To Fine or not to fine, that is the question.

I was reminded as I looked through Library Journal tonight, of a quote that both made me grimace and laugh, because I understood the sentiment so well.

"I actually have several late fees. It is kind of deterring me away from the library," says Ashley Brown, In the Chronicle of Higher Education Information Technology supplement of January 2007.

We've been discussing fines some recently, and of course I've often discussed them with friends. Friends who have quit using the library after large fines were accessed to their account.

Academic libraries are, or necessity, a different beast than public libraries, and yet I still can't help but feel that overdue fines are a hassle for both librarian and user and a deterrent to library use. While this particular belief is one I don't really voice often in department meetings, or one that would be even remotely popular among my colleagues, it's still one that I hold.

Perhaps its a childhood of growing up in the Daniel Boone Regional Library system, where overdue fines aren't accessed. If you lose an item, you pay for the item, but if it's three days late, you check it in. Perhaps it's my supervisor's voice in my ear when I worked as a circulation assistant there - "why don't we do overdue fines?" - "It's more hassle than it's worth, and it doesn't bring the books back any more quickly." That's a paraphrase, but that covers the general idea.

I think too of NetFlix and their business model - you keep it as long as you like, when you return it you get another one - no late fines.

Where there are fines involved, video rentals for instance, knowing that I need to pay those fines will keep me from using the that service again. And when I was in college, the Lincoln Public Library system was my first encounter with overdue fines. At first I was very careful to make certain my books were back on time, but then I had thirty small children's books checked out (elementary education major) overdue two days at $.25 per item per day and you can imagine how quickly that adds up. Knowing that fine was there and that I would need to pay it to check materials out did discourage me from going back. As a book lover and a libraryphile, it clearly won't stop me as it might some users, but I did wait until I had money to pay the fine which meant not visiting the library for several weeks more than I would have otherwise.

We're very concerned with users. We want people to enter the library, to make use of the collection, for our gate count numbers to be high. If as librarians we want users to make use of our collections, isn't there a better way to encourage items to come back? Blocking items with a "replacement fee" that is removed as soon as the item is returned seems far more effective alternative, both in terms of bringing the item and the user back into the library building.

One Box Fits All

The more I work with students, the more exciting the idea of a metasearch sounds. I pretested several of the English Writing students during the last period. Their response to how to find a book when they have a title, were things like "search that library database", "search on the library's main search", "ask a librarian", and so forth. The problem of course is there are catalogs and databases and they search different things.

A metasearch would search everything. At one point it seemed frivolous. After all, there's the catalog and it searches what the library has. That's a no brainer, right? (Seriously, even before I was a librarian, that was a no-brainer.) Except that it isn't. And add in dozens of databases and it muddies the waters even further.

Leaving me to draw the conclusion that a metasearch isn't necessarily a bad thing on library websites. And one box on the front page that searches the library's books, journal subscriptions, and possibly quality websites, isn't necessarily a bad thing either.

Thingamabrarian

An interesting interview with Tim Spalding, creator of Librarything.com, in Library Journal. Particularly of interest, is his discussion of tags. I've mentioned them from time to time to other librarians, and the temptation seems to be - oh, no, what happens to controlled vocabulary, users won't tag things with useful information, etc. Except that I don't really see it that way - particularly with a large user base tagging items.

I also was interested in this link from the LibraryThing blog, where it seems that Tim is working with library OPACs to integrate LibraryThing data into the catalogs. This could make tagging much more useful because it would be using data already available and from a large group of users, into a setting where the controlled vocab (i.e. subject headings) are still available.

The largest push currently in libraries is to pay attention to the users. Frankly that makes me ask the question, why haven't we been doing that all along? The answer, of course, is probably wound up in the history of libraries going way back to the Monk's and the fact that normal people didn't have access to this type of information, but it's a different world now. Let's not live in the dark ages.

2.0 @ The Library

Jenny linked to this on her blog The Shifted Librarian and I thought it certainly pairs the web down to its cultural and anthropological heart.