Typically story about fines owed to a library. Article mentions that the top outstanding fine was $8000.
Excerpt from article: “For the large one, this person came in and checked out 125 items in one day and that was it. They never came back and we can’t trace them.”
Full article here.
There is always the story of
There is always the story of the person who goes around to libraries checking out books and selling the on ebay.
125 items at once
What is the library doing by letting someone checkout 125 items at once?
Our library doesn’t even
Our library doesn’t even have a 125 item limit. I work at a university library so we have a bit more of a leash on the patrons than most libraries but it still leaves us vulnerable to abuse.
Why?
What are the administrators thinking?
Why would you allow someone/anyone to check-out 125 items? Where is the fine/lost material threshold? How is it that people can keep books from when they are children and still check out other materials and keep incurring fines?
Where I work we had a fine free week; anyone returning overdue items ,no matter how late, had all their fines canceled and for those who already had late fees, those who came in to pay them we gave a 50% discount. It worked! Not only did our weekly revenues from fines increase but we got a lot of our missing materials returned.
Part of running a library is no different than running a business. $8,000 is a large chunk of change and there is no reason that this amount should have been allowed to have been incurred! There are fiscal responsibilities in running a library, this is not a welfare state. “There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch” With these tough economic times, librarians losing their jobs, and library closures, libraries are obviously going to have to get tougher and more fiscally savvy.
>^..^<
Serves them right
There is NOONE that needs 125 items out from a library.
Surely all you’d need is a few people doing that and you’d have whole sections of the Library empty.
The fine rates for most libraries I seem to read about on here are pitifully low as well.