BoringSupreez wrote:Ticked: I wanted to check out Squee's Big Wonderful Book of Unspeakable Horrors at the library, but ran into problems. The computer said it was on the shelf. It wasn't. I talked to a librarian, who checked again for me, then suggested I look in other locations in the library it might have been misplaced. When she checked the records on the library's system, she discovered it had been missing since 2008 (three years ago!), and no one had ever noticed until now. I'm betting it got stolen. My library uses little metal strips placed inside the book that set off an alarm if someone tries to take a book from the library without checking it out but A: the strips are very easy to find, and even easier to remove, and B: the check-out machines mess up so often no one even looks up when the alarm goes off. It goes off like once every 10 minutes, from people walking in with books that were supposed to have been checked out that weren't. One could walk into the place, load up on books and movies, and then steal them all and he would never get caught. Oh well.
Sounds about right. Your typical school library has to contend with quite a lot: thieves, miniscule budgets, performing all of the essential functions of a library with typically little in the way of a staff while also giving class tours and visiting classes for various purposes, unruly kids, vandals, etc. Folks steal or destroy things from libraries all the time, and with a collection of really any size, it's not easy to tell if something has simply disappeared until sometimes years later when someone else finally wants that particular piece. Hell, some kids like abusing it simply because they think it's funny, as gtmtnbiker mentioned.
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