Hai excomunión reservada

It sometimes strikes me as absurd the amount of effort we put into materials security in academic libraries. After all, regardless of the institutional precautions, there's no real trick to stealing books from the regular stacks of a university library. (Special collections are a different matter, particularly in the wake of Forbes Smiley.) It's a simple two-step procedure that I will reveal to you now:

1. Select the book(s) you wish to steal.
2. Take them to the nearest emergency exit and walk out the door.

Even if there are security cameras mounted at these doors, what are the chances someone's going to take the time to review the footage? Big libraries don't take regular inventory anyway; the only way they generally notice something missing is when some other patron asks for it. I suppose RFID tags have the potential to change all that, but the current industry standard is passive tags which can only be read from within the same room and even these can be spoofed simply by wrapping them in aluminum foil.

The security procedures where I work are particularly obnoxious. Many years ago we decided to use tattle tape which cannot be desensitised. This means is that any library book will set off the exit alarms, whether the book has been checked out or not. Every patron has to remove tattletaped materials from their bags and pass them around to an exit attendant who checks for checkout slips. I find it so annoying that I rarely ever check a book out myself (something that garners me a lot of grief from my colleagues).

In fact, my borrowing privileges were actually blocked for years because of a fee dispute: I was told that staff weren't liable for fines, so when I got overdue notices, I ignored them. Eventually, three books I had were declared "lost" and I was charged a replacement fee--which wasn't waived when I returned the books. Only just now, when I checked out an umbrella for protection from midday rainstorms (which missed me) did I realise the block had been removed--years ago by someone who doesn't even work here any more.