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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."
His real name is Sam Axe.
Displaying initiative and ingenuity in order to work around idiotic managerial policies & decisions. Give 'em a raise!
I don't understand why they would purge books? One of the benefits of a good library is that you can get hard to find books, rarely read books, older stuff that people have forgotten about, and so forth.
Is this felony hacking? or some other felony do to bad laws?
Seems like that is what goes on when a book is needed.
Not every library can keep every book forever in paper copies.
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I volunteer at our local library's used bookstore where some of our donations are withdrawals. I guess the obvious question is why would they be repurchased if they weren't circulating in the first place? What's also left out of TFS is that library circulation is often used as a metric for a branch's success, as market share is for internet startups (that don't necessarily generate profit). The excuse looks more like a fig leaf to promote the branch supervisor.
TFS does touch upon a more general discussion about what books the local branch should stock, or whether there even should be local branches in the day of Amazon and Netflix. Gaming circulation certainly doesn't help the cause for keeping local branches.
Finally, low circulation doesn't (or shouldn't) automatically point to withdrawal and books are withdrawn if they become 'damaged'. Typically issues develop with the bindings as book drops literally are, and they ain't a binding them like they used to. One of our group used to repair bindings to keep the books in circulation longer.
Scanning is fast these days with the scanning function on photocopiers. It's not like in the old days when you had to rely on slow flatbed scanners. I scan several dozen books each year (when I visit other specialist libraries that have resources missing from my own), and a book of some 300 pages can be scanned in greyscale in 600 DPI in less than 20 minutes. Sometimes it can take longer to process the scanned images into a nice PDF suitable for upload to an ebook filesharing community than it actually took to scan the book.
That said, obviously no public library is going to go to all this trouble even if things have got faster. This would rightly be left to publishers or to specialist archival teams working on a grant.
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.
Scanning is fast and easy, if you are willing to destroy the book binding so it will autofeed. There exist robotic page turners, but just cutting the book apart and tossing it into the hopper is much more common.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The poster's lack of a well-defined sense of reality is the greater problem. The only other people I've seen with a bigger persecution complex than your modern day Alt-right type are the "War on Christmas" kooks you find hanging out in Evangelical or Conservative Catholic forums.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Most libraries don't want you to reshelve books. Too much chance of getting it wrong.
Sure if it's some trash fiction book I could see that being an issue.
But this was in the science library. The hole in the shelf the book came from would still be there later, and the person putting it back would probably correct the numerical order of several books to be more properly sequenced after he or she re-shelved it!
Not to mention the patrons are just trying to help the library staff out, not realizing how many tomes of wisdom they were putting in peril.
What want to know is why on earth ANY library would choose to destroy books without looking at resale value... around here we have library sales all the time, most have a rare books section which charge more, but even the trash books like a Photoshop guide from 2000 is there for sale. Sure, after that point if no-one wants it get rid of it... but this instant "purge" thing smacks of something really underhanded going on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A better question is why do we still have mostly paper based libraries. Some books (a small minority) can't be digitized, sure, keep paper copies for those. But the rest can and should be digitized. You can then dramatically reduce the cost of staff and facilities, and make the service more convenient. What's not to like?
Tiny collection, nobody will care.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Should public libraries be repositories like museums and "save" old books pretty much no one wants to read? Or should they be modern collections of contemporary material people do want to read? It is a sound management practice for a library to have a policy that books not checked out in one or two years ought to be candidates for replacement. That doesn't mean EVERY book so classified will be purged. Nobody is going to throw away the last copy of "Tom Sawyer." But particularly in a "branch" library which is part of a library SYSTEM that has many branches and very likely a "central" library where "last copies" are stored, it makes infinite sense to keep branch collections fresh.
What we have here is a clear case of insubordination by a Branch Librarian who has decided in his or her infinite wisdom that his or her judgment is superior to the overall library policy. Her excuse is that "other libraries do it, too." without any proof of that. But I can verify that it does happen. I worked in public libraries for forty years (most of it in IT) and I know we FIRED one librarian who had that attitude (for that and a lot more) because her acquisitive OCD tendencies drove everyone else crazy to the point that the branch and staff morale suffered.
Libraries have a hard-enough time staying relevant in a world where people believe Google substitutes for a good research librarian. Even considering the Library is just about the only public place with hundreds of computers for the public to use, free databases that otherwise charge, and even classes for the public to teach them the basics, it's still difficult. Yet around the entire country circulation is at record levels because the general public still sees the library as important to their daily lives and an excellent value for money spent. You don't get there by being a collection of old, musty books no one wants to read.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
My collection is 50k folders. Some of the folders are box sets with 6 CDs but most are 1s and 2s.
There is a cash value trigger that can really leave you screwed, but you're right, just pass them around on portable drives and nobody will ever know.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We've been cutting funding to public services for 30 years. It's catching up in more ways than one. If you've been voting for all that "Austerity" this is what that actually means.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It is not the primary task of a library to cater to the current fickle tastes of its patrons. Sure, this can be a secondary consideration, but the primary one is to have a wide selection available for people to discover things in the first place. I don't know how many hours I have spent as a teenager pulling books at random from shelves in a library and finding quite a few of them interesting.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
GOOD!
Libraries are supposed to be about KEEPING and CURATING books.
This is why these circulation/purge rules are such idiocy.
Especially with library budgets shrinking year over year...
There's GOT to be a better system than "It hasn't been checked out in a while, sell it or throw it away!".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I find it interesting that they saved all the customer data showing who has borrowed each book, even after the books had been returned, instead of just saving the anonymous borrowing statistics for each book.
I asked at my local library about this many years ago (I wanted to know how many books I had borrowed over the years), and was told that their system intentionally didn't store historical customer data, out of fear that someone's borrowing record could later be used against them somehow.
Libraries should be tracking books, not customers.
Lets just scan everything and let people borrow e-readers if they want to take something home. (If they don't already have one of their own.)
Scanned copies of reference materials could be maintained as well.
Why wouldn't we want it all in a digital format?
I do appreciate that with reference materials, it would be more convenient to be able to have 5 things opened at once.
These individuals have access to what books aren't being checked out. They know the retention/purge policy. Why not just check these books out under their own names and avoid the purge?
Specifically, I want names at the St. Louis County Library. A lot of important books get weeded out to make sure there is room for a buzillion copies of the latest Lee Child novel and Star Wars/Trek movie, and such.
If I had a name or two at the StLCoLib, I could given them recommendations for "keepers".
Yeah, I like Lee Child novels and popular movies, and check them out. But having one less copy of "Night School" and one more copy of a book like one of Heinlein's "juveniles" (especially if there are zero now) is a pretty damn good trade-off, IMO. Better to still have a copy of David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" and one fewer copies of that Karl Marx biography (in the "Juveniles" collection, no less!), because Friedman's ideas are on the way in, and Marx's are on the way out. Neither is moving fast enough, IMO.
And of course, Get off my lawn!
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.