Proposal:Lending

Lending
Proposal status:	Rejected (inactive)
Proposed by:	Andrewth1
Tagging:	lending=*
Applies to:
Definition:	The groups of people that a library lends its collection to, including books and other media
Statistics:
Draft started:	2025-08-08
RFC start:	2025-08-09
Vote start:	2025-09-01
Vote end:	2025-09-15

Proposal

Introduce a new key lending=* to indicate the the groups of people that may borrow (aka "check out" or "home loan") items from a library's collection. To be used in combination with amenity=library.

Rationale

Under current library tagging guidelines, there no distinction between permission to physically enter a library and permission to borrow a book from the library.

• operator:type=* describes what type of entity operates a library. However, lending privileges cannot be inferred from the operator type. Governments often operate both lending libraries and reference-only libraries. In some countries such as Germany and Finland, university libraries may extend lending privileges to the general public, not just to students. In rural areas of the United States, K-12 school libraries sometimes lend to the public.

• access=* describes physical access to library buildings, but does not imply what a person can actually do inside the library. University libraries and national libraries are often open to the public for reading or tourism purposes, but the public cannot borrow materials from them.

• library=* (482 occurrences) and library:type=* (239 occurrences) are occasionally used. These tags lack documentation and rely on broad assumptions about the services that a certain "type" of library provides, leading to issues with internationalization. Values are not standardized either, and can range from academic to Tool_Library.

Although this key applies mainly to libraries, lending=* was chosen rather than library:lending=* because (1) library:*=* is an undocumented namespace and (2) it allows for future flexibility in expanding the key to other lending institutions, such as tool libraries or bicycle cooperatives.

Tagging

lending=*

Values

Value	Description	Examples
yes	A library that lends most of their materials to members of the public who have a library card. Notes: Some materials, such as periodicals and historic items, may be excluded from lending. Some libraries restrict lending privileges to residents of the municipality where they are located. The value yes should still be used as long as local residents can obtain a library card with proof of address.	Arlington Central Library LaMoure School and Public Library Biblioteca Vasconcelos TUM Universitätsbibliothek
no	A library that does not lend to individuals. Commonly known as a "reference library" or "special collection". Some materials may be available via inter-library loan, but not at the location where the library is mapped.	Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library National Agricultural Library National Library of Medicine The Newberry Library Bibliothèque nationale de France
restricted	A library that lends to specific individuals only. May include students of a school/university or individuals who have purchased a membership to the library. Note: Some school and university libraries lend to the public. If this is the case, use yes instead.	The Mercantile Library Odegaard Undergraduate Library Phillips Exeter Academy Library

Rendering

This tag could allow public lending libraries to be rendered separately from other types of libraries, which would be helpful for consumer mapping applications.

Features/Pages affected

This tag can be added to existing features with the tag amenity=library.

External discussions

Community forum discussion on this proposal

Community forum discussion on the obsoleted "Library Types" proposal

Comments

Please comment on the discussion page.

Voting

Voting closed

Voting on this proposal has been closed.

It was rejected with 0 votes for, 7 votes against and 2 abstentions.

• I oppose this proposal. : You should announce changes to your proposal before voting. lending=restricted is unclear and overlapping. See reply. —— Kovposch (talk) 05:00, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
• I oppose this proposal. The name of the tag is too broad for its very specific scope: "lending" seems to be the counterpart to "rental". E.g. what can be lent in this library: All books, some selected books? It might be anything between "all of their stock" and "none of their stock". As commented, the intended user group of a feature is commonly tagged as "*:for", e.g. "lending:for" might be a good term for this. --Mueschel (talk) 07:34, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
• I have comments but abstain from voting on this proposal. I feel uneasy about this proposal because "lending=" to me suggests money lending / loans. I know that the proposal is that "lending=" would be used in conjunction with "amenity=library" which would make it clear that we are talking about the lending policy of a library, but I fear confusion with other types of lending--PeterPan99 (talk) 08:09, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
• I oppose this proposal. I like the general idea of this proposal, I just have some issues with the specifics and feel it needs more community discussion. I've put my thoughts here: Proposal_talk:Lending#Terms --GuardedBear (talk) 10:49, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
• I oppose this proposal. I also like the idea and agree we do need a way to tag this info. However, I agree with GuardedBear's comments above that the tagging needs to be clarified a little. Particularly I'd like to see more clarity about whether a membership is needed and what conditions of membership there are (must live locally, must pay fee??, etc.) --Pwbriggs (talk) 17:59, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
• I oppose this proposal. This is too broad, and libraries often have different levels of lending based on the media type, section, etc. This tagging scheme isn't defined well enough to account for this and I think it would create more problems than it would solve. -- User:Steglitz 10:02 (UTC), 2 Sep 20205
• I oppose this proposal. I also first thought that this is about money. Maybe some namespacing could help here (like lending:books=yes or something) --Jofban (talk) 16:01, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
• I oppose this proposal. I think it's too easy for someone to accidentally misuse this tag because they thought it meant something else, as opposed the actual usage listed here. --Mewhenthe (talk) 19:41, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
• I have comments but abstain from voting on this proposal. I think this is a good idea and is even a great one to add to the wiki so people can reference how to tag these libraries, but I do not feel this needs a new tag to accomplish this. I would rather it be referenced somewhere rental=book + (fee=no or charge=no.) Furthermore, this seems to have morphed more into an access key than a lending information key. The restriction, for example, can be access=customers where the library defines what it's customer is (possibly even requiring a membership or similar.) These things (and more) should absolutely be referenced on the wiki and I hope you will consider adding such a page, even if this proposal is not ultimately successful. Thank you for your time and effort on this, you did a great job! -- GA Kevin (talk) 23:22, 4 September 2025 (UTC)