On June 16th, the Library Commission approved our recommendation to keep adult and young adult materials fine free permanently! We found in our tracking of materials over the last year that fine free made a positive impact on our community. We saw around 50,000 inactive accounts come back to use the library. We did see an initial increase in the number of items and accounts that went overdue once fines were removed, but autorenewal drastically reduced these numbers.

The initial increase in numbers correlated to the fall and winter increase in COVID cases when people were not getting out as much. In February, we implemented auto-renewal for library materials. Once this was in place along with fine free, our materials and accounts overdue dropped dramatically and stayed low. On June 2nd, only 2300 guests had materials overdue and only 6000 items were overdue out of over 300k items checked out. This means only 2% of all items out on accounts were in an overdue status in CARL. Lost items have also stayed steady with no increase in the percentage of items currently out on accounts.

Guests are returning their materials close to on time even if they hold them overdue. On average, if our guests keep materials overdue, they are returning them within one day of their due date. Additionally, we are not seeing accounts with high numbers of renewals on their items since we started autorenewal. So, we are not seeing guests keep their materials longer than they need them.

See the attached document for graphs of our overdues, checkouts, and renewals.

Going forward, just technology, experience passes, and ILL's will retain overdue fines!