Most, if not all libraries, offer and participate in a service known as interlibrary loans (ILL). Since no one library can house absolutely everything, the idea is that libraries will loan materials to other libraries. The borrowing library will, in turn, loan that material to their patrons.
Our ILL department switched to a
Relais hosted ILL system last September. Due to firewall issues, our automated overdue notices were not being issued. The ILL staff was, with a good deal of success, trying to stay on top of things manually. This all changed when the college replaced its firewall about three weeks ago. An unexpected result was that the queued overdue notices were released – they were sitting there like water behind a dam, which finally burst.
The consequence was some kind (and not so kind) panic calls and e-mails being placed to our ILL staff. The staff calmed most of the patrons and assured them that this was a onetime occurrence. One of the borrowing institutions, which will remain nameless, did decide to follow-up on the overdue notice. As it turns out, it appeared as though the patron did not return it to them.
Now the funny part, the item was returned to us but sloppily stripped of all MHC Library Services’ markings. It appears as though the borrowing library shelved the item in their collection. It gets better though; the item was not the original we loaned out – it was a facsimile of the original. The coil binding was gone and replaced by a stapled version that used black book tape (not unlike thick hockey tape) to bind the spine. The tape was even sloppily placed on the book (it was off center and crooked). Unfortunately there is not much recourse that we can take for trying to locate the original, which either resides in the office of the borrower or the stacks of the borrowing institution. By the way, the item is
The Ecology & Zoogeography of Fishes in the Missouri (Milk River) Drainage of Alberta by Thomas Andrew Willock, published in 1969.
This is a practice that was allegedly done by the original Library of Alexandria. It was suggested that they would “borrow” copies from other libraries, passing ships, and traders; the owners would, however, have copies of varying quality returned to them. It is good to see that another 2,300 year old library tradition remains alive and well.
