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The article illustrates the many experiences of the spread of unconventional lending in public and university libraries in the United States, where for many years now – alongside the lending of books, films and other bibliographic material – non-book lending has been carried out. Items that can be borrowed belong to everyday life and are at least apparently far from the objectives that libraries aim to pursue. The choice adopted by the author is to present these innovative cases according to a sort of ranking of complexity, ranging from the more ordinary case of courtesy loans (as in the case of glasses, umbrellas or mobile phone chargers), to the lending of technological tools to support teaching in university libraries; the loan of ties for those who have to participate in a job interview, up to ‒ through various intermediate steps ‒ the largest “library of things”, which includes drills, cake molds, musical instruments, golf clubs, ski poles and many other objects that do not have a current use and that you do not need to buy. The article aims to analyze the link between these innovative choices, the environmentalist values of the sharing economy and a broader declination of the concept of “literacy” extended to different aspects of the lives of the people served by the library.
