Reflecting and building on what's been said here (including the inherent problems with the community library) is that the issue with a community library, like most community resources, are most successful when there's some degree of active ownership from the community, vs a passive "resource."
I consider it a very good thing when people's stuff is around, showing bits and clues about who the people in the community are, what they're interested in, etc. It starts to make a place feel more like home, with an element of coziness and "lived in." But there's a fine line to be mindful of.
Knowing what I know now (and how many times we've had to find ways to get rid of stuff that was randomly left behind) I'm increasingly hesitant to ideas that start with "let's just pool a bunch of stuff so that people can use it!' Left to entropy, stuff becomes disorganized. Worse, over time, the line between "stuff" blurs into "junk" or "trash." Clutter tends to attract more clutter. I'm actually way less worried about people not returning books than people dropping random stuff on the shelves that just takes up space.
No matter what you do, you're going to be battling that entropy of stuff.
This isn't to say that a community library is a bad idea - but it's a more active undertaking than I think most people expect.
I've never found an organization who can accomplish this without some significant buy-in from the community to help with the organization and care-taking of a resources like this. That's true of tool libraries, hacker/maker spaces, and even shared kitchens. I've seen variations of this - but the theme among the ones that succeed are that the solution is simple, and often, the core of the solution is a person (or people) and not technology.
Rather than go for a big collection of book cases, why not try something smaller and more focused? If you get it right on the smaller scale, you've got much better odds of figuring out how to scale it in a way that doesn't cost you lots of unnecessary time and effort in the future.