Head in the Cloud storage?
Sounds like an early form of storage system ...
Artworks which went missing from the Boston Public Library, leading to FBI involvement and the resignation of the library's president, have been found on a shelf in the library. The Boston Globe reported that the pair of rare prints were found a day after president Amy Ryan announced her resignation. The prints – an Albrecht …
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I had a guy working with me in an IT team once, both doing the same job under an IT Manager.
We noticed things occasionally went missing. A disc here. A component there (RAM, disc, fans, etc.). The disc with the VLK pre-burnt into it one day.
We knew what was happening, but couldn't gather evidence to do anything about it. When he wound himself up to leave of his own accord, our boss dropped-in a sideways mention of the missing things in the course of conversation (no accusation, just "Oh, have you seen the X disc because we can't find it", etc.) Later that week, another casual mention that the VLK installs could be tracked (he wasn't bright enough to know that the tracking wasn't actually that good, especially not without making a lot of fuss with Microsoft, etc.).
The day he did decide to leave, he came in at 5:00am. He was friendly with the caretakers, so they let him in before anyone else. He told them he was working early. By 8:00am, he'd gone and never came back. But that day we found discs and components and VLK discs tucked into odd places where they'd never been before, and where we would have noticed them immediately if they'd been there the day before.
Strange that. Rather that than have to prosecute the guy (which I don't think we'd have done anyway), but it was one of those things that I won't forget. My boss at the time said she got a reference request for him a few weeks later, from a security firm to monitor CCTV for theft, etc. I would love to know exactly what she wrote, but I have a pretty shrewd idea what kind of lines it would have gone down, even if there was no way she could write a direct accusation in it.
>>"My boss at the time said she got a reference request for him a few weeks later, from a security firm to monitor CCTV for theft, etc. I would love to know exactly what she wrote, but I have a pretty shrewd idea what kind of lines it would have gone down, even if there was no way she could write a direct accusation in it."
"Well," she might have replied, "set a thief to catch a thief."
Out of all the misdeeds and rules I've ever broken coming up through the school system a one thing I never ever screwed around with was trying to re-file library books.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/bofh_2008_episode_7/
Librarians ARE vampires, or the very next thing to vampires. You'll accidentally misfile a book and then realize that even though you thought you were alone there was a librarian silently watching from three feet behind you. And according to at least one town librarian, "We know where you, and your family, and your friends, all live."
"but didn’t keep records to accompany them".
There needs to be an icon for being in shock!
DNTP has got it pinned.
If there is one thing that defines a librarian it's the drive to put things in the right order, in the right category, in the right place.
So Boston!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's why the public generally don't get stack access in a library
For sufficiently small values of "generally".
I've used many libraries, public, private, and university, over the past forty-odd years. Most of them had some staff-only stacks; a few were entirely staff-only. But most had at least some stacks that were open to patrons. And yes, misfiling was a regular occurrence, even when the libraries had prominent "Do not reshelve books!" signs and reshelving carts liberally scattered about.
...a system in which her predecessors voraciously acquired collections for the library, but didn’t keep records to accompany them.
I would imagine almost everyone here has worked at a place like that at one time or another, exchanging "collections" for "random crap" and "for the library" for "to cram into wherever it would fit".
I remember one computer repair room that was inherited from someone who had left after 15 years, when he was done with something he would just dump it at one end of the room. Gradually removing the refuse took months. Digging down into the heap was like going backward in time, it felt like we were on an archeological dig. We even found a 2.5m x 1m table and a set of shelves that were completely obscured when we started, the shelves fell off the wall when the load-bearing piles of filth and MFM hard drives were removed.
I tried to find out how long this Amy had been in charge, but the website of the BPL mentions no date information for anyone - not the President, not the Board members. No timeline of any kind.
So I am a bit torn when I read that she complains about no records being put in place. Nice to complain when stepping down, dear, but what did you do about it when you were in charge ?
Maybe she did do something, or try to do something, but I can find no record of that either.
In final analysis, however, it is the Board that is ultimately remiss in its duties. Not having a catalog of acquisitions is really a disastrous display of not being aware of their responsibilities.
Have you been to the BPL?
A dedicated president could spend years trying to get that place organized and end up with most of it still a confused mess. It's a large, old institution which, as Ryan said, rarely observed any sort of cataloging discipline in the past. Getting it all sorted now requires as much archaeology as library science.
Of course, that's a good part of its charm, too, at least for the right sort of bibliophile. I was very fond of the BPL when I lived in Boston. But then I keep my own personal library arranged in serendipity order (a pseudorandom permutation of volumes that evolves by my refusing to reshelve anything anywhere near where I got it from). Of course, I only have a couple thousand volumes to worry about.
'A library statement claims that 14 library workers searched through 180,000 of the print stacks' 320,000 items before the missing items were discovered.'
I bet that they didn't catalogue the items as they sifted through them, had they done that they would already be more than halfway through.
They probably just routed through them in no particular order, moving and mixing them as they went along.
I bet that they didn't catalogue the items as they sifted through them, had they done that they would already be more than halfway through.
Hilarious. Yes, they claim to have looked through over half the items in the circulating print stacks. But the BPL has another 900,000 items in its branch libraries, and about 20 million more in archival collections. "halfway through" is pretty much meaningless.
And the circulating stacks are cataloged. It's some of the other collections that aren't well-cataloged, and more importantly the lack of a central catalog - which is a database merge problem, not one of physically examining the collections.
And cataloging takes a lot longer than simply looking through stacks. If they'd cataloged as they went (had that even been a useful thing to do), they would have gotten through a lot less material, or needed a lot more staff.
I know, I know. Reg readers are smarter than everyone else.
In next week's news:
"Police Shoot Unarmed Black Man Running From Boston Library".
A police spokesman said that although no crime had been comitted, they were there anyway, and it wouldn't do to have officers standing around doing nothing. The black man had been seen being suspiciously quiet in the library, hiding his face in a book, and leaving with a bag that could easily have contained stolen items rather than borrowed books. Better safe than sorry, eh?
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