Does your library circulate hotspots to your community? Ours is just about to. Like many libraries, we were lucky enough to receive an Emergency Connectivity Grant. This provided funds for us to purchase 150 hotspots and 20 Chromebooks to circulate to our county. I know many libraries have circulated hotspots for years, but this was brand new to us. Here’s what we thought about as we got our hotspots ready for our community.
Why circulate hotspots?
Although many people outside the library may not realize it, there’s still a digital divide in our country. For example, more and more activities like applying for jobs, taking classes, and participating in social and cultural events are moving online. Therefore, people who don’t have high speed internet may be left behind. This includes the children and families that we serve. Some people cannot afford high speed internet, and high speed internet is still not available in some rural areas. There are many ways that libraries can help bridge this gap. See this post from the ALSC Children & Technology Committee: Bridging the Digital Divide with Circulating Tech. Our library has made it a goal to circulate hotspots.
So, how do you circulate hotspots?
You will consider many factors if you want to circulate hotspots. The Public Library Association put together a Hotspot Playbook toolkit that may help you start. Some of the questions we asked when starting this program were:
- Who is the target audience for this program? How are they likely to want to use hotspots?
- What information do we need to include in the catalog and item records?
- How can IT and circulation work together for success?
- How can we package and explain the hotspots effectively to help those new to this service succeed?
Things about our circulating hotspots that just make sense (I hope)
If you circulate hotspots and they are not returned on time, you can switch the service off. We wanted an easy way for our IT staff to know when that happened, so we set up a scheduled report to run. Once a week, our IT staff will get an email that alerts them if a hotspot has gone overdue.
We needed to keep track of the device phone numbers and serial numbers. We played with cataloging until we found the fields we could pull out into a report. That way we don’t need to keep separate spreadsheets. And if a barcode falls off or something, we only have to update the information in one place.
We set up a couple of different collections that circulate in different ways. Our typical hotspots will check out for 2 weeks, but we also have a “lucky duck” collection. The lucky duck hotspots will check out for 3 days and patrons cannot place holds. This increases the chance that we might have a hotspot on the shelf for an emergency. Did your internet go out right before your Zoom job interview? We’ve got you!
The company we ordered our hotspots from were able to place the barcodes and label each device for us. I was glad I double checked them as I was entering them in the system, though. We found five devices that were not registered to the correct account. If you notice something wonky, don’t be afraid to ask.
Does your library circulate hotspots?
I’d love to hear any tips and tricks you have to share!