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The famous British Library mislays 9,000 books
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by Amy Judd | March 17, 2009 at 03:41 pm
407 views | 12 Recommendations | 2 comments
The world famous British Library, which holds some of the most famous books in the world, many of them first editions and originals that are irreplaceable, now claim that they have lost over 9,000 books, including an edition of Mein Kampf that was produced in 1939 on Hitler's 50th birthday.
The library has says that the books are not stolen, but rather misplaced, despite the fact that there are no records of some of them for over 50 years now. Some of the books are valued at over twenty thousand pounds. One of the books missing is a first edition of Oscar Wilde's novel 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', which has not been seen since 1961.
The library records all of these items as "mislaid" rather than gone for ever, still less stolen. Despite well-publicised recent cases - such as that of Edward Forbes Smiley III, convicted in the US three years ago of stealing more than 100 maps from institutions including the British Library, and Farhad Hakimzadeh, an Iranian collector jailed in January for cutting maps, illustrations and pages from priceless volumes in the British Library and other collections - the library is convinced that almost all the missing texts are still somewhere within its walls.
Books are only noticed as missing when a reader requests them and they cannot be found.
The building however is secure and they do have a security system.
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at 17:45 on March 17th, 2009
Hum... No comment.
at 20:31 on March 17th, 2009
I worked at the British Library for almost ten years. I was part of a team producing a printed catalog of books up to 1975, if I remember correctly. It was published by a German publisher who specializes in libraries. It was the last time a printed catalog would be made, at least by the pre-computer method.
The catalog was about 700 vols.
Anyway, the point of my comment is prior to the British Library having its current own building it was part of the British Museum and there was no or little storage space. It would take more than a week just to order a book, and often longer. Most of the rare books were kept at the museum in the rare reading room but the majority of the books were stored in many places around London.
The British Library owns more than 15 million books making it the largest library in the world. The Congress library is bigger but that is mainly government papers.
The library has misplaced 9,000 books which is only 0.06% of the collection. Sometimes books end up in the wrong place or on the wrong shelf then a search is needed to locate it, but you may have to search millions of books to locate it.
I suppose matters could be improved if each had a wireless tag then it would be easy to locate a book, but who will pay for this?