My family are avid public library patrons. I’d estimate that in the three years we’ve been in Lawrence we’ve checked out well over 1000 items amongst the five of us.

It’s been up to me to manage the due notices and pay the inevitable overdue fines. I think we’ve only had to pay to replace a handful of items, which is a pretty decent success rate given who my children are. Still, it’s been fairly tedious to juggle five library cards, five accounts, log in to the site to check and renew each as needed.

The Lawrence Public Library website greatly improved when they switched to the bibliocommons platform. I finally got around to writing a command-line library management tool to aggregate all five accounts into a single report and automatically renew any that are coming due.

Example:

% perl my-toolbox/lfk-library --renew --all

No more click-click-click and putting-off-till-its-too-late-and-whoops-we-have-a-fine.