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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the overdoing-it-notice dept.

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."

37 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Its not a fictional name, just an alias by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    His real name is Sam Axe.

  2. Good for them by willoughby · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Displaying initiative and ingenuity in order to work around idiotic managerial policies & decisions. Give 'em a raise!

    1. Re:Good for them by elrous0 · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's a heartwarming tale in the summary, but the article implies that there may have been a somewhat less noble reason for the fake patron (emphasis mine):

      nine city-run libraries that are part of the Lake County library system and receive a percentage of their funding based on circulation levels.

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    2. Re:Good for them by v1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If they were just trying to bolster funding, one would expect that they would inflate checkout rates for more popular titles then so as not to draw suspicion. Despite there being other possible options for "ulterior motive", "looking for a fix to offset a stupid decision by upper management" (or what someone passionately believed was a bad decision) looks like the frontrunner.

      The policy's primary reasoning/justification was probably "clearing shelf space to make room for new books", so ultimately the need for that will end up getting re-examined. That's the risk you take when going behind management's back. You have to be sure that when your actions finally get exposed (and they almost always DO), you not only need to be right, but you need to be show to be unambiguously right. (and sometimes that's not even enough - they're management after all, and just like you they're allowed to make mistakes occasionally) Sometimes managers have a caretaker above them that will shelter them from fallout due to ineptitude, so either it doesn't matter or they don't care if they're wrong.

      So it's difficult to defend what may have been a very well-intentioned act without substantial evidence to show that it was justified or perhaps necessary. I just don't think we have enough evidence at this point. Maybe later.

      --
      I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
    3. Re:Good for them by meerling · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You may be right, but librarians have a nearly genetic imperative to prevent the loss of any book, even if nobody has read it in centuries.
      It's also a point of professional pride and the loss of books is at odds with their stated goals.
      If you really want to see what it's like, hold a book burning in front of your local library.

    4. Re:Good for them by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      By holding onto clearly unpopular titles (not one checkout in a year or two), they were ensuring that potentially newer and more popular titles had no space in their library. I'm not sure how anyone could believe this was in the best interest of the library.

      I can only think of a few motivations. An arrogant: "We know what's best for you." or "Everything new is crap" attitude, or perhaps purging books simply means more work for the librarians, and so this seemed easier to them. I'm leaning towards the latter explanation, as a kid's book titled "Why Do My Ears Pop?" doesn't exactly seem like high literature worth preserving for all time.

      George Dore, the library’s branch supervisor who was put on administrative leave for his part in the episode, said he wanted to avoid having to later repurchase books purged from the shelf. He said the same thing is being done at other libraries, too.

      And this makes no sense. If the books were not being checked out for years at a time, why would they have to later re-purchase the book?

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    5. Re:Good for them by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    6. Re:Good for them by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Ah, of course! It's clearly a plot by the DNC to promote their "fake books." I have a suspicion of what deviltry we'd find in that innocent-sounding "Why Do My Ears Pop?" book:

      Susie: "Hey Mom, why do my ears pop?"

      Mom: "Because Republicans are bad and want to hurt you. What you're feeling is the concentrated evil of failed Republic policies leftover from the Reagan era."

      Susie: *cries*

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    7. Re: Good for them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    8. Re:Good for them by johannesg · · Score: 3, Funny

        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.

    9. Re:Good for them by lucm · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The policy's primary reasoning/justification was probably "clearing shelf space to make room for new books"

      Yes get rid of that Steinbeck crap so there's more room for extra copies of "The Secret" and "Fifty shades of Grey". It's called the Blockbuster Syndrome.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    10. Re:Good for them by Locke2005 · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      --
      I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    11. Re:Good for them by Locke2005 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "They have control of the public schools"??? You know most schoolbooks are the ones approved in that bastion of liberal thought know as Texas, right?

      --
      I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    12. Re:Good for them by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 2

      You may be right, but librarians have a nearly genetic imperative to prevent the loss of any book, even if nobody has read it in centuries.

      I think the personal record I have for circulating books is a book that hadn't been checked out in 82 years. It was actually a really useful book which ended up providing a significant discussion in a research article I was writing -- and not just for historical interest.

      Well, that's if you don't count archival sources, some of which probably hadn't been examined in significantly longer periods. But that's another story.

      It's also a point of professional pride and the loss of books is at odds with their stated goals.

      That's not quite true. All librarians who operate small local branches are familiar with periodic weeding. It's expected, and it's a skill that's taught to anyone with library degrees. That said, most librarians probably would prefer to keep books in stock -- even in closed storage stacks -- rather than discard them. But that's not generally feasible to do for long periods except at very large and well-funded university libraries.

    13. Re:Good for them by tepples · · Score: 2

      So it isn't because "She's got legs, she knows how to use them." triggered some double amputees?

    14. Re:Good for them by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    15. Re:Good for them by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's not how weeding works. Last years' "blockbusters" are the ones that get weeded out and replaced with this year's "blockbusters."
      Classics will tend to stay around,

      Unless nobody happens to rent them for a year. Maybe they get them from other sources, like project Gutenberg, so the demand is filled some other way. And then someone comes into the library in the middle of January and tries to check it out, and it's gone, because...

      It isn't like librarians aren't actually professionals who have been thoughtfully working this stuff out for centuries.

      ...sometimes they get subjected to stupid policies that make it harder to do their jobs.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    16. Re:Good for them by mysidia · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Someone will be along to checkout 'It takes a village' any year now. They just know it.

      Why are they using checkouts as the metric to decide on purges, anyways?

      I pull books all the time, mostly non-fiction materials, and read from them, maybe take the notes and record the details I need for later reference for what i'm working on, and then put the book back on the shelf in the same slot I got it from.

      At no point is it necessary to check most of the books out and take it out of the library.....
      I sometimes do that, but it doesn't mean the books I didn't need to check-out were not useful.

      Especially the periodical volumes, which for some reason... we're not allowed to checkout, anyways.

  3. Why purge? by Darinbob · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Why purge? by Burdell · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    2. Re:Why purge? by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But this process means they keep new mass market fluff, and not old out of print books.

    3. Re:Why purge? by DogDude · · Score: 2

      That's sad. I go to the library regularly. I enjoy it. It's one of the unequivocally good things that comes from modern society. It's much better than having to read corporate-approved "books" on a gadget controlled by said corporation.

      --
      I don't respond to AC's.
    4. Re:Why purge? by tsa · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most books are corporate approved, or they wouldn't be sold. Only very few people sell their books themselves.

      --

      -- Cheers!

    5. Re:Why purge? by tuxgeek · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In a more civilized time we would just expand the library.
      Bonds usually are the means to pay for them. The people you elect are the ones you pay to do this stuff.
      This process tends to make for jobs which tends to keep money flowing around an area.
      It's a part of capitalism that seems to have been lost.
      From a more civilized time.

      --
      "Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
    6. Re:Why purge? by SNRatio · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re:Why purge? by martiniturbide · · Score: 2

      There is the problem that old books that can not be sold are being purged (or recycled). I think the best way for the moment is send a copy of each book the Internet Archive Book Drive. They take some time to scan the books, but at least there is a chance for knowledge to be preserved. https://blog.archive.org/2010/...

    8. Re:Why purge? by tepples · · Score: 2

      The Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, has something similar to this: less frequently accessed books go into more dense storage in the downtown branch's basement, and patrons can request them through the catalog terminal.

    9. Re:Why purge? by shanen · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.)

      --
      Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
  4. No props for the Burn Notice reference? by El+Cubano · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference? by hsthompson69 · · Score: 2

      Yeah, the notable lack of attribution there (or the skipping of middle attribution, since Sam Axe notes Finley as a baseball player), was odd...jarring even more so because it was a Florida library :)

    2. Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference? by sconeu · · Score: 3, Informative

      Finley played for the Angels from 1986 through 1999.

      --
      General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  5. Why you should support these actions by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Why you should support these actions by Calydor · · Score: 2

      So any reference books NOT used by people with manners who know how to put a book back where they took it?

      I'm sorry that my parents and grandparents raised me to clean up after myself. Or that yours didn't.

      --
      -=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
    2. Re:Why you should support these actions by HornWumpus · · Score: 2

      You need to talk to some librarians. _They_ don't want you reshelving books.

      Have you ever been to an actual library? How about searching for a misshelved book? I've seen them get pissed, in a good sized university library a misshelved book might as well be destroyed.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    3. Re:Why you should support these actions by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.

    4. Re:Why you should support these actions by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  6. Weeding is a Critical Part of Healthy Libraries by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.