No More Late Fees at the Weyburn Public Library

If the thought of late fees was preventing you from accessing your local library, you now have no more excuses here in Weyburn.

"We stopped charging fines because of COVID before I started working here in the summer, but that was just a temporary thing, so it was officially January 1st that we stopped charging overdue fines," stated Katherine Wagner, Branch Manager at the Weyburn Public Library.

She explained, "enforcing overdue fines doesn't actually make the libraries a lot of money, when you consider the administrative costs of having to process all of the fines, and when you consider the amount of people who might be pushed away from the library because of it, it's just not worth it."

Wagner said she used to live in Japan, where no libraries ever charge fine for overdue materials.

"That was a bit of a shock for me when I first moved there. I returned a book late, and I was like, 'are they going to tell me... how much do I owe? Oh no, what am I going to do?'," she shared. "My Japanese wasn't super great yet, so I was just assuming someone would tell me [about my overdue fines]."

She said even though it's something she was used to from having lived in Canada, the libraries in Japan still "functioned totally perfectly".

Wagner noted, however, patrons will still be charged for lost or damaged items.