Father of Our Country, Father of Our Book Theft Problem

I was never overly fond of George Washington. I don't know if it was the powdered wig, the wooden teeth or that whole cherry tree folklore. But I never found that the father of our country was really as great as everyone believed.

And now my belief has been proven. George Washington, who could not tell a lie, is now a known book thief.

Recently an article came out that said George Washington had not returned two books to a library in New York, which makes him a book thief. If you check out a book and never returned it the library world calls that legalized theft and although not a great deal has been done about it historically, it is a major problem and is costing our libraries millions.

Now I can't really hate George Washington for doing something that I too have done. I will say that a)I was eight and b)not only did I replace the book, I replaced it with two copies. So if some other enterprising eight-year-old could not be parted with The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle the library would not suffer. But I can and do actually hold this against The New York Society Library. Why? Because they have been quiet about it for so long.

This is the problem with library theft: NO ONE TALKS ABOUT IT. If you ask librarians they will deny it exists. They look at it as a part of doing business. Although not a great deal of data has been collected on library book theft, the last known numbers for how much library book theft costs libraries a year was $2 billion. That's a lot of books or a lot of services that libraries provide. That number comes from a 1998 article. That's $2,619,891,819.88 according to an inflation calculator.....Wow is it just me or does that number look like a huge chunk of our library budgets?

Libraries need to not only talk about book theft, but they need to start doing something about it. I respect Terry LaTour from the Clarion University Libraries for the work he's done to prevent library book theft. When he came to Clarion it was a $30,000 a year problem and now it's not. Terry talks about book theft and he does something about it. As librarians we could learn from Terry and we should. Because people stealing books from libraries legally or illegally is a price libraries can't afford to ignore anymore.