, Plumfield Moms. Or you began collecting a rich home library for yourself and your own children, and now you’ve run across the idea of sharing your collection of good books with others.  

How do you get started? First of all, pray and discern the season and the calling for this living books library ministry. Is God calling you to provide a living books library for homeschoolers and others in your community?  If you have some books, even if it’s only a few, to share, and if you just can’t get the idea out of your head, perhaps He is calling you to provide this service. 

Is this the right season in your life to begin a ministry to others outside your home? If you have lots of responsibilities at home still–young children, children with special needs, a need to provide a second income for your family–maybe God is still calling you to the library ministry, but not now. Maybe now is the time to wait and pray and collect a few books at a time and read lots of good books so that you will be prepared to open a library when the time is right.  

But if you’re ready to get started, you can start lending books with a minimum of preparation.  

1. Figure out about how many books you have and arrange them on shelves. Organize the books in whatever way makes sense to you, and if you plan to have people come inside your library to browse, whatever way will make sense to them. See the articles under Classification at Ask the Librarian for more ideas.

2. Make a list of the books you have. Even if you only have a few hundred good living books, you can start lending. Your list can be a simple document with the books listed in alphabetical order by title or author. If you have quite a few books, you will probably want to enter the books into a library database of some kind, either an online database like LibraryThing or Michelle Howard’s Living Books Lady database, or a simple database file on your computer. See more options for listing your books in Options for Keeping Track of my Books.

3. Decide on pricing, loan period, and member responsibilities for your library. While you should not expect to make much (or any!) profit in offering a living books library to your community, you should at least consider charging a fee for patrons to check out books from your library. People are more likely to borrow, appreciate, care for, and return books if they pay a membership fee to join your library. How you plan to loan books, membership pricing, and member responsibilities should all be compiled into a Library Member Guide or document that spells out all of the details of how you want your library to operate.

4. Tell people in your community what you have. You can start a library with just a few hundred books or with several thousand. You can begin by lending to a few trusted friends or advertise your library throughout the homeschool community and beyond. Whomever you choose to lend to, we suggest making your library operate like an “official library.” You are not just lending a book or two to a friend. You have a library, and your patrons, friends or strangers, are responsible to take care of your books and bring them back promptly and in good condition.

5. Start lending. Spread the book love around. There are many other things you may want to do as your library grows and becomes a valuable resource for more people, but it’s fine to start small. You don’t have to have your library beautifully housed or perfectly arranged and catalogued to start lending books. You can start lending a few books to a few people and grow from there. And we certainly hope you do.

This post is part of our Ask The Librarian series, a Card Catalog Project. You can find more like this here. And, we would love to connect with you! You can find us on Facebook here.