About this project

Mini-Library Network is part of One Library Per Village: small libraries kept by ordinary people, in places people already walk past, connected so that a book can travel between them.

Why small, and why many

A conventional village library needs a building, a budget, a librarian and a committee, and most villages are never going to get one. A Mini-Library needs a person and a rack. The difference between those two sentences is the whole reason this project exists.

The cost of the network is close to nothing: a printed label sheet, a register, and a page on the internet. Everything expensive about a library — the building, the staff, the opening hours — is replaced by somebody who was going to be standing there anyway.

What the network adds

One small library in a village is a good thing on its own. What connecting them adds is movement. A book borrowed in one place can be left in another forty kilometres away, and the next reader sees everywhere it has been. A village with one Mini-Library has forty books. A village with one Mini-Library inside a network of two hundred has access to all of them, a few at a time.

It also means a donated book is never stuck. Give a book to a Mini-Library and it does not sit there for six years being ignored by the same twelve people — it travels.

Where it fits

Mini-Library is a sister project to #My-Tree and runs on the same platform, which is why one account works on both. It sits alongside the Green-Campus work with schools and colleges: a campus can run its own Mini-Libraries on its own subdomain, with its own students as Captains.

What it is not

• Not a business. Nobody is ever charged to borrow, to join, or to open one.
• Not a way of collecting reading data about people. Members are private by default and minors are never named. The privacy notice is short and says exactly what is kept.
• Not a dumping ground for clearing a warehouse. There is a cap on bulk donations to one Mini-Library, on purpose — forty good books beat four hundred unreadable ones.

Get involved

The useful thing you can do is open a Mini-Library, or help somebody near you open one. If you would rather talk it through first, get in touch.