Starting last Saturday, and lasting until April 15, the University's library will be accepting overdue materials without fines, save for short-term course reserve materials and short-term equipment loans.

The initiative was proposed "five or six months ago" by the library administration as a method to decrease the number of missing books before the library initiates a plan to change its collection, according to Goldfarb Library Associate Director for Public Services Patricia Flanagan in an interview with the Justice.

With more books accounted for, the library will be able to better determine shelving accommodations, said Flanagan. She added that the current number of missing books is no higher than usual, numbering at around 1,000. According to Flanagan, the whole collection includes about 1.2 million books. Eventually, missing books are taken off of catalog records so as to remove "dead ends" from the catalog search. Once returned, the library will recreate records of the books.

The initiative is intended to be both a goodwill gesture to the community and a chance to get lost books back, according to Flanagan. Flanagan said that popular books are often the more valuable items in the collection.

"If it's gone missing that might be a good indication that it is useful information, and therefore we would want it back."

The University library has never attempted such an initiative before. Both Flanagan and Vice Provost, University Librarian and Chief Information Officer John Unsworth noted that many university and public libraries have implemented similar programs.

"It's more important to retrieve missing materials than to collect fines," wrote Unsworth in an email to the Justice.

Flanagan expressed little concern about the loss of funds from fines that would ordinarily be collected. "The point of having library fines isn't to make money, it's to encourage books to come back so that people can have access to them again," she said.

Furthermore, fines go into "general university streams" and only come back to the library through what Flanagan described as "some kind of a budgetary addition," through which the library may replace books.

The library has plans to shift around its collection during this semester and after final examinations, according to Flanagan.

Current plans are to move materials from Goldfarb floor two to floor one to fix sequencing of call numbers and to move some materials from the Gerstenzang Science Library to the main library to "permit easier access to them," according to Flanagan. Most of the materials will be moved after final examinations, she said.

Flanagan said that the initiative is purposefully scheduled in advance of end-of-semester returns, which often number around 20,000.

If enough materials come back with the initiative the library will be able to shelve the returned items before end-of-semester returns arrive, according to Flanagan.