I live rurally and my library has been part of a consortium of 24 libraries across this part of the state where they all share a catalogue and patrons can borrow from all of them. Recently, courier costs have become too much and they’ve cut into blocks of 5 or so libraries for delivery (I honestly just thought they’d hired someone whose job it was to continuously circuit through the 24 libraries, collecting and returning books).
The other cost-cutting measure is that they no longer return books to the originating library. So I’m seeing “New to this library” bookmarks on quite a few books now.
One of the librarians casually told me that patrons still have membership in the full 24-library network. So that if I were to, say, visit one of the big towns now outside our small delivery block, I could, maybe, borrow books directly from there — and I could, you know, conveniently return it via my own library.
And then my library gets to keep it.
They’re very quietly deploying their readers to raid the bigger libraries 😂