As long as you get them in on time, you shouldn’t see any difference.
The William K. Sanford increased its overdue fees for book titles from 10 cents to 20 cents per item per day on Sunday, Nov. 1. The fee will max out at $5 per item which the book title borrower will have to pay before checking out another title.
According to Richard Naylor, library director, The last time we changed it was about 16 years ago and this is the second time we’ve raised it.
Naylor said the original overdue fee was 5 cents when the library first opened in 1976.
This time, the library decided to raise its fee because the cost of the max out, which used to be $3, was such a small percentage of the actual cost of the book that borrowers could end up keeping the books for such a small fee.
`It’s a small percentage of the cost of the book,` he said.
To get to the new fee, Naylor said the library added inflation.
`It’s proportionally the same in terms of the dollar,` Naylor said, comparing the $5 maximum fee to what the $3 maximum fee would have been in 1976.
When asked whether the decision to raise the overdue fee had anything to do with the economy, Naylor said, `You can’t really disconnect the two.`
But Naylor said that it is not the main reason the library decided to increase the overdue fee.
`The main thing is that we want to get the item back for another person and that overrides everything,` he said.
When books are not returned on time, Naylor said they are unable to circulate throughout the library and into the hands of a new borrower. By decreasing circulation there are higher chances that when someone comes to the library looking for a particular book, it might not be there.
Cindy Seim, supervisor of the circulation department, said that by circulating books, library users are made to be more responsible.
`It does keep things moving, it does keep people responsible,` she said. `It keeps them responsible for items that they check out.`
Seim said that a borrower is able to renew a book up to five times and that it creates a lengthy amount of time for the book to be in the possession of one person.
`That’s a long span of time to have a book in your possession. That’s 15 weeks, as long as nobody’s waiting for it. If somebody’s waiting for it, they will stop the requests.`
Oftentimes what happens, Seim said, is that the book gets circulated amongst friends while it is checked out.
`People would loan it to their friends and it would go around a friend group rather than circulating with other patrons who are sitting and waiting for it,` she said.
Seim said that many people also take out more than one book so they should be aware of the overdue fees.
The library does offer a one-day grace period where the fee will not increase on the first day, Seim said, and books dropped off in the drop box will be backdated to having been returned on the day before.
If one chooses, Naylor said, they cook keep the book longer, if for instance they were working on a paper for school and needed the book a bit longer to complete the project.
But they would then be responsible for the overdue fee.
`You could keep it a week longer and pay $1.40,` he said. `But we’d really rather have people bring it back. It depends on the situation.`
There are several options for renewing your books to avoid overdue fees. You could stop in the library and ask if the book has been reserved for another patron and if not, renew it; you can renew over the telephone; and you can also renew the book online by clicking on `My Account` on the Library’s Web site, www.colonie.org/library. The site will ask you to enter your pin. If you are not sure what your pin is, contact the library at 458-9274.
For more on this story, check back at www.spotlightnews.com, or read the Wednesday, Nov. 4, print edition of the Colonie Spotlight.“