With the crippled economy forcing more Bay Staters to dust off library cards, local lending institutions are throwing the book at overdue scofflaws, turning them over to the cops and courts in a hard-nosed bid to collect fines and recover costly tomes and DVDs.
“The value of the materials is fairly high. We need to replace them,” said Martha Holden, director of the Peabody Institute Library, which has sent the law after a trio of overdue culprits.
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The severe steps to retrieve borrowed materials comes as cash-strapped public libraries statewide are busier than ever.
Bay Staters borrowed 57 million items from libraries in fiscal 2009, up from 54 million in fiscal 2008, according to Celeste Bruno, spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. Meanwhile, state aid to libraries dropped to $6.8 million in fiscal 2010 from nearly $10 million in fiscal 2009.
Another example increasingly successful (and utilized) libraries have their budgets cut. As we have said before, The greater the demand for service seems to regularly cause funding to decrease. It makes little sense.
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