FINDING PAIN POINTS 

To begin, I began brainstorming pain points that may discourage people from using a lending library during COVID-19. I observed some issues such as: 
- Serendipity means that we don't know who donated the books or who will use them, so it's hard to trace COVID-19 that may linger on books
- Many communities don't have a free lending library near them 
- Some people may be anxious about leaving their homes during quarantine and going to a lending library

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USER INTERVIEWS 

With these preliminary thoughts, I began interviewing people about why they use lending libraries in the first place. I invited people to participate from social media groups: I Should Be Writing, a group of graduate students, professors, and writers; Grad Student Memes, a large group of graduate students in various fields and from various universities; Library Think Tank, a group of professional librarians and library students; and Urban Fiction Writers, a group of readers and authors. I posted a general call for participation, asking readers to contact me to schedule an approximately15-minute interview to discuss lending libraries. In total, I interviewed ten people from across these groups, about an even number from each group. 8 people identified as female, 2 as male. The average age of these participants was 35, although participants ranged from 21-60. 

Notes from the interview are as follows: 
 

• Participant 1: Uses free little libraries to save money and to find interesting new books they may not otherwise search for if they were buying a book from a store. 
   

• Participant 2: Uses free little libraries to save money and to clean out their own bookshelves. They try to read one new book a month and especially look for language books or books that can teach them new skills.
   

• Participant 3: Uses free little libraries to find cheap, vintage books for decoration or to find something new that they might not have thought to read. 
   

• Participant 4: Uses free little libraries to get free books for their nieces and nephews since children's books can be very expensive. 
   

• Participant 5: Uses free little libraries to find fun fiction books and to take a break from reading textbooks for school. 
   

• Participant 6: Uses free little libraries to affordably fill up their bookshelves since they couldn't bring their old books with them when they recently moved. 

 

• Participant 7: Uses free little libraries as a reward after work; after a stressful day, they will walk to the closest lending library and spend several quiet minutes looking to see if there any books they want to read. 
   

• Participant 8: Uses free little libraries to save money because bookstores can be expensive. They tend to be tough on their books, such as by accidentally spilling coffee on them and by annotating in the margins, so they prefer to have their own books rather than borrowing from a formal library.
   

• Participant 9: Uses free little libraries to see what kinds of topics their neighbors are interested in and to share books they think people in their neighborhoods may like.
   

• Participant 10: Uses free little libraries to find old books that they can rip up for craft projects. They enjoy finding and rereading old-school books they may have enjoyed in their youth. 

COMMON USER MOTIVATIONS 

After the interviews, I found that most participants had similar motivations for using free little libraries. First, cost was the most common incentive. Second, readers enjoyed the opportunity to find something new, a book they may not have known to look for in a bookstore or at the library. In short, readers appreciated how the serendipity of a lending library could always offer them novelty. In this serendipity, some readers like Participant 9 mentioned how they liked getting an insight into the genres and topics that their neighbors enjoy. Even for users who did not directly state that free little libraries connect them to other people, the act of finding a new book relies on an anonymous person "recommending" a book to you by leaving it in the lending library. Among the participants, serendipity was a major factor in why they visit lending libraries. Users are motivated to return to lending libraries because they know they may find something new on different days, and these new books may surprise them or teach them things they might not expect. This serendipity, as Kenneth Kidd writes, also helps us make human connections outside of the pages of the books we share. 

MAKING A DIGITAL LENDING LIBRARY

I knew from personal experience that some community members were stocking my local lending libraries, but I also could recognize that as readers were using them during COVID-19, other people were afraid of potentially contracting the virus by touching a book without knowing who used it before them. 

Ironically, these hand-to-hand relationships readers build by sharing books with each other were now a threat as physical books might carry traces of the virus. But I still had hope in the community model of a lending library to help connect people during this time of quarantine. When people can't socialize in person, how might books provide those physical connections? And how can serendipity help connect us to books and other people in new ways during COVID-19? 

These were questions I sought to explore as I conceptualized a safer digital lending library. Why did I want to make a lending library instead of using an existing open-access database? During the loneliness of COVID-19, I wanted to highlight how sharing books can be a democratic, social act. I also wanted to provide some sense of the serendipity that readers already appreciate from lending libraries, where they never know what to expect when they look at the books on the shelves. This sense of serendipity is harder to obtain when you type in certain keywords or look through databases that are intentionally organized. 

I returned to the same social media groups from which I invited participants for my interviews. In these groups, I asked a simple question: "What open-access book would you share with a stranger?" These books had to be open-access or otherwise in the public domain so I could share them on a website without breaking copyright regulations. I did not ask people to explain why they would share that book, and I did not identify who had shared which books when I was building the actual library. I opted for this anonymized approach to replicate the spirit of a lending library, where visitors often do now know who donate which book or why they chose to donate it. I imagine that some of these social media users chose to share their favorite books. Some may have shared books that had a profound impact on them. These unknown motivations may provoke speculation in readers as they imagine who may have recommended each book for the digital lending library, and why they recommended it. 

When sorting through recommendations, I saw that some books were recommended more than once, especially classic texts. Pride and Prejudice had the most recommendations, but I only included one copy of most books in the collection in the rare exception that another version or another copy contains new images or content. 

Occasionally, recommenders on social media would list a general type of genre instead of a specific book. In the case that someone listed "poetry" or "cookbook", for example, without naming an exact title, I found a book in that genre on Project Gutenberg to include in the library. 

168 Books
My original goal was to collect 168 books in this lending library. I chose this number because I wanted this project to directly represent how books can help bring people together, even when they are social distancing. According to psychologists Ruixue Zhaoyang, Martin J. Sliwinski, Lynn M. Martire, and Joshua M. Smyth, the average person has 12 in-person social interactions every day. Many of these interactions are serendipitious, like the books we unexpectedly find. For example, people may start conversations with coworkers over lunch, speak with a cashier, or compliment a stranger's outfit. 

During COVID-19, these in-person moments of social serendipity have largely disappeared. While we can connect with one another online, it's rare for us to bump into strangers or have unexpected conversations when we have to choose to message a particular person. We curate our social media spaces with "friends," so digital spaces (while social) don't always foster new or unexpected relationships. 

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To honor those 12 social interactions that many people no longer have during COVID-19, I multiplied 12 by 14 (the number of days that a person needs to self-isolate if they may have the virus). Together, this number is 168: the average number of in-person social interactions that people may miss during a 2-week quarantine. 168 is lonely. 
 

But with 168 books, that number can represent something else. That number that represent a community of people who have collectly contributed 168 stories. 

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Fortunately, I received nearly twice that many book recommendations. The final lending library features nearly 300 different titles. Some of the books are portrayed with their titles on their spines, some are portrayed with decorative or even blank spines. I intentionally kept many books blank to promote that sense of serendipity. Visitors can click on a book without knowing what they are reading until the website directs them to a digitized version on Project Guttenberg or another open-access website. 

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In this digital exchange, I like to imagine that there's a socially distant form of hand-to-hand connection, similar to when people exchange physical books. After all, the original recommenders typed out their suggestions, and then readers will use their fingers to click on a book in the collection. Even digitally, sharing books promotes an embodied relationship between strangers, a connection to transcends space and place. 

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And in the space between these digital bookshelves, there is room for community.