mini-rant about the library policies

So, the first time I checked out a book from the library here, I was surprised that I was allowed to check it out until the end of the semester (and there are virtually unlimited renewals after that). I thought, that's pretty cool.

Now, I think this is a terrible idea. Why? Because grad students go and check out every possible book on a subject, and keep them indefinitely. My officemate has virtually every book about stochastic optimization out there, and he never uses them, but he just keeps renewing them. Now I am stuck in the situation where every useful book on Fokker-Planck equations is checked out until June 15. I have a feeling that there is some grad student sitting there with all these books gathering dust on his/her shelf, while I really would just like to look at them for like a day. I can put a hold on the books, but chances are that I won't get them until June, and by then I will have wasted a month doing nothing. If the library just put shorter terms on books, I'm sure this problem could be avoided.