LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

A Wisconsin woman has been arrested and booked for failing to pay her library fines.
Twenty-year-old Heidi Dalibor told the News Graphic in Cedarburg that she ignored the library's calls and letters as well as a notice to appear in court.
(Thanks to Gary for the headsup)

Private detectives hunt for late library books: Norfolk County Council (That's in England) admitted it had spent £82,358 in the past three years using private detectives.

Much of the money was used to hunt debtors and the council confessed it had used detectives to look online for people who owed them cash but had moved away.

Now That's LATE! Finnish library-goer apparently thought 'better late than never' and quietly returned a book on loan for more than 100 years to a library in Vantaa, in southern Finland.

The library had long since lost track of the loan but welcomed back to its collections the bound copy of a 1902 volume of Vartija, an active religious monthly periodical at the time.

A librarian, a book 113 years overdue, and a patron listed only as "A" takes a librarian on a journey around the world and through 2,000 years of time in a new one man play titled Underneath the Lintel.

More from the Herald Tribune.

We're way overdue for an overdue book story! The BBC Saves The Day! An overdue book borrowed from a Cumbrian library more than a quarter of a century ago has been returned.
The book, Mining in the Lake Counties by WT Shaw, was posted back to Penrith Library anonymously during an amnesty.

It was last borrowed in April 1983 and was one of 400 overdue items returned to libraries throughout the county during the 10-day suspension of fines.

An Overdue Library Book Could Scuttle Your Dreams Of Home Ownership:

Libraries are not stores. Sorry to boil it down to such a simple statement, but libraries are unique institutions (as the idiot who keeps going "What's a library?" seems to think is so funny) that provide a community service. Most library systems require you to provde a couple forms of id to get a card.

Sewell Chan's NY Times Blog reports on a program at the Queens Borough Library that for the past eleven years has utilized a collection agency and also sometimes refers extreme cases to a credit bureau.

In a related story, one overdue borrower sued the collection agency and won (on something of a technicality).

Readers are invited to reveal their own overdue book stories here.

Should an overdue library book affect your credit rating?

Chile has returned 3,778 books that its military had taken from Peru's national library - more than 126 years overdue.
Chilean soldiers pillaged the library in 1881 after capturing the Peruvian capital, Lima, during the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific.

Now residing in Brooklyn, N.Y., Elizabeth Gifford enclosed a note in the package explaining that she'd recently found the book and realized it was from her high school library.

She wrote to the school librarian that she recalled the late fee on overdue books as 10 cents per day. So, she did the math.

Enclosed in the envelope with the book was a check to the Brooks High School Library for $620 - the accumulated fine since 1990.

"I couldn't believe it," Whitehead said. "She requested that the money, 'please be used for new library acquisitions.' "

When it comes to overdue books there are apparently no excuses - not even death - at the Harrison Public Library.

That's the lesson a town woman learned when she was charged a 50-cent late fee while turning in a book that had been checked out by her mother, who died before she could return it herself.

"I was in shock,'' Elizabeth Schaper said of the incident at the Bruce Avenue library branch. "This has rocked me to my core."