Libraries Can’t Get Their Loaned Books Back Because of Trump’s Tariffs

Hey there,

Jason has written a few stories lately about how Trump’s tariffs are creating chaos in almost any hobby that relies on buying items or parts from a different country. Recently, a librarian reached out to me with a tip about how the same tariffs are preventing libraries from working together and causing their loaned books to get stuck in other countries, even though they are not selling anything. It’s not a well-known issue, but a huge problem for academics.

-Emanuel

The Trump administration’s tariff regime and the elimination of fee exemptions for items under $800 is limiting resource sharing between university libraries, trapping some books in foreign countries, and reversing long-held standards in academic cooperation.

“There are libraries that have our books that we've lent to them before all of this happened, and now they can't ship them back to us because their carrier either is flat out refusing to ship anything to the U.S., or they're citing not being able to handle the tariff situation,” Jessica Bower Relevo, associate director of resource sharing and reserves at Yale University Library, told me. 

After Trump’s executive order ended the de minimis exemption, which allowed people to buy things internationally without paying tariffs if the items cost less than $800, we’ve written several stories about how the decision caused chaos over a wide variety of hobbies that rely on people buying things overseas, especially on Ebay, where many of those transactions take place. 

Libraries that share their materials internationally are in a similar mess, partly because some countries’ mail services stopped shipments to and from the U.S. entirely, but the situation for them is arguably even more complicated because they’re not selling anything—they’re just lending books. 

“It's not necessarily too expensive. It's that they don't have a mechanism in place to deal with the tariffs and how they're going to be applied,” Relevo said. “And I think that's true of U.S. shipping carriers as well. There’s a lot of confusion about how to handle this situation.”

“The tariffs have impacted interlibrary loans in various ways for different libraries,” Heather Evans, a librarian at RMIT University in Australia, told me in an email. “It has largely depended on their different procedures as to how much they have been affected. Some who use AusPost [Australia’s postal service] to post internationally have been more impacted and I've seen many libraries put a halt on borrowing to or from the US at all.” (AusPost suspended all shipments to the United States but plans to renew them on October 7).

Relevo told me that in some cases books are held up in customs indefinitely, or are “lost in warehouses” where they are held for no clear reason.

As Relevo explains it, libraries often provide people in foreign institutions books in their collections by giving them access to digitized materials, but some books are still only available in physical copies. These are not necessarily super rare or valuable books, but books that are only in print in certain countries. For example, a university library might have a specialized collection on a niche subject because it’s the focus area of a faculty member, a French university will obviously have a deeper collection of French literature, and some textbooks might only be published in some languages. 

A librarian’s job is to give their community access to information, and international interlibrary loans extend that mission to other countries by having libraries work together. In the past, if an academic in the U.S. wanted access to a French university’s deep collection of French literature, they’d have to travel there. Today, academics can often ask that library to ship them the books they want. Relevo said this type of lending has always been useful, but became especially popular and important during COVID lockdowns, when many libraries were closed and international travel was limited. 

“Interlibrary loans has been something that libraries have been able to do for a really long time, even back in the early 1900s,” Relevo said. “If we can't do that anymore and we're limiting what our users can access, because maybe they're only limited to what we have in our collection, then ultimately could hinder academic progress. Scholars have enjoyed for decades now the ability to basically get whatever they need for their research, to be very comprehensive in their literature reviews or the references that they need, or past research that's been done on that topic, because most libraries, especially academic libraries, do offer this service [...] If we can't do that anymore, or at least there's a barrier to doing that internationally, then researchers have to go back to old ways of doing things.”

The Trump administration upended this system of knowledge sharing and cooperation, making life even harder for academics in the U.S., who are already fleeing to foreign universities because they fear the government will censor their research. 

The American Library Association (ALA) has a group dedicated to international interlibrary lending, called the International Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Committee, which is nested in the Sharing and Transforming Access to Resources Section (STARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). Since Trump’s executive order and tariffs regime, the RUSA STARS International ILL Committee has produced a site dedicated to helping librarians navigate the new, unpredictable landscape. 

In addition to explaining the basic facts of the tariffs and de minimis, the site also shares resources and “Tips & Tricks in Uncertain Times,” which encourages librarians to talk to partner libraries before lending or borrowing books, and to “be transparent and set realistic expectations with patrons.” The page also links to an online form that asks librarians to share any information they have about how different libraries are handling the elimination of de minimis in an attempt to crowd source a better understanding of the new international landscape. 

“Let's say this library in Germany wanted to ship something to us,” Relevo said. “It sounds like the postal carriers just don't know how to even do that. They don’t know how to pass that tariff on to the library that's getting the material, there's just so much confusion on what you would even do if you even wanted to. So they're just saying, ‘No, we're not shipping to the U.S.’”

Relevo told me that one thing the resource sharing community has talked about a lot is how to label packages so customs agents know they are not [selling] goods to another country. Relevo said that some libraries have marked the value of books they’re lending as $0. Others have used specific codes to indicate the package isn’t a good that’s being bought or sold. But there’s not one method that has worked consistently across the board. 

“It does technically have value, because it's a tangible item, and pretty much any tangible item is going to have some sort of value, but we're not selling it,” she said. “We're just letting that library borrow it and then we're going to get it back. But the way customs and tariffs work, it's more to do with buying and selling goods and library stuff isn't really factored into those laws [...] it's kind of a weird concept, especially when you live in a highly capitalized country.”

Relevo said that the last 10-15 years have been a very tumultuous time for libraries, not just because of tariffs, but because AI-generated content, the pandemic, and conservative organizations pressuring libraries to remove certain books from their collections. 

“At the end of the day, us librarians just want to help people, so we're just trying to find the best ways to do that right now with the resources we have,” she said. 

“What I would like the public to know about the situation is that their librarians as a group are very committed to doing the best we can for them and to finding the best options and ways to fulfill their requests and access needs. Please continue to ask us for what you need,” Evans said. “At the moment we would ask for a little extra patience, and perhaps understanding that we might not be able to get things as urgently for them if it involves the U.S., but we will do as we have always done and search for the fastest and most helpful way to obtain access to what they require.”