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:Why purge?

[Burdell]

Most likely due to limited space. Libraries aren't infinite, so every new book has to displace an old one.

No props for the Burn Notice reference?

[El Cubano]

I am surprised that nobody has brought it up yet, but Chuck Finley is the alter ego/favorite assumed persona of Sam Axe (played by Bruce Campbell) from Burn Notice. I can't believe that they haven't received props yet for the cool reference. Heck, I am inclined to give them a pass just for the originality of that.

Why you should support these actions

[SuperKendall]

Read this horrific story from UC Santa Cruz about 80k books being destroyed or sent elsewhere, it sounds like most from the science library...

What the purge rules overlook, and this article points out is that a lot of reference books are never checked out - they are looked at, something gleaned from the contents, and then put back where they were without a librarian being involved. As a result some books people did use from year to year are purged. And in this story at least you can't even get a list of what they threw out, because it was "lost"...

So do whatever you have to do noble librarians to fight the power and the Purge.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[AthanasiusKircher]

The most horrifying aspect of your linked story:

No chance was given to students or faculty to buy the books. Millions of dollars of public property was destroyed. A long-standing and painstakingly collected archive was removed to solve a temporary space problem.

This sounds like something they wanted to keep quiet because they expected pushback. I've been at many university library booksales over the years where they sell off stuff they want to purge. The library makes a little money, and happy patrons take books home for cheap.

I still recall with fondness the annual booksale at my local public library when I was a kid. Some of it was purged books from the library, and a lot more were just random donations from the town. For most of the sale, prices were low (maybe $1 for a hardback, $.50 for a paperback), but then for the last hour or two on the last day they'd do $1/bag. You could get a large paper grocery bag full of books for a $1. I must have gone there for 6 or 7 years and walked away with multiple bags of books... stuff that was mostly obscure non-fiction that I'd never think of looking for (and which was mostly too obscure for the small local library to stock). Sure, I myself would purge a lot of those books within a year or two of purchase too, but I still own some of those books today... including some that contain info that's still hard to find on the internet.

It's unfathomable that a major university library would simply throw away so many books without even offering them to someone. To me, the only reasonable explanation is that the administrators who made the decision wanted to do it "quietly," because I'm sure the librarians wouldn't just want tens of thousands of books destroyed without at least offering them to faculty or students.

Re:Why you should support these actions

[drinkypoo]

I've seen them get pissed, in a good sized university library a misshelved book might as well be destroyed.

So when are they going to start slipping RFID tags into all the books (and attaching them to the ends of the rows) so that they can be cataloged by simply walking up and down the stacks? All the books already get stuff stuck into them, and the cost of the tags will be negligible compared to the cost of everything else that happens to them.

Re:Good for them

[Dutch Gun]

The article does point out a bit later that this particular library didn't participate in that program, so it appear that there wasn't a financial motivation. This was mentioned, as it may be a motivation for OTHER libraries doing the same thing.

Weeding is a Critical Part of Healthy Libraries

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but no. As someone with multiple librarians in the family, I can say you are straight up incorrect.

Weeding is not only normal, it is a very important part of collection management.

Watch this presentation on weeding from the American Library Association, or at least read the slides.

Or if the ALA's word isn't good enough for you, read these comments from a hundred or so working librarians.

Of course librarians will make poor decisions when weeding. Making mistakes comes with the territory of being human. But as a general principle, weeding is critical to maintaining a useful library that serves the needs of an ever-changing community.

Re:Why purge?

[SNRatio]

A branch library justifies its expenditure of public funding by being useful to it's community. To a first approximation, If more people check out new mass market fluff than old mass market fluff then recycling older titles is useful. Branch libraries are just that: branches. Almost all have access to state or regional interlibrary loan for rare titles. If the goal is to have older titles onsite so that people browsing will come across them: shuffling the rarer books between branch libraries every so often would be better than trying to have a "complete" collection at each site. Regular users of the library would have new-to-them titles to browse every few months.

Re: Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

In my town, all but one of the Librarians attend the same church. Every single book related to the Occult, Mysticism, magic, etc. is checked out... to a member of the same Church. The books get checked out once, then slowly accrue late fees for a year or two, until they finally equal the purchase price of the book. Then they get reported as "lost" and the Curch member pays for the copy.
Then the book is usually not reordered because it was only checked out once and thus has a low circulation score.

They do it as a way to censor material their Church finds objectional. There's a few things which will always get restocked regardless, but they are willing to pay a few bucks a year to keep people from being able to get it. And they also have a small cleaning supply closet stacked full of books which are listed as "on the shelf" but can never actually be found.

Re:Good for them

[MightyMartian]

By "left wing distortion" you mean science books that discuss evolution and a 4.5 billion years old earth as facts.

Re:Why purge?

[shanen]

Writing as an aging bibliophile who loves the feel and "process" of reading paper books, I'm still forced to regard this as a kind of Luddite problem. Or maybe I should just describe it as bad economics?

The value of a library's shelf space is measurable. The old books should not be rendered inaccessible, but their marginal value continues to decline and shelf space needs to be made available for the new stuff that people want to read more. The obvious and rational response is to retire old paper books in favor of electronic versions. Personally I hate ebooks and think Amazon is aggressively creating an ebook monopoly that will destroy the publishing industry, but... It would make much more sense to make the old, long-tail books available instantly in electronic forms.

There should actually be an equilibrium price here where the 'rental' cost to the library is balanced against the value of the shelf space. For old fogies like me, they should still have an inter-library loan to (slowly) borrow a paper copy. It's not like the old books are going anywhere, eh?

(As usual, I would have hoped to see previous commenters ahead of me, and as too usual these days, it seems no one goes to the obvious places... I should have searched harder? However, in this case the key terms were obvious and they came up almost entirely dry. The unmoderated comment I'm replying to does mention "ebooks", though the notion of putting "ebooks in libraries" is confusing. This is primarily a problem of permissions exacerbated by the greed and desperation of the publishers. The technology is already there.)