Everytime I seem to remember to take my library books my internal month remembering mechanism is a week out, this time I have 4 old poetry books and the fine at my locally library before i got them renewed is now £4.72. this seems to be a monthly cost for me and i can no longer afford to use my public library at this rate.
I’m thinking about starting a campaign to limit and standardise library fines :
1. Library fines to be a standard 5p per day UK wide for books from your local library that no-one has reserved, and to be 10p per day only, on books that are reserved by someone else, from the date that person reserved them. Only including days the books are returnable. This would limit the maximum fine per year per book to £18.25, Rather than the current £36.50 as most library seem to charge per year per book at the 10p per day rate.
2. Loan Periods for standard books to be exactly 30 days not 28 days countrywide.
3. To limit maximum fines to the retail cost of the book – 10% per annum for every year the book is old, upto a maximum of 60% reduction based on the publish date of the book, this will make sure that libraries arent charging ludicrous fines on books that can be picked up second hand for less.
4. Every library must have 1 random advertised amnesty a year. Lasting a period of 7 days, books returned within this period can be returned for either free, or at 10% of the fines involved, at the librarys discretion this rate choice should be advertised at the time though.
Often though if a family has borrowed books and not returned those books they might have say seven out, this would total £255.50 in a year with the current 10p per day scheme, this could easily be done by poor busy familys and most of the books they borrowed would not be that expensive to replace by quite some way. Loss rates in library are known to be somewhere between in the 3-8% region each time a library stock loss check is run, though rates can be as low as 0.15% up to 0.5% loss rate per annum, indicating that loss rate checks are done around every six years. Any library staff want to give the skinny on this ?
I think these measures need to be imposed, Otherwise libraries will fall out of use, if people can buy books cheaper than the cost of associated accidental fines from borrowing. After all libraries are mainly for the use of poor people, as rich people can afford to buy the books there interested in. So if poor people end up with fines that drive them away from public borrowing whats the point of libraries in the first place its their mandate to encourage reading. The fine should be an incentive to return the books not actual painfull expense for poor familys and people.
North Yorkshire libraries seem to charge 15p per day per item for adults, I wonder whether this has any impact on their adult literacy rates ? Heres their charges table:
Link me your councils librarys charge table and we’ll make a ranking of them and correlate with literacy ranking.
COMMENT BACK :
Have public library fines discouraged you from using Public library services or from letting your children use them ? Have you got fines at your local library, that now prevent you from using it ?