People tend to get a little nervous around Susan Bartoletta when she tells them she’s a librarian.

There’s often a long pause, followed by a confession.

“Oh, I have fines,” they tell her. “I haven’t been back to the library in a long time.”

Bartoletta is used to the “stigma” around fines that she says drives people away. It’s one of the biggest reasons why Brampton eliminated fines on most children’s materials last fall under a two-year pilot — a change that many libraries across North America are making to break down barriers for the people who need libraries the most.

“We’re always looking for opportunities where we can remove barriers for people,” said Bartoletta, Brampton Library’s director of branch and neighbourhood services.

“We looked at our most vulnerable clients, which are children, and they need the library the most.”

The diverse city northwest of Toronto went fine-free for almost all kids’ materials, a huge collection that covers everything from Harry Potter to Clifford the Big Red Dog, in September 2018.

According to a May 2018 report to Brampton’s library board, as of February of that year 30,000 members’ cards were blocked for owing more than $25 in charges — 2,200 of them under age 12.

The report noted that fear of fines also stopped parents from initially getting library cards for their kids because of the worry they’d rack up fines on multiple accounts. Other patrons, Bartoletta said, simply stopped coming back because they couldn’t pay fines, or were embarrassed.

The library’s mandate is to be free and equitable, she added. That’s especially important in a city where more than half of the population is newcomers and there’s a large low-income population.

There are still fines for new, popular items that you can only take out for a week, and if patrons lose books they still need to pay to replace them.

Staff have anecdotally reported fewer tough conversations around fines, Bartoletta said, calling the pilot “extremely successful” so far. They’re still gathering the hard numbers, such as tallying in-person visits and new memberships.

The revenue they get from fines has dropped by about 10 per cent, but funding from other sources, such as room rentals and printing, has gone up so they haven’t taken a big hit overall. Revenue from fines was dropping before the pilot, she added, due to library-goers checking out more digital materials, such as ebooks, that return themselves.

More and more public libraries across North America, especially in the U.S., are going “fine-free,” said Curtis Rogers, director of communications for the Urban Libraries Council, a membership organization of more than 150 large urban public library systems.

In San Francisco, Salt Lake and other big cities that have completely eliminated fines, “the data is outstanding and overwhelming,” Rogers said.

“It’s clear that the people who are impacted the most by overdue fines are those from low-income backgrounds.”

Chicago Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot announced in late September that city’s library would go completely fine free and forgive existing fines. It’s the largest U.S. library system to make the move.

According to Lightfoot, one in five blocked cards belonged to kids under 14, and one in three cards in the poorer South District were locked, compared to only one in six in the wealthier, whiter North district.

The changes, she said in a news release at the time, will “end the regressive practices disproportionately impacting those who can least afford it.”

In Canada, library systems in Oakville and London, Ont., have also recently gone fine-free for kids.

Rogers calls it “a movement.”

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“It’s always centred around this idea that the library should be an open access point that is opening doors for information access and should not be creating extra barriers,” he said.

Not all libraries can do it, as some make substantial money off fines. Some parents bring up teaching personal responsibility, he said, and argue that removing fines lets kids off the hook.

But in many larger systems, revenue from fines is “negligible,” Rogers said.

It’s also a possibility at the Toronto Public Library, said Susan Caron, director of collections and membership services, who’s pulling together data to present to the library board sometime next year.

“We really would like to do this because our goal is to have every child in Toronto with a library card,” she said.

Library fines make up a “very small part” of the roughly $190 million operating budget, at about $2 million a year, Caron said, and like in other big city libraries revenue from fines has already been dropping.

Such an initiative would fit well into the city’s Poverty Reduction Strategy, she added.

According to a 2015 library briefing note, more children and youth with blocked Toronto library cards are located in priority areas (designated at-risk neighbourhoods) than in other areas of the city.

Brampton’s pilot has already hit the halfway mark, Bartoletta said, and the “conversation is ongoing” about whether to expand it further.

As someone who’s worked at a library since age 15, she diligently keeps track of fines. But with three kids to shuffle to activities such as hockey and music, she understands why even adults sometimes slip up.

“Your schedule is just crazy, and it’s nice when somebody can just give you a break,” she said.

One man recently returned a book that was about 40 years overdue.

“He was forgiven,” said Bartoletta with a laugh, due to the uniqueness of the situation. He got a new card and has been welcomed back into the fold.

“So they do come back. That’s our biggest concern, we want them to come back.”

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