Altamont Library Notes for Wednesday, March 2, 2022

As we all know, the Enterprise’s Letters to the Editor section is required reading for anyone interested in the rich, dramatic pageant of local life, and is worth the meager cost of a subscription all on its own. This week, Guilderland Public Library Director Tim Wiles and I contributed to the drama with our announcement that, as of today, both of the libraries we serve have eliminated overdue fines.

It’s difficult to change your perception of what a library is supposed to be overnight. Some people hold tightly to the image of libraries as quiet book repositories where you were as likely to be shushed as to be helped. We hope that our users have appreciated the sea change that has taken hold over the past decades, as libraries have become more energetic, more community focused, warmer and, yes, sometimes louder. Librarians don’t really shush anymore, though many of us still wear cool glasses and cardigan sweaters. Cardigans will never go out of style.

Overdue fines are a relic of that older style of library service, when librarians believed that it was their job to protect books from dirty fingers. Today’s libraries are far more about community building, active learning, and personal empowerment than about gatekeeping.

An important aspect of this transition to a new, more welcoming mode of operation has been the dismantling of barriers between people and their libraries. We’ve reduced barriers by making it easier to get a library card, easier to borrow ebooks and digital audiobooks from home, and easier to renew the things you’ve borrowed through our smartphone app and our new automatic renewal policy. Eliminating overdue fines is one more way to reduce barriers to access.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that you can keep library materials forever. If you keep things out for too long, you’ll be charged for the replacement cost of the item, and you won’t be able to borrow more items until the item is returned or the replacement cost is paid.

Our patrons know that, when you borrow something from the library, you have a responsibility to return it when you’re done with it so that others can use it, and we trust that our patrons will be more motivated by that responsibility than they will be by a financial penalty. But, if you still feel guilty about keeping items out too long, we’ve got a donation jar right on the counter.

Many libraries have taken this step before Altamont and Guilderland, including several of the others with columns on this page, so we have a very good idea of what to expect. The vast majority of libraries that have eliminated overdue fines have — perhaps counterintuitively — saved rather than lost money, because of the reduced staffing and postage costs related to collecting fines.

The majority end up getting items back that they haven’t seen in a long time. The majority end up seeing more patrons coming through the door, both new ones coming in for the first time and old patrons who haven’t used the library because of past fines.

The primary consideration, though, is that we never want to tell a child that he or she can’t borrow books from the library because books were returned late. If my staff and I never have to do that again, then this new policy will have been a success.

If you have any questions about this policy or anything else, give me a call at 518-861-7239 or send me an email at . Alternatively, if it’s been a while, you can stop by the library and say hi. We’ll be happy to see you again.