Daily Archives: January 4, 2010

Please stop stealing our stuff.

Imagine that you’re going to the library. Perhaps you’ll visit the Film & Audio Department, home to thousands upon thousands of DVDs; shiny, round, and free. Listen to the beep of the circulation scanner as the clerks check out your DVDs. Take your selections home in your reusable library bag. Crack open the cases and admire the fingerprints left on the discs by other customers. Enjoy the confused whir of your DVD player as the library’s security strips cause that gently fingerprinted disc to spin just a little off balance. Aah, that’s the stuff.

But now let’s search for a particular DVD. Do you like the Simpsons? Are you itching to hear Apu sing “Who Needs The Kwik-E-Mart?” Wanna see Homer become an astronaut? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could check out the whole season five box set at once? Admit it, that would be awesome.

But you can’t check it out, because someone stole it.

Really. They took the discs and left the empty case back in the stacks, where one of the shelving clerks found it this morning. Worst of all, this was a brand new set that just came in last week.

Alas, poor season five! I knew it, readers, a season of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.

Honestly, we know that people steal things and we plan for it as best we can. I’ve even made a game of it by collecting the covers of stolen DVDs and putting them in a binder – 157 since July 2007, and those are just the ones I’ve found.

We also make a point of replacing stolen items when we can afford it – because if someone likes it enough to steal it, it must be popular, right? And so many things are not stolen (like the thousands of items that pass through our doors every day) that we can deal with a swiped DVD now and then. But a brand new set, popular, slightly expensive, newly labeled and laminated? That’s just painful.

So please, please stop stealing our stuff.

– Amy

P.S. If you do have those Simpsons DVDs, you can just put them in an envelope and leave them in a book drop, no questions asked. And thank you.

P.P.S. If you’re wondering what we do when our items are stolen, lost, or damaged, be sure to check out our borrowing policies. If you have any questions, please come in and talk to us and we’ll try to work things out.

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