Not just books - how renting a sewing machine from the library can improve democracy

Finland's libraries are increasingly being valued not by how many books they lend, but how they help societies function.

On a freezing January morning in Helsinki, around 20 people gather outside Oodi, the city's central library, waiting for the doors to open.

"I have tears in my eyes when I see people almost run into the building at 08:00, heading straight to their favourite spots," says Katri Vänttinen, director of library services for the whole of the Finnish capital. "It shows that the library really belongs to the public."

By lunchtime, the building is so full that visitors wander between floors looking for an empty seat. Students work on laptops beside huge windows overlooking Finland's parliament and parents read with babies and toddlers in brightly coloured play areas.

A small group sits in a circle: they're knitting woollen socks, those with more experience helping newcomers with techniques and patterns. In a library music pod, a middle-aged man records his first saxophone track. In the library café, an elderly woman holds a Finnish conversation class for two foreign girls. By the entrance, a teenage boy picks up a basketball he's borrowed and joins his friends on the library court just outside. 

Oodi, voted the world's best newly built library in 2019, is thriving – a striking contrast to the situation in many other countries where public libraries are slowly disappearing. 

Between 2008 and 2019, 766 public libraries closed across the United States, while in the United Kingdom, between 2016 and 2023, more than 180 council-run libraries were either closed or handed over to volunteer groups. Finland, instead, is expanding its libraries and transforming them into publicly funded community service centres where people can borrow much more than just books.

Research emerging from these initiatives – not just in Finland, but also in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Canada – already suggests that libraries play a significant role in promoting social inclusion, making a poignant argument: what if the value of libraries is not in how many books they lend, but more in how they help societies function? And what can the world learn from this Finnish model?

Finland has more than 700 libraries for a population of 5.6 million, offering everything from podcast studios and 3D printing to tennis rackets and swimming pool passes.

According to Vänttinen, the most borrowed items after books in Helsinki libraries are spaces: rooms that can be pre-booked, free of charge, to meet, study, hold political discussions or make music. Among portable items, board games and console games top the list.

This culture of borrowing, Vänttinen explains, is rooted in deep-seated pragmatism that stretches back to Finland's rural past, when people routinely shared farming machinery. "Today, many people in cities live in small homes, and they might need a sewing machine only once a year," says Vänttinen. "So why buy one? People prefer not to spend their own money when they can access a sewing machine for free, funded through their taxes."

Six hundred kilometres north of Helsinki, the city of Oulu's newly refurbished central library Saari reflects the same thinking, says library clerk Chris Stephenson while loading a microfilm reader for a visitor to browse an old newspaper.

Around him, readers fill long tables beneath soft lamps. A newly retired teacher is printing sheet music for the choir he sings in and the band where he plays the guitar. One floor up, a young man arrives to shorten his jeans after booking a slot for a sewing machine. In the same room, a 3D printer hums behind a schoolgirl........

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