“I feel like an idiot. I vastly misunderstood how a library card works for years.”

This is a pretty funny /r/books thread on Reddit from a guy who knew that library cards were free but thought that there was still a charge for the actual lending of books! 🙂

It sounds funny but there are lots of examples where libraries don’t always do as good of a job as we should of communicating what we do and how the services we offer work.

One particular example I run into regularly in my own library system is that we don’t have overdue fines on children’s materials. But we do charge if a children’s item is out for an excessively long time even beyond the regular loan period.

So there is often confusion for people who think that they will never get any charges for taking out children’s materials when this isn’t actually the case.

And of course, in a much more general sense, there are so many people in society who think of libraries as warehouses of dusty books and many other stereotypes rather than the dynamic community hubs they’ve become.

Head Tale