Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Watch Those Light Fingers

The library where I work serves four schools. The student body of one of those schools has achieved a minor notoriety for stealing textbooks. Their books just vanish. Very mysterious.

It's quite frustrating, because as a library the institution wishes to serve its users by having the books they want to use, but also wishes to not to keep purchasing the same book over and over when it keeps disappearing.

You're tempted to just say "fine, we're not buying you books anymore," but that's obviously hugely unfair to those students who didn't steal a library copy. Those students are certainly the vast majority, and we hate to tell them we don't have a title they need.

On the other hand, we can't just buy replacements indefinitely. Or we could, I suppose, but that would mean not buying various other books. Which, since those other books don't get stolen, might in fact not bother the students terribly. Maybe we should just buy a hundred copies of every title that gets put on Course Reserves, enough for every student to steal one or not, and call it a day in terms of book purchases.

But that's not the direction we've chosen to go in collection development so far.

So what's fairer: to buy no copies of popular texts and make everyone pay for their own, or to buy copies for a couple of people to slip away with and then make everyone else pay for their own once the first ones have disappeared?

Meh. It's not one of the more satisfying questions we consider.

Also, to be fair, I should really try a little study here, to make sure confirmation bias isn't causing us to think that this particular school is really 'losing' a disproportionate quantity of the books in its field (given its representation in the total user population), when the number might really be about the same as for other schools.

Let that be a warning to you, students of schools. Your school gets a reputation, and then gets blamed for everything, with everything being seen as evidence of guilt! Rumors, innuendo...all the libraries whispering about you behind your back...

I need hardly say that any individual student, or group of students in a classroom, is still A-OK with me. I'm not out there giving people dirty looks at the reference desk because Muttonchops Wilkins' Big Book of School-Specific Health Knowledge has turned up missing.

Not unless they look kind of shifty-eyed when I oh-so-casually turn the conversation that way. In that case I'd obviously find out where they lived and then break into their room using super-cool stealth lock picks when they weren't around and search for clues. And if some sort of international travel was involved, I'd be all over that. Creeping over borders with forged passports and such is all in a day's work.

That's how we roll in Tech Services. Dedicated. Also criminal, I suppose, if you want to get picky.

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2 comments:

Andrea said...

A lot of our textbooks are put on reserve by the professor so that any student can use them in the library, but no student can take them home and keep them from other students. Also, ebook textbooks can be useful for this. They're hard to lose. :)

A'Llyn said...

That is definitely one of the things I like about ebooks. That and the fact that they don't take up space on the shelves. We just added 1600 ebooks to the catalog--not one extra inch of shelf space was lost!