Huffington Post has an article about another library wanting to send out collection agents, cops, courts, and jails for overdue books. Not surprising in a red state.

huffingtonpost.com

One of the best ways I can think of to kill libraries is to make people afraid to use them.

In the article, they note a little-known ordinance in the city that allows this.

In my own village, we had a similar ordinance. (Our public library is directly owned by the town, not run by a non-profit as many are.) Actually, we had a bunch of them.

I got with the library board (which is nominally in charge of running the library, and is appointed by the village board) to note that we had a bunch of out-of-date ordinances that were actually harmful to running a library. They agreed when I showed them laws going back to the Thirties noting such things as “a library patron will be charged $2 for a lost book.”

I brought up at a village board meeting the problem with these old, outdated village ordinances, and the board put me on the problem of finding them to put to it the next month for discussion. (You found it, you fix it.)

I did that. At the next village board meeting, I presented two resolutions: One to strike out the entire section of the village ordinances pertaining to the library (other than the parts pertaining to the village board appointing library board members), and a new ordinance making the library board responsible for library rules (previously they had to be passed as ordinances), employee pay (the village budgets the library but the library board would determine how that money is spent), and a technological plan for computer security.

In one swoop, over 120 ordinances accumulated over eighty-five years were stuck down on a 5-0 vote.