[SJAA-announce] Loaner Program restarted

[Rob Hawley-SJAA]

I am happy to announce that the board is turning on the loaner program.  The
board asked me to be the acting chair.  We need lots of help as will be
described later in this message.

To avoid chaos we will turn on the program in stages.  I hope that it will
not be long before the full program will be active, but I cannot tell you
how long that will be.

A number of the scopes are currently being stored by non-members. Initially
only these scopes are available immediately.  You can see which scopes are
available at

	
	http://www.sjaa.net/loaners/sjaaloan.html


This will allow the club to get the scopes back under control. Storage for
these scopes is a major issue. Even if you only want to donate space for
storage, we would appreciate you taking the loan of one of these scopes.

Once we get these scopes under control we will open the loans up to other
scopes.

The new loaner program will depend on the efforts of volunteers.  We need
help in the following areas:

	1. storage
	2. Avoiding the high cost of commercial space
	3. Some Place to hold returned scopes
      4. Handling the transfer of scopes from storage to 
         loanee and vice versa
	5. Assistance in evaluating and documenting current inventory
	6. Training new users

Rob Hawley