We cap at $10 for books and $30 for media and reserves. Had to increase it recently due to the difficulty we’ve had getting that stuff back. Students really hate it when they can’t get their mitts on that reserve or dvd they need for class.

Anyone can renew once online. Faculty and staff don’t get unlimited renewals (mentioned above). Yikes!

We belong to a terrific ILS service called Link+. It’s really efficient. We always encourage patrons to request through Link+ rather than place a hold (or do both). Generally, they get the book quicker through Link+.

Oh and someone mentioned taking comfort in the fact that the fine money went to the library. This isn’t the case on our university campus. Fine money goes to the campus! Not sure if that’s the case for a lot of academic libraries.

Since I have so much out, I’m very careful about fines. My unofficial system is that I renew all items a week before their due date and whatever comes up with a hold on it that I can’t renew I read and return in that week. So some weeks I’m scrambling to get everything read and will purposefully incur a few fines just to finish them and other weeks nothing’s on hold and I can read freely from the pile. Our loan period is a generous three weeks, so I don’t have to scramble too often, and I let fines collect at $.25 a day until they get to the $5-6 dollar mark. Honestly, fines don’t really bother me much either. I’m with the folks who are happy to pay something for this awesome public good.

Because there’s a different loan period and fine structure ($1.00 a day) for DVDs, they don’t really fit into my renewal system, so I very rarely borrow them from the library (and we have Netflix anyway.)

We charge .05/day for kid books, .10 for adult $1 for movies. Kids are capped at $5, adults at $10, movies at purchase price.

You can only renew stuff twice if there isn’t a hold. Honestly, I’m ok with this. After working at an academic library where the staff had unlimited renewals? Many, many, many members of staff had books that had been checked out for decades. They’d have the library order a book that they wanted to own, check it out as soon as it came in and keep renewing it until they retired.

Also, a helpful library hint– if you can’t renew because of a hold, but there are several open copies? Wait a day. Most libraries pull hold books every morning before opening. If you wait a day or two, there’s a good chance the book will have been pulled and trapped for the hold, so then you can renew. If you can’t wait, call the reference desk of a branch with an open copy and explain the situation. They won’t override the hold, they’ll just get their copy and trap the hold, so then you can renew, that way everyone gets what they want!

We have a designated spot for library books – out of the car, into the house, and in the basket in the family room … not to be removed from that room until they’re on their way back to the library. It’s hard to enforce, because the kids like to bring the books to their rooms and on car trips, but I tell them they can’t do that with library books.

At age 5 each of my kids got a library card of their own, and was reminded of the overdue fines if a book couldn’t be found when it was time to return it.

That just leaves my books and my 4-yr-old’s on my card, so it’s getting easier for me. I do enforce that they pay the fine if a book isn’t in the designated spot when I do a sweep to return them.

I have all the library reminders (for kids and me) go to my email so I can pull the books from the basket as needed (they give us 2 days notice on reminders)

Good luck … this too shall pass!

Your library does have hefty fines. Our is $.25 a day per item, with a max of $5. It also usually has a good online holds and renewal system, but it goes down a lot and if you owe more than $3-4 in fines you can’t use it. Frustrating when you just want to renew the book so you don’t get any more fines.

I wish our library would send reminder e-mails when an item is due! That would be so cool.