The Worcester Library in Massachusetts is letting people with lost or damaged books get their cards reactivated by bringing in an image of a cat.
The only thing people will have to do is bring a photograph, drawing, or magazine clipping of a cat.
March Meowness
The program has generated a way to forgive community members who misplaced a book or damaged a borrowed item and never returned to pay for it.
So far, the program has generated hundreds of returns.
Multiple images of cat photos are on the library’s Instagram page. Some of the photographs and drawings are on a wall in the library’s main building.
Jason Homer, Executive Director of the Library, said in an interview on Monday that about 400 people have had their accounts reactivated and borrowing privileges restored by bringing in an image of a cat.
The program allows an image of any animal like a raccoon, whale, or a dog for people to bring to get their fees forgiven. The images submitted were of cats stretched out in a tree, ignoring a dog, and peering into the camera from a chair or carpet.
March Meowness Progress
The library has returned to become a vibrant community space. They are doing this by offering crafts, wellness courses, and seminars about avoiding fraud.
The library will have events for March Meowness in addition to the fee-forgiveness.
There will be a cat-eye makeup tutorial for humans, a lecture from a certified cat behaviorist, and an event to de-stress with cats from the Worcester Animal Rescue League.
Before March Meowness, the library would hold canned food drives to boost attendance and fee-forgiveness programs.
The program took shape after several months of brainstorming by a library task force. This task force met to devise a creative way to get people to look through the doors.
101,601 cards were issued at the library’s seven branches. 4,297 of those cards were blocked. Three hundred cards belonged to students, most of them in elementary school.
The library had previously stopped charging fines for late returns. Even though the library did this, many people who had fees for lost items stayed away.
Worcester Library is encouraging people to re-emerge from the solitary days of Covid-19.
Impact Covid-19 had on libraries
In 2020, the library system announced that it would no longer charge late fines. However, the library systems still collect fees for lost or damaged books.
The program is part of a larger trend of libraries to reduce and remove fees.
“Many libraries, for example, in big cities like New York and Chicago and Seattle have already adopted programs of not having fines per se”, Marc Aronson, Associate Professor of Practice, Library and Information Science at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, said.
The initiative came from a rise in overdue fines among young patrons since the pandemic.
The program proved to be popular by clearing over 400 accounts in only five days.
