Issue 58
Ed keeps his eye on the ball
Monday March 5th 2012
Should we intervene in Syria?
Page 4
Hail Mary? More like Fail Mary! LOL banter... Page 7
Page 15
The Newspaper of Queen Mary Students’ Union
Your library fine: £650,000 » Each of the last four academic years have seen the Library receive more than £100,000 in fines Kaamil Ahmed Students have paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in fines to the Library in less than ten years according to information released by the college. Across all campuses, Queen Mary’s Library Services have raised more than £650,000 in fines for overdue material since 2004 - the furthest date for which data is available. Each of the last four academic years have seen the Library receive more than £100,000 in fines, but a spokesperson for Library Services said that they do their best to reduce the amount that students have to pay. “The Library monitors and changes book loan statuses to reduce the amount of fines generated whilst still enabling books to circulate and encouraging people to return books on time”, said Pat Simons. “We also have processes that ensure individual borrowers do not incur excessive fines without speaking to Library staff about making arrangements to pay them and how to avoid them in future.” Simons said that the Library Services tried to make it easier for students to return books by getting rid of the short loan status, which meant some books could only be kept for four hours, and making those books one day loans.
How much has the library made? 2004/05 = £74,323 2005/06 = £84,569 2006/07 = £91,081 2007/08 = £102,825 2008/09 = £102,057 2009/10 = £105,449 2010/11 = £100,738
There was a significant increase in the amount of money generated by fines, with £74,323 in the 2004/2005 academic year, but the amount has been consistently over £100,000 since 2007/2008. Simons suggested that this was because there has been a 41% increase in the number of students in full-time education at Queen Mary and a 10% increase in the amount of books which are loaned annually. Simons said that all of the money raised from the fines is used to buy new books and internet resources for students, with more than 55,000 books being bought for the college libraries since 2008. Just over ten per cent of the books bought for the 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 academic years were paid for with money collected from fines. The library has also bought more than 4,000 e-books since 2008. Library fines so far for this academic year have reached £27,000, though may rise significantly towards the end of year as students often have to pay off all of their debts in order to receive their exam results. It was recently revealed that universities across the country had raised £50 million over the last six years, with some universities raising more than a million pounds in that period.
Figures for books added to stock 2008-09: 33186 new books plus 3475 e-books 2009-10: 11604 new books plus 418 e-books of which 1330 books and 168 e-books paid for from fines 2010-11: 12890 new books plus 692 e-books of which 1591 books and 178 e-books were paid for from fines