Warning! The next story has been deemed a cognitohazard for library professionals! Publicity might result in heads exploding, coronary heart assaults, wailing, gnashing of tooth, and murderous rage!
… So, within the library within the city the place I grew up, there was a locked card catalog constructed into the wall within the director’s workplace. This appeared an odd place for the cardboard catalog to be positioned, however the typical assertion given was that it was a historic oddity, and to pay it no thoughts. It might have been an excessive amount of bother to unload it. Apart from, nobody actually knew the place the keys have been for it. Some day somebody may need to take a look at the outdated historical past of our assortment, the catalog could be there, ready! So swore the librarian, who was a social fixture of nice significance on this very small city.
Being a bored and curious younger youngster, I had at all times wished to know what was in it. We had one other card catalog down the place the general public may use it (it was the early 90s), so I satisfied myself that this catalog should include one thing particular, to must be upstairs and locked.
Ultimately, I’d be employed as an aide at this library, and I confess I nonetheless was curious in regards to the catalog within the director’s workplace. So, I requested the (new) librarian if I may open it, and she or he shrugged and stated “Positive, no matter. Nobody ever gave me keys for it once I changed [Old Librarian] in 2009 although.”
Not an issue, I stated, and aided by a few letter openers and a pocket knife, I finally opened the drawers.
They contained the historic borrowing playing cards for each merchandise the library had owned, neatly organized by the library part the e book had been a part of. Not one of the patron names had ever been crossed out, and so they have been all nonetheless legible, with due date and return date famous dutifully on them. They spanned from the Seventies to roughly 2008 – every time the borrowing card for a e book had been crammed, it had been meticulously filed away, and a brand new one put in that e book.
When had we gotten an digital library system to have the ability to verify books out and in on a pc and never must maintain monitor of it on items of paper, I think about some of us are asking? 1993. [Old Librarian] had maintained fully redundant data for roughly 15 YEARS, hand filling out the playing cards after checking books out on the brand new system, and functionally nobody had identified. In and of itself, that’s a bit mindboggling.
However bear in mind how I stated this catalog was organized by what part of the library the books had been saved in? Properly, [Old Librarian] had robust notions of Propriety, and so these borrowing playing cards have been organized into her conventional e book classes of Kids’s Materials, Fiction, Marital Points, Non-Fiction, Periodicals, Perversions, Youths, and Ladies’s Well being (Dewey Decimal order, after all, inside every shelving part).
“We should always in all probability eliminate these, proper?” I stated to [New Librarian]. “I believed we weren’t supposed to maintain data of what individuals checked out. That complete patron privateness factor you lectured me about on my first day.”
“We’ll must have them securely destroyed.” [New Librarian] mused. “I don’t assume we’ve received the finances for it. Are you able to relock the cupboard?”
I couldn’t. And so after speaking with the city upkeep man, a set of iron bands have been bolted to the wall and secured with padlocks to maintain the drawers closed and data safe.
And… that’s the tip of the story, as finest I do know it. Within the time I labored at that library, the funds by no means appeared to get the playing cards destroyed securely.
