New Year, new loan policies, and new books for December

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Year! We have a couple of new things related to loans to announce for 2009.

1. Fines: For all our registered borrowers (RAI Fellows, academics and graduate students in US Studies), we are introducing fines on overdue loans at a rate of 20p per day from now on.
2. Staff Desk Collection: We will now be issuing books from the staff desk collection as short loans for two hours at a time. The books will still be confined to the library, and will be able to be renewed for further two hour periods provided no-one else has reserved them. This should help improve access to these in-demand titles. If you are not already a registered borrower at the VHL and would like to use the staff desk collection, please bring your card to the desk in the library to register. Once you have done this you will be able to check books out from the staff desk collection and place reservations. Please note that if you are not otherwise entitled to borrow, registering for the staff desk loans system will not entitle you to take out any other books.

And finally, the list of new books received in the library in December is now available on our website and LibraryThing page.