Library Creates Fake Patron Records To Avoid Book-Purging (heraldnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Chuck Finley checked out 2,361 books from a Florida library in just nine months, increasing their total circulation by 3.9%. But he doesn't exist. "The fictional character was concocted by two employees at the library, complete with a false address and driver's license number," according to the Orlando Sentinel. The department overseeing the library acknowledges their general rule is "if something isn't circulated in one to two years, it's typically weeded out of circulation." So the fake patron scheme was concocted by a library assistant working with the library's branch supervisor, who "said he wanted to avoid having to later repurchase books purged from the shelf." But according to the newspaper the branch supervisor "said the same thing is being done at other libraries, too."

Comments

Re:Good for them

[johannesg]

  You'd also be surprised how many 'reports' are hard coded to filter out all the names starting with 'ZZ'. I surprised nobody has been able to leverage it into a real computer crime.

Crimes committed by people whose name starts with ZZ don't show up in official reports, for some reason.

Re:Good for them

[Locke2005]

Damn! That explains why I can't find any ZZ Top in the library CD catalogue!