San Franciscans are a critical bunch when it comes to city government. Just the other day, I dropped in on the guy who makes my glasses. "You hear that buzzing?" he asks.
I do, vaguely. He explains the phone in the back room has been on hold for half an hour trying to get through to someone in a city tax office to explain that he's already paid the bill they are dunning him for.
We commiserate.
I also routinely commiserate with a friend who owns a little shop: although we have an "Office of Small Business," she's never been able to reach a human being there either.
But there's one institution most of us can praise unreservedly: the San Francisco Public Library. It even comes to us, as pictured here.
And now our library plans to join San Mateo, Contra Costa, Berkeley and San Diego in making borrowing fine-free. Those annoying 5 and 10 cent a day fines only bring in $300K annually -- a drop in the bucket in a $138 million budget.
Librarians told the Library Commission they hate trying to collect fines. But the damage is so much greater than a few dollars. Anne Stuhldreher from The Financial Justice Office (yeah, we have such a thing) studied the effects of the fine system:
Message received by the powers that be. No more fines! You would think they actually people to read books. ...We found that approximately 5 percent of all library cardholders have their cards blocked because of overdue fines.
Library borrowers regardless of income miss return deadlines at similar rates. About one-third of borrowers owe overdue fines or fees at any time.
However, lower income people have a harder time paying fines for overdue items. In the Bayview branch, which serves a lower-income area, 11 percent of people have their cards blocked. That’s three times as high as at branches in many high-income areas.
Library branches serving areas with larger numbers of African Americans and people without college degrees also had higher debt levels and more blocked accounts from overdue fines.
Simply put, charging overdue fines works against the library’s mission of free and equal access to information.
I think I'll take in the 5 cents I owe anyway.
2 comments:
Excellent idea. My kids live in San Mateo and use the library ALL the time. I know they have talked about getting videos back on time so as not to pay a fee.
Sanford Berman, radical librarian.
* Expand and simplify access to library resources for poor, unemployed, and homeless people, in part by energetically implementing ALA's "Poor People's Policy." (Locally, this also involves abolishing fines when their major purpose is to generate revenue, not to get the books back, and avoiding fee-based services -- like bestseller rental programs -- that are predicated solely on the ability to pay.)
Not about fines, but a twitter seeking volunteers:
https://twitter.com/Crowd_LOC
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