Only in some places the scale of the problem seems massive relative to one's own issues. Take for example the City of Birmingham's (UK) problem with overdue books. They currently have 145,671 overdues! Now, of course Birmingham is a large city and the library system there holds well over 1.9 million items. Just in raw numbers though, that's a huge bunch of books. But my reading of the article linked below makes it sound like that 145k number is a snapshot; in other words a total from a specific day but looking back over a ten-year period.
You can read about their predicament in
this BBC report.
To put it in perspective, the Hutchinson Public Library holds a total of about 260,000 physical items. We currently average (this is a guesstimate based on number of notices we send out per day) about 300 items overdue. Also, we consider items that are "overdue" for a long time, say a year, not "overdue" but "lost".
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