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When was the last time you visited your neighborhood library? Read the excerpts from the featured article and check your bookshelves, if needed.
“Eleven years ago, the Queens Library system, the largest in the nation by circulation, hired a professional enforcer to collect the 25-cents-a-day late fines as well as missing library materials from books to DVDs to rare musical scores…The gambit has paid off handsomely. The haul so far: $11.4 million, about half of that in fines…
Borrowers who fail to return Queens Library books can be reported to a collection agency and to a credit bureau, with a damaged credit rating as a result…
The gambit has paid off handsomely. The haul so far: $11.4 million, about half of that in fines. That’s a lot of quarters.
Borrowers who fail to return Queens Library books can be reported to a collection agency and to a credit bureau, with a damaged credit rating as a result…
The company’s muscle comes from its ability to report some library users to credit bureaus. Unique Management contacts library patrons by letter and phone with an encouraging yet ultimately threatening message: Your library wants to keep you as a patron in good standing. Contact them to return your books and settle your fees. Or we will report you.
It works. About 70 percent of the people contacted by the company (who, in Queens, have ignored or missed four notices from the library) return some of their overdue materials or pay part of their fines.
“Once reported, this adverse information can stay on your record for seven years!” declares one of the company’s standard letters, which goes on to warn that car dealers, department stores and banks may learn of the library users’ misdeeds. “Why allow this to happen?”
…the New York Public Library, which runs branches in Manhattan, Staten Island and the Bronx, has been a satisfied client since 1995, library officials said. Unique has retrieved $5.8 million for the system, including, in the fiscal year that ended in June, $415,695 worth of materials and $335,062 in cash, money that the library spends on new materials.”
Read the article here: www.nytimes.com
I don’t know if other states employ similar tactics to get their books back, but consider yourself warned.
