Warning! The following story has been deemed a cognitohazard for library professionals! Exposure may lead to heads exploding, heart attacks, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and murderous rage!
… So, in the library in the town where I grew up, there was a locked card catalog built into the wall in the director’s office. This seemed an odd place for the card catalog to be located, but the typical statement given was that it was a historical oddity, and to pay it no mind. It would have been too much trouble to unload it. Besides, no one really knew where the keys were for it. Some day someone might want to look at the old history of our collection, the catalog would be there, waiting! So swore the librarian, who was a social fixture of great importance in this very small town.
Being a bored and curious young child, I had always wanted to know what was in it. We had another card catalog down where the public could use it (it was the early 90s), so I convinced myself that this catalog must contain something special, to need to be upstairs and locked.
Eventually, I would be employed as an aide at this library, and I confess I still was curious about the catalog in the director’s office. So, I asked the (new) librarian if I could open it, and she shrugged and said “Sure, whatever. No one ever gave me keys for it when I replaced [Old Librarian] in 2009 though.”
Not a problem, I said, and aided by a couple of letter openers and a pocket knife, I eventually opened the drawers.
They contained the historical borrowing cards for every item the library had owned, neatly organized by the library section the book had been part of. None of the patron names had ever been crossed out, and they were all still legible, with due date and return date noted dutifully on them. They spanned from the 1970s to approximately 2008 – each time the borrowing card for a book had been filled, it had been meticulously filed away, and a new one put in that book.
When had we gotten an electronic library system to be able to check books in and out on a computer and not have to keep track of it on pieces of paper, I imagine some folks are asking? 1993. [Old Librarian] had maintained completely redundant records for approximately 15 YEARS, hand filling out the cards after checking books out on the new system, and functionally no one had known. In and of itself, that’s a bit mindboggling.
But remember how I said this catalog was organized by what section of the library the books had been kept in? Well, [Old Librarian] had strong notions of Propriety, and so these borrowing cards were organized into her traditional book categories of Children’s Material, Fiction, Marital Issues, Non-Fiction, Periodicals, Perversions, Youths, and Women’s Health (Dewey Decimal order, of course, within each shelving section).
“We should probably get rid of these, right?” I said to [New Librarian]. “I thought we weren’t supposed to keep records of what people checked out. That whole patron privacy thing you lectured me about on my first day.”
“We’ll have to have them securely destroyed.” [New Librarian] mused. “I don’t think we’ve got the budget for it. Can you relock the cabinet?”
I could not. And so after talking with the town maintenance guy, a set of iron bands were bolted to the wall and secured with padlocks to keep the drawers closed and information secure.
And… that’s the end of the story, as best I know it. In the time I worked at that library, the funds never appeared to get the cards destroyed securely.