SFPL going about it from the wrong direction

Today I received an email message from the SFPL letting me know that I book I have checked out is overdue by ten days.

My first thought was: why did they wait ten days? This isn't like a paper notice. There's no cost associated with sending it, so there's no advantage to delaying. Why wasn't email sent out immediately after closing time on the day it was due?

My second thougth was: since a goal of libraries is to have as many items available in the library at any time, and since overdue materials is a rampant problem in America's public libraries, why not send a friendly reminder notice to me a week before the book is due? I would have really appreciated it, and they would have had the materials back on time.

I'm certainly no expert on the topic, but I'm constantly distressed at the feature gap between the web software that libraries use and sites such as Amazon. Library software is lacking both in the small details (such as with reminder mail, as described above), and in bigger things, such as fostering community (why not let patrons review books? Who are the top 100 reviewers in your community?).

Basically what I'm getting at is that no one has their public library set as their homepage, and that's a shame.

Comments

[cj]

To answer one of your questions with a factual answer and the other with an opinion -

"why not send a friendly reminder notice to me a week before the book is due?"

This depends on the feature set of their "Integrated Library System" - aka ILS to us librarians. The ILS Seattle Public uses (Dynix) is set up to send you reminders three days before your materials are due and I would imagine that any ILS these days could be configured to pick any date based off of the due date. Basically, tell the system to subtract X days from the due date and send the reminder.

But maybe the SFPL system only allows you to do it post-due date. Which would be really stupid, but that leads to the next point....

"Library software is lacking both in the small details (such as with reminder mail, as described above)"

Agreed - but the market is small and generally you work on fairly mundane programming procedures when it comes to ILS design and development, so it is hard to attract top talent. And, oh yeah, it is the library field, so the pay is crappy.

"and in bigger things, such as fostering community (why not let patrons review books? Who are the top 100 reviewers in your community?)."

The standard answer I have heard for this within the library community is that it would require too much overhead to monitor. Not sure if this is true, but I doubt that any library wants to get invovled in the area. I will just make a broad statement about librarians and that is we generally see things like this as threats not opportunities.

Regardless of the above, you should send an e-mail to the e-mail address on the web site at SFPL and tell them exactly what you said in your post.

And since I am just making broad, sweeping statements about librarians (that is one of the benfits of being a librarian), I might as well make another one - we aim to please. If the system can be fixed and it makes more sense, I would say that there is a good chance they would listen to you and implement your suggestions. Of course, there may be some sort of weird reason why they do not, but it is just as likely that they set that parameter once and forgot about it.

PS - your suggestions made me think about this way too much and have (or will soon) generated a blog entry over at www.technobiblio.com.

[chris]

Library fines are a revenue source. 10 day late notices make sense to me.

As far as the reviews idea, I see no reason why it couldn't be volunteer moderated like LiveJournal. You start of with an open forum, say for sci-fi books. You identidy responsible people who make good/useful posts and who help others. Invite them to moderate and then move on to creating the next forum.

Tying that in to a web-based catalog like SFPL's shouldn't be impossible [ducks]. Of course, that would mean people spending more time at the catalog terminals.

Now, if more people would buy our product then they'd have the entire web catalog in their pocket as they walk the aisles. That would solve the problems with long lines at the catalog stations.