From lending code to a research question

Germany has roughly 200 Libraries of Things — mostly small, volunteer-run associations solving the exact same problems in isolation. My bachelor thesis asked a simple question: what would these initiatives actually need from a nationwide infrastructure to lend things together? The short answer my research points to is an umbrella structure that acts as a service provider to its members, not a centralized authority above them.

I handed in the thesis on February 5, 2026: "Strategic Networking of Libraries of Things in Germany — A Requirements Analysis of Local, Civil-Society Libraries of Things for a Nationwide Infrastructure."

The idea didn't come from a desk — it came straight out of my work on Kulturdepot, the rental platform for Bremerhaven's cultural scene that I'm building for the Kulturamt. While programming, I had to make a lot of fundamental decisions — about data structure, processes, licensing, the legal form of usage. The deeper I got into it, the stronger the suspicion grew: other committed Libraries of Things (LoTs) in Germany are probably solving exactly the same problems in isolation. Out of that grew the wish to widen the view — away from a single technical solution, toward the question of whether and how these initiatives could be networked nationwide.

This is also a correction to my original plan. In "From Interest to Research Question" I had sketched out a completely different direction: a FinTech topic focused on post-growth financial products. I didn't pursue that thread. Instead, during the concrete work on Kulturdepot, a topic emerged that was closer to my actual day-to-day — and in the end fit my technical background better, too. This article is the look back at what the work actually became.

Sharing Economy and Libraries of Things

The theoretical frame of the thesis is the sharing economy — in Rachel Botsman's terms, an economy built on decentralized networks of individuals and communities rather than central institutions. The global market volume is estimated at 366 billion US dollars, with a projected rise to 1.4 trillion US dollars by 2030.

At the same time, the research shows a tension. On one side stand platform-capitalist providers like Airbnb or Uber, which critics like Evgeny Morozov accuse of being "neo-liberalism on steroids." On the other side stand grassroots initiatives that want to address consumption and inequality — but face the risk of so-called mission drift: over time, even non-profit organizations can become increasingly commercialized and water down their original social mission. How you can structurally guard against this is described in the article on Post-Growth Entrepreneurship (Part 2).

Libraries of Things (LoTs) are a special form of the sharing economy meant to counteract this drift through a communal organizational and decision-making structure. One study distinguishes four archetypes: public-to-citizen (e.g. city libraries with things in their catalog), community-driven-free, community-driven-fee-based, and growth-oriented-fee-based. According to the OCLC list, there are around 192 LoTs in Germany, and the network of non-profit lending initiatives in the DACH region has 46 entries — mostly registered associations with no supra-regional connection.

Research question and approach

The central research question of the thesis is:

What organizational, technical, legal, staffing, and social requirements do civil-society Libraries of Things in Germany place on a nationwide infrastructure for promoting communal lending?

To investigate this, I conducted semi-structured expert interviews — following the methodological standard work by Kvale and Brinkmann and a guide from Scribbr. Of 18 people invited, ten agreed: initiators and staff of local LoTs, staff of municipal economic-development offices, a sharing-economy researcher, and an operator of a commercial rental platform. The interviews lasted 60 to 90 minutes and were transcribed automatically via Google Meet and then cleaned up.

I analyzed the transcripts with qualitative content analysis after Mayring — a rule-guided method that combines qualitative interpretation with a quantitative tally of categories. I derived five main categories deductively from the research question (organization, technology, law, staffing, social), then refined them inductively from the material into 20 subcategories. With support from Google Gemini and NotebookLM, I categorized and paraphrased a total of 177 coding units — individual statements with a concrete bearing on requirements.

Results: what LoTs need for nationwide networking

Organizational

The choice of legal form — association, foundation, or umbrella body — is a strategic foundational decision for the experts, because it determines access to funding and tax status. We also discussed whether established LoTs should be attached to city libraries: that brings expertise and infrastructure, but bureaucracy can crowd out volunteer work. Financing models range from flat-rate subscriptions (as at the LoT in Bochum) through donations to public funding — with the underlying conflict that fees can run counter to social accessibility.

Technical

Here there was the greatest agreement among respondents: what's wanted is a powerful search-and-booking function, simple inventory management for volunteers, and a translation function for multilingual audiences. On the architecture question — central vs. federated — the majority favored a federated model, where data sovereignty stays with the local LoTs but a shared standard (models: MARC in librarianship, GTFS in public transit, or a protocol along the lines of Mastodon) enables network effects. A central solution was seen as a risk to autonomy and an invitation to monopoly. On the open-source question, opinions diverged strongly: transparency and independence against the risk of "tech debt" when community engagement wanes.

Legal

An umbrella structure could negotiate collective insurance for loaned items and provide legally sound templates for terms and conditions, usage contracts, and liability rules. For identity verification, current practice ranges from an ID number on paper to a digital user account — a uniform, GDPR-compliant verification mechanism via the BundID was named as a possible solution. The distinction between volunteer activity and commercial trade also becomes legally relevant once platforms admit commercial providers as well.

Staffing

Many LoTs run entirely on volunteers — that keeps costs down, but hits limits on opening hours, platform maintenance, and coordination. Mentioned were hybrid models with federal volunteer-service positions, as well as the long-term goal of paid roles without displacing volunteer engagement. An umbrella structure could also reduce the "bus factor" — the dependence on individual knowledge-holders — by centrally collecting guides, lessons learned, and successful funding applications.

Social

LoTs often see themselves as a "third place" — a non-commercial space for encounter against loneliness, complemented by repair cafés and workshops. Lack of visibility was named as a permanent problem; a central, interactive map of all LoTs could help here. But the most important social function of an umbrella structure was named as its role as a mouthpiece toward politics, to strengthen the recognition and legitimacy of the movement — alongside a concurrent worry about political dependence, for instance when public funding is cut.

Recommendations: the umbrella structure as a service provider

From the results, I derive one central clarification of roles in the discussion: a nationwide umbrella structure should understand itself as a service provider for its members, not as a centralized decision-making authority. Tasks that are location-independent — software development, funding applications, building cooperations, lobbying — can be bundled centrally. Tasks with a direct connection to the local community — lending, inventory, identity verification, social interaction — stay with the LoTs on site.

The reference model is the Verbund Offener Werkstätten (Network of Open Workshops), an umbrella body founded in 2012 with over 500 member workshops, offering expert advice, networking meetings, training, tax consulting, and shared insurance — while preserving the operational freedom of the individual workshops.

Concretely, I derive recommendations along the five categories: a legal form with robust, mission-securing statutes and diversified financing; an open data standard plus federated system architecture instead of a central platform; bundled insurance and legal templates; a permanently employed core team for coordination plus non-monetary incentive systems for volunteers; and an active role in public relations and political advocacy.

Conclusion and open questions

The work shows: a nationwide umbrella structure for LoTs can succeed if it finds the balance between efficient centralization — for instance in software development and lobbying — and the autonomy of the local initiatives. It should not curtail local room for action, but reinforce its impact.

A few questions remain open, which I mark as research gaps: how do end users feel about a centralized solution and about data privacy? What role could publicly funded LoTs play? And — more fundamentally — how sustainable is the concept really, given possible rebound effects, and at what degree of commercialization does the social and ecological value tip over?

Critical reflection

A few points to put the results in context: the motivation for the work grew out of my own programming on a rental system, which brings a technical bias with it — four of the ten experts have a technical background themselves and mostly advocate for open source. The sample is not very regionally diverse (four of the respondents are from Bremen, one from Vienna), and only people from civil-society LoTs and economic-development offices were interviewed — not end users or representatives of classic public libraries.

I found the shift in terminology over the course of the work remarkable: at first the term "central platform" was in the foreground. Over the interviews, it became clear that the requirements of LoTs are more multifaceted than a pure software question — out of that came the term "umbrella structure," deliberately more open and less technical. That shift was the real insight of the work for me: away from a solution blueprint, toward the open question of the need for, and form of, networking.

My first examiner gave me two pieces of advice that proved right in the end: a bachelor thesis doesn't have to save the world, and it needs a narrow focus. Scientific quality doesn't come from ambition for scale, but from depth.

Where all of this ultimately leads — also in relation to my other learnings from my studies — and how the work concretely interlocks with Kulturdepot, will become clear once the platform itself goes into pilot operation.