nbruce writes “This item was buried in the “In and about town” column of the weekly Upper Arlington News, Jan. 14, 2004. UA is an affluent suburb of Columbus, OH. A $10 fee is going to be assessed for library material more than 45 days overdue, using Unique Management Services, an Indiana company that works specifically with libraries to retrieve delinquent material, writes Anne Maher
Considering that the article reports that 99.5% of the patrons return their materials on time, I’m wondering if even fines, let alone fees, are cost effective. However, I noticed that my Ohio State University Libraries notices are advertising $10 a day overdue charge now.
The UAPL does not fine senior citizens for overdue materials, something I discovered when I complained about the barely readable single piece of paper with the due date that is taped to a stack of books being checked out.”
Shakedown
The idea is to threaten your patrons credit if they do not pay their library fees. Read the info on the website of the collection agency. Libraries sign up for this because they get money. It is profitable for the collection agency because they get a percentage of all the overdue fines collected. The reason libraries are adding a $10 fee for overdue books is because they have to pay the collection agency $8 for each account they send to them. Once the fee is payed the collection agency comes after you and takes a percentage of the money collected.
The post had this line “Considering that the article reports that 99.5% of the patrons return their materials on time, I’m wondering if even fines, let alone fees, are cost effective.”
Personally I would really have to question that statistic. 99.5% of all items are turned in on time??? I need some comparisons. Any libraries out there have other statistics on the percentage of books turned in overdue?
Fees for fines
That is 99.5% of the patrons, not the materials. You could have a few problem patrons with bad track records.
It’s not all bad…
We use Unique as well and we’ve had some really stunning success with them. We started charging fines for the first time in over 30 years back in July of 2002. At first, patrons were pretty pissed off. But ya know something? When you have over 10,000 items overdue and probably one quarter of those are more than a year overdue, you have to do something. We got books back in droves. Stuff that was so old, it hadn’t even been added to our system when we’d changed over more than four years before. Tech Services was putting in some hefty time getting stuff back into the system.
We were pretty happy with that, and then we starting looking at some other data. There were patrons who still hadn’t gotten the jist and never returned their materials. There were more than a few folks owing well over US$1,000 in materials and fines. We wanted that stuff back too, since that tended to be the really good stuff. One schmuck literally had a copy of every book Ann Rule wrote up to that time. And they’d had them all over a year. After some searching, we went with Unique. Boy oh boy, when those first notices hit and patrons thought they might be sent to collection, we got even more books returned.
We charge a $15.00 fee if the account has to be handed over to Unique. It takes a lot of work and time to go that far though. The patron is sent two overdue notices. After that, they’re sent a third notice and billed for the cost of the material plus the fine. If they bring the book back, the cost of the material is waived. They still have to pay the fine. I believe that the third notice goes out at 30 days overdue. After another 30 days, 60 total so far, they’re handed to Unique and assessed a $15.00 charge on top of everything else. Once again, they hand in the material, we waive the costs, but not the overdues or the $15.00 charge.
After Unique has it for another 60 days, then, and only then, are they sent into collection. That’s quite literally 180 days overdue. If a patron can’t get a book back in six months, they deserve collection.
Re:It’s not all bad…
You say you had 10,000 items overdue. How many patrons comprised this pool and out of how many total patrons? Just curious what your rate of overdues was.