Your Seattle Public Library card goes beyond books and movies now. In late May, SPL announced a program to lend Wi-Fi hotspots to library card holders and, according to GeekWire, the hotspots are definitely a hot commodity. There were 81 checkouts of the devices within the first hour of the first press event, and 175 holds on the 126 devices by the end of the first day. Now, the library has a wait list of nearly 1,300 people, and another 200 units are being added to circulation due to an additional $80,000 grant from Google.
The program was set up in reaction to a 2014 report that found 15 percent of Seattleites didn’t have home Internet access. The project was funded by Google, who gave $225,000 to cover the hotspots as well as digital literacy training and the opportunity to begin checking out laptops at some point. The program will run through May 2016, at which point the library will either have to find another source of funding or shut down the program.
