Today someone came by my office in the library and informed me that he’d seen some of our books floating in a drainage pond behind the boys’ dorm.
I sent my assistant out to retrieve them, and he brought back about five soggy, ruined volumes from our Isaiah shelf. Someone, apparently, had swept the books off in a bunch, carried them out without checking them out, and deposited them in the water. There’s no way to tell how long ago this happened.
So our innocence quotient goes down a couple points.
We’re a family sort of operation. We have do-it-yourself checkout, and essentially no security, because our students have always been the sort of young people whose worst infractions are born of absent-mindedness or high-spiritedess, not malice.
I don’t suppose we’ll upgrade security over this one incident.
But the day is coming, no doubt. Security will cost money, and everybody will have to chip in to pay for it.
That’s the way of the world, even at a Bible school.
Today’s Virtual Book Tour stop is here, at The American Chronicle. Oddly, the article isn’t on their home page. I can make a guess as to why, but I’ll say nothing. Probably wrong anyway.
It’s dated October 1. Hmm, that’s one scary website.
That’s a sad story. Were these books commentaries on Isaiah? Do you have several shelves of commentaries like these are single biblical books?
Yes, they were commentaries on Isaiah. We do have several shelves of commentaries on that particular book, but these will have to be replaced.
Ugh! I’m sorry about this. Instead of security, it might be cheaper to put RFID chips on the books, and a reader in the doorway. That way, you can tell when books leave the building. The one time cost is higher, but ongoing costs would be lower than an actual person.
I was once a library monitor in your library, 1988-90, when it was still in the lower floor of the chapel building, and it gives me an unpleasant feeling to learn about that.