Library Creates Fake Patron Records To Avoid Book-Purging (heraldnet.com) 258
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."
Its not a fictional name, just an alias (Score:5, Insightful)
His real name is Sam Axe.
Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Displaying initiative and ingenuity in order to work around idiotic managerial policies & decisions. Give 'em a raise!
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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.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, 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.
Re:Good for them (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.
Re:Good for them (Score:4, 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.
Re:Good for them (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.
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This is one possibility, but the "That way I wouldn't have to repurchase them again in the future" argument seems pretty weak, given that once most books have their day, circulation drops to zero for years (which is why it does make sense to purge books from smaller libraries). I think the more likely possibility is that it was a scheme to boost circulation numbers to protect their budget, as suggested in TFA.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
Re: Good for them (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.
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You've made a claim for which you've provided no evidence whatsoever, and yet still manage to come out with this sort of petulent response.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, 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?
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Some people see books as the central repository of human knowledge and culture. They believe that books are our history; the thing that will one day resurrect civilisation if we accidentally wipe it out. And also the final thing we leave behind, a form of immortality even as our bodies perish. _That's_ your motivation: they have a deep love and respect for books and don't want them to be destroyed.
They are the people who lovingly collected a copy of every single book in Skyrim, possibly for each of their ma
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What is the limit of books that the library is able to carry and are they at / close to that limit? Your whole argument is based on the premise that the library is full and that stopping these books being removed blocked others.
If the library's total lend rate has dropped dramatically you may be in the situation where there are not enough borrowers to turn over the full catalogue in any reasonable time period. From the TFA they are only lending something in the vicinity of 65000 times a year. Where I liv
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Their online catalogue search - http://catalog.mylakelibrary.o... [mylakelibrary.org]
Re:Good for them (Score:5, 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*
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)
By "left wing distortion" you mean science books that discuss evolution and a 4.5 billion years old earth as facts.
Re:Good for them (Score:4, 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.
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I often check out old classics and not so popular books (especially poetry and non-fiction) that I'm not interested in (re)reading at the moment just to hopefully achieve this same effect. There are works, even those I don't particularly care for, that should always be available.
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Sure, it seems pretty harmless for library books, but it's the same kind of "initiative and ingenuity" that causes government budgets to balloon and government services to deteriorate.
Libraries need to comply with the rules set by the people who provide the money for them. And keeping books around that people don't read means that space isn't available for books that people actually want
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Are the library shelves at capacity?
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Even if they were made illegal that would be quite hard to enforce because a well made fake entry is impossible to distinguish from a real one without knowing anything about it beforehand.
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The test data has last names that start with 'ZZ', duh.
You'd be surprised how often test data makes it into live systems. 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.
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Not in the database of the museum I work in.
Re:Good for them (Score:4, 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.
Re:Good for them (Score:4, Funny)
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So it isn't because "She's got legs, she knows how to use them." triggered some double amputees?
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The test data has last names that start with 'ZZ', duh.
Great, so it's not OK to say that all Asians are bad drivers and all Mexicans are lazy, but it is OK to say that all people whose last names start with ZZ are test data.
Signed, Zebediah Zzymurgy.
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Why purge? (Score:4, 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.
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Why call it an purge as that sounds to much like what nazi Germany did to books they wanted to get rid of.
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It's all about money and bean counters now.
Free access to books and information to the masses is not profitable to some that value money over people.
Not all can afford computers.
Re:Why purge? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most likely due to limited space. Libraries aren't infinite, so every new book has to displace an old one.
Re:Why purge? (Score:5, Insightful)
But this process means they keep new mass market fluff, and not old out of print books.
Re:Why purge? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Why purge? (Score:4, 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.)
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I remember for sure once I bought a book and didn't have to throw out anything from my library. And I don't have an infinite one. Probably you're referring to buying infinitely many books this year?
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Willful ignorance.
Imagine you have a room. The room's walls can't be expanded. Within this room you put more and more and more books. Eventually there will be no room for more books, even though you don't have infinite books yet.
That is pretty much what a library is.
Re:Why purge? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Try getting modern taxpayers to support a bond issue to expand the library for the purpose of storing more physical books, at a time when fewer and fewer people are interested in physical books. Try being a politician facing re-election who voted for such bonds. The attack ads would write themselves.
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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.
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I know my local library used to sell their old books it isn't like they are tossing them in the dumpster. The money from the sale can also help buy the newer materials that are in demand, be it books, movies (IIRC the local library had and may still have a rental service), or anything else that the public using the library needs.
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For some libraries, sure, but my local public library is using, maybe, 60% of their shelf space and they still seem to purge tons of books almost monthly. The exception is kids books, which they seem to hold on to forever.
Around me there is a lot of cheap, empty warehouse space. I think it would be cool for a bunch of library systems to get together and buy one, converting it into a giant set of stacks for "archived" books. Shoot, downtown there is a converted warehouse bookstore that carries more books tha
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Even if storage is free, there's a cost involved in indexing them prior to long-term storage and in retrieval. Even if that were free, if a book hasn't been requested for two years, there's a very good chance that it will never be requested again. If you sell them off, you can typically buy one new book for every 5-10 that you sell. If there's less than a 10% probability of the book being requested again then it's probably better to sell it now and buy a new copy later if there's a spike in demand.
That
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Because libraries became places relatively devoid of books in the late 1980's-2000 when their stock of actual reading material was replaced by books on tape, videos, and computer screens. Libraries have been sort of fucked up except for a place to get children's books ever since.
Get with the times - if you actually want to read, you can attempt to download their limited online books onto your e-reader of phone through their lousy e-borrowing software (which requires a special client to read - you wouldn't w
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Re:Why purge? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most books are corporate approved, or they wouldn't be sold. Only very few people sell their books themselves.
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Only very few people sell their books themselves.
But then only very few people are professional authors in the first place. Nowadays, with print on demand services and e-books, it's easier than ever to self-publish. In fact, one e-book that I've bought from an individual author is E-Word: Edenics Digital Dictionary by Isaac Mozeson, a list of false cognates between Hebrew and other languages, as a DRM-free PDF.
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Weeding is a Critical Part of Healthy Libraries (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 [ala.org] 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. [awfullibrarybooks.net]
Of course librarians will make poor decisions when weeding. Making mistakes comes with the territory of being hum
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Interlibrary loan does that sort of thing. If you are looking for an old / obscure book, then more than likely you know what the title is and can search for it. Or the librarian can. Then you can get if from the NY Public Library or some other larger facility. If you are just wandering the shelves looking for some ancient book on Dragons or Runes, the local library is probably not the place for you.
You need to go to Hogwarts.
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The local library is often the only library most people have access to.
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Money (Score:2)
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The problem is that it's not likely copyright will ever go away. For all intents and purposes copyright is being re-engineered as a perpetual entity, so that Walt Disney can still profit from Steamboat Mickey a million years from now.
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The interim extensions in the 1960s, the Copyright Act of 1978, and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 were all part of the same change: phasing in the "life of grandchildren" standard that the rest of the developed world had been using for decades [copyrightalliance.org], including an update to reflect increased overall longevity. The Supreme Court recognized this when it upheld the CTEA in Eldred v. Ashcroft, and the opinion of the Court carefully distinguished this from the possibility of "legislative misbehavior" that pu
Is this felony hacking? (Score:2)
Is this felony hacking? or some other felony do to bad laws?
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It must be some felony, after all libraries must be emptied and prisons filled. Now look up which other societies in history had those priorities. Opps, sorry, you cannot, _those_ books have been removed....
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Umm... perp?
Intra-library loan after purge? (Score:2)
Seems like that is what goes on when a book is needed.
Not every library can keep every book forever in paper copies.
No props for the Burn Notice reference? (Score:4, Interesting)
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If only I had mod points to give you!
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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 :)
Re:No props for the Burn Notice reference? (Score:4, Informative)
Finley played for the Angels from 1986 through 1999.
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Glad I'm not the only one who recognized the name, and was then annoyed with the lack of recognition/attribution to the actor/character, show, and locale.
Why you should support these actions (Score:5, Interesting)
Read this horrific story [mercurynews.com] 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.
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Most libraries don't want you to reshelve books. Too much chance of getting it wrong.
They know which books are looked at, they could easily scan a barcode when reshelving references.
Remember these are science books (Score:2)
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 tom
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Like me and many users of libraries, Gildas marks the place from which he takes a book and carefully reshelves it when he is done, saving the library staff reshelving work. The algorithm missed his book and now it is shredded or moldering in a distant storage facility.
Most academic libraries put up pretty explicit notices saying why patrons shouldn't reshelve the books.
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Being a direct response is not relevant? Fuckoff AC. Libraries know which reference books they are constantly reshelving.
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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.
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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.
Re:Why you should support these actions (Score:4, 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.
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In Trumpmerica you won't need science. Science is evil and makes people feel bad.
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I understand that you need to do something when you run out of space, but hopefully they would go through and get rid of the less valuable books, rather than a blind '2 year' policy.
Re:Why you should support these actions (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I totally agree; that was the worst part to me also. Thank you for highlighting it.
Where I live the public libraries have book sales all the time, just as you described... I always assumed university libraries would do the same thing. But they operate in a different world...
Hard to believe (Score:2)
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 prom
A better question is why (Score:2)
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?
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What's not to like?
Digital books and e-readers, that's what. I want a book I can hold, feel, smell, turn the pages. A book doesn't need to be charged, it doesn't come encumbered by DRM, there's no glare reflecting back off its pages. And my eyes are compatible with every book, I don't need to worry about what format it's in and whether or not it works with my specific pair of ocular devices.
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A book doesn't need to be charged, it doesn't come encumbered by DRM, there's no glare reflecting back off its pages.
But it does take up quite a bit of real estate compared to a digital copy. You can fit the whole library into the space of one small book. It's really pathetic that every book isn't available digitally. What year is it?
An age-old argument (Score:2)
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
This policy is stupid (Score:2)
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.
Same thing being done at other libraries. (Score:2)
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!".
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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.
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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.
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Tiny collection, nobody will care.
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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.