Stealing books from the library is not headline making news. Seriously, are we not asking for it the way we populate the shelves with sex books that you can borrow for free?! Why check it out, just steal the damn thing, afterall isn't it yours anyway, Mr. Taxpayer?
This morning while I was reading some local news headlines, one caught my attention "Md. Man Sentenced for Stealing Library's Tarantula." Huh? I clicked on the link and read further, "A Maryland man has been sentenced to 90 days in jail for stealing a spider from a public library." Ok, so it was the library's pet, which explains why a tarantula was at the library, other than it's creepy, though the article did not mention if the spider had received the boo-worthy name of "Dewey." The guy who stole it apparently got caught because he couldn't shut up about his amazing score -- way to go!
This odd bit of news made me curious if there were any similar stories nationally. Stolen books aren't news, but what other bizarre, attention getting things can be stolen from the library?
I decided to Google "stolen from the library." Here's some of what I found:
At the Ponce de Leon Boulevard Public Library in Florida, the emergency defibrillators were stolen from the cabinet at the library's entrance. I think the most interesting part of this article is that they blame the theft on the homeless without any real proof.
In Texas, a statue of a boy reading was stolen from the Allen Library. I feel at least lucky that my library does the "Paws to Read" program and lets kids read to dogs, where it looks like the poor children of North Texas are reduced to reading to statues. And now that statue is gone!
In Cincinnati the news story was a little different, the item in question was not stolen from the library, but brought to the library. Yes, at the Cincinnati Public Library, Police arrested a man accused of being naked at the library with a bag full of stolen cheese: "When officers searched his bag, they said they found a knife, a razor, two stolen DVDs and 4 pounds of stolen parmesan cheese."
I decided to stop my search there, because everyone knows anytime you read a story about someone getting naked and weird at the library you're only jinxing yourself.
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
*gasp* Theft in the library?! Shocking!
The Post had an article about how 12 naughty patrons in Maryland are being indicted for stealing nearly $90,000 worth of books from the county libraries. The group of library users were checking out the maximum of 75 items for that county, most of them textbooks, never returning the items, then reselling the textbooks and sometimes CDs and DVDs online.
Two things shocked me about this story and neither of them had to do with theft in the library. The first thing that shocked me was that the people were actually being indicted and held responsible for their stolen book fines. Many times I have looked up a patron's account to give them their internet password to discover that they have at least $100 in fees for lost library items. Once, there was this girl who was a student and begged us to let her go over the regular interlibrary loan limit for her research paper and never returned any of the books, ruined our relationship with several lending libraries, and to this day still has an outstanding $843.99 in lost items on her card. What does my library system do when you don't return a book? We send you a letter. Are you scared yet?! I have heard of library systems that actually turn their nonpaying patrons over to collection agencies to try and recoup some of the costs, so obviously I'm pretty impressed that Maryland's state's attorney is going balls to the wall over this.
The second thing that shocked me was that these book recycling morons actually checked the items out to their own account, leaving a noticeable paper trail as to who had the missing book last instead of just stealing the stupid books in the first place since that's what they planned to do anyway. Sure, we have those electronic security gates at the entrance of our library, but we stopped putting the tattle-tape in the books eons ago. In fact, our security gates are just for show because they kept breaking and were so expensive to fix that they were left broken as a visual deterrent. You want to steal a book? No one's going to stop you. Hell, that's the reason why we can't keep any of the sex instruction books on the shelves. But then again I work for a library system that doesn't have loan limits or late fees, so maybe that's why our patrons take advantage of us.
However, we don't carry textbooks either -- I mean, come on, that's just asking for it.
Two things shocked me about this story and neither of them had to do with theft in the library. The first thing that shocked me was that the people were actually being indicted and held responsible for their stolen book fines. Many times I have looked up a patron's account to give them their internet password to discover that they have at least $100 in fees for lost library items. Once, there was this girl who was a student and begged us to let her go over the regular interlibrary loan limit for her research paper and never returned any of the books, ruined our relationship with several lending libraries, and to this day still has an outstanding $843.99 in lost items on her card. What does my library system do when you don't return a book? We send you a letter. Are you scared yet?! I have heard of library systems that actually turn their nonpaying patrons over to collection agencies to try and recoup some of the costs, so obviously I'm pretty impressed that Maryland's state's attorney is going balls to the wall over this.
The second thing that shocked me was that these book recycling morons actually checked the items out to their own account, leaving a noticeable paper trail as to who had the missing book last instead of just stealing the stupid books in the first place since that's what they planned to do anyway. Sure, we have those electronic security gates at the entrance of our library, but we stopped putting the tattle-tape in the books eons ago. In fact, our security gates are just for show because they kept breaking and were so expensive to fix that they were left broken as a visual deterrent. You want to steal a book? No one's going to stop you. Hell, that's the reason why we can't keep any of the sex instruction books on the shelves. But then again I work for a library system that doesn't have loan limits or late fees, so maybe that's why our patrons take advantage of us.
However, we don't carry textbooks either -- I mean, come on, that's just asking for it.
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