Coming soon
Every library event, in one place.
Commons Calendar is free event software for public libraries — and one shared calendar of everything happening at them.
The problem, from both sides
If you want to know what is on at your library this weekend, you check your library's website. If you want to know what is on at any of the libraries near you, you check all of them, one at a time. Most people give up, and good programming goes to empty rooms.
Meanwhile libraries pay real money for event software that is hard to use, hard to embed in their own site, and weak on accessibility — an expense that is difficult to justify and even harder to escape.
One thing that fixes both
For libraries
Modern event management with recurrence that actually handles weekly storytime. A widget you paste into your existing site with one line. A hosted events page of your own, which for a library without a website is the whole thing. Free, permanently.
For patrons
One calendar covering every participating library near you, filterable by town, date, age group and kind of event. Every library that joins makes it better for everyone, with no extra work from anybody.
What makes it different
- Free forever for public libraries. Not a trial, not a freemium tier with the useful parts removed. Library budgets go through committees; this one skips procurement entirely.
- Accessibility is the point, not a checkbox. WCAG 2.1 AA across every surface — the public pages, the widget, the staff screens — built in from the first commit rather than retrofitted after a complaint. Municipal web accessibility deadlines arrive in 2026, and most incumbent vendors cannot make this claim in writing.
- Open data, no key required. Event listings are public information, so the API is public too — documented, free, and open to anyone building signage, a class project, or a town website.
- No tracking, ever. No patron accounts, no analytics following anyone around, and registration collects the four fields a library actually needs and deletes them shortly after the event. We cannot leak what we do not keep.
Where it is right now
In active development, and not open to the public yet. The event system, the public pages and the embeddable widget are built; the next step is a small pilot with a handful of Massachusetts libraries before anything opens more widely.
If you work at a library and this sounds like something you would use — especially if your library has no website of its own, or is paying for event software it does not love — that pilot is exactly who it is for.