Announcement: Beginning March 3, 2022, Altamont Free Library has eliminated all overdue fines!

Even better, we brought a friend to the party! The Guilderland Public Library is ALSO eliminating their overdue fines.

And here’s the cherry on top: Both AFL and GPL will be waiving all outstanding overdue fines for our patrons!

One of the most important things that libraries do is to make our collections as freely available to our community as possible, and to remove as many barriers as we can between people and the educational, entertaining, and empowering resources we provide. We do that making it as easy as possible to get a library card, by allowing you to download ebooks and audiobooks from anywhere, and most recently by making renewals of your checkouts completely automatic. Eliminating overdue fines is one more way that we can remove barriers and increase access to our collections.

Now, does this mean that you can keep books forever without penalty? No! Once a patron has renewed their items as many times as they are allowed to, if you keep an item out too long, you will still be charged for the replacement cost of the item. But if you return it, even if it’s late, there won’t be any financial penalty. If you feel bad about keeping a book out for so long, by all means, throw something into our donation jar!

For our friends that we haven’t seen in a while because they had excessive overdue fines, we hope you come back. If you have a book or a DVD that you’ve kept our for a few months (or a few years) too long, we hope you bring it with you when you come. For everyone, we hope that this is one less thing that you have to worry about. Having less to worry about is something that we all can get behind!