Punishing the wrong behaviour

I love the idea of the New York Public Library's 'Read Down' programme.

Over the summer break, kids who have racked more than $15 in fines can get them expunged by logging their reading times on the Summer reading site. 15 minutes of reading equals a $1 reduction in fines.

Currently, 143,000 kids - 30% of those with NYPL cards - owe $15 or more in fines. The Library wants to get them back in the doors:

"Kids might be afraid or ashamed because they are delinquent with the library," said NYPL official Jack Martin. "The idea of this program is to bring them back in.

"We are in such hard economic times and children and teens depend on the library," he added.

I can't easily think of an alternative way to encourage people to return books apart from discouraging them for holding on to them with fines (although drop-boxes at schools might help). But stopping kids from borrowing more because they're scared of getting told off or turned away defeats libraries' bigger purpose.

Amnesties like this delight me. Libraries recognise they're unlikely to ever get the money back - but they can get the items, and - more importantly - get the readers back through the doors.

Getting shit done

I'm utterly smitten with this Atlantic article by Alexis Madrigal on the New York Public Library. Especially this paragraph:

I'm going to give you the conclusion to this article here to solve the tl;dr problem. There are two things the library has done to create such cool projects. First, I'm convinced the NYPL is succeeding online because of desire. The library's employees give a shit about the digital aspects of their institution, and they are supported in that shit giving. I mean this in the most fundamental way possible and as a damning critique for media companies. Second, the library sees its users as collaborators in improving the collections the library already has. While serving them online costs the library some money, they are creating value, too, by opening up conduits into the library for superusers.

Madrigal was obviously pretty smitten to - the Atlantic has put out an open call to librarians, archivists and curators to tell them more about what they're doing:

We here at The Atlantic Technology channel love archival collections that have been digitized. We think they help us situate ourselves in the present by giving us an unvarnished look into the past. We also think that your work doesn't get enough attention from the outside world. Reporting a recent story on the New York Public Library's digitization efforts, we realized that we wanted to create a conduit into our reporting system for you to let us know when you're working on an interesting collection.

So, that's what this form is. A self-service way to quickly ping us about the good work you're doing.

Awesome.