Florida Man Checks Out 2,361 Books, Doesn't Exist
December 31, 2016 4:08 PM   Subscribe

Chuck Finley appears to be a voracious reader, having checked out 2,361 books at the East Lake County Library in a nine-month period this year. But Finley didn't read a single one of the books, ranging from "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck to a kids book called "Why Do My Ears Pop?" by Ann Fullick. That's because Finley isn't real.
posted by Knappster (58 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
rebellious librarians=new punk band name
posted by LuckyMonkey21 at 4:18 PM on December 31, 2016 [3 favorites]


Have they no off-site storage? Seems a bit ridiculous to wear out books just because they haven't been checked out in 2 years, especially if they're 'classics'.
posted by Fence at 4:18 PM on December 31, 2016 [5 favorites]


Chuck Finley sure is a popular alias in Florida.
posted by madajb at 4:19 PM on December 31, 2016 [21 favorites]


Seems like a reasonable way for a library to actually save money in the face of a system that is geared around metrics rather than around literature and what libraries actually are.
posted by hippybear at 4:20 PM on December 31, 2016 [28 favorites]


THAT's because the only metric the Library system was using to evaluate the collection (and funding) was circulation numbers instead of the professional opinion of the professionals they hired or alternative metrics.
posted by saucysault at 4:21 PM on December 31, 2016 [20 favorites]




Most books that haven't checked out in two years are books that really don't generate enough demand to justify the shelf space they take up; they're best-sellers from 3 years ago where you bought 500 copies and now you really don't need more than 5, or the fad diet or money or self-help books that have long since been replaced by new fads, or books that are so niche-interest or badly-marketed or just boring that you have to say "Well, if we had infinite shelf space we'd definitely keep it around for the ONE person who actually wants to read this book, but since we've got a whole crate of new books coming in this week..."

But there is no excuse for using inflexible metrics for weeding. My past library system used a web tool to pull up data on every book that hadn't circulated in the last X months, and it was useful in identifying candidates for weeding, but when there's administrative pressure to weed EVERY book that falls in that category... this is what happens. It's like the scandals around cheating on standardized tests: if you create an inflexible metric for people to live up to, but don't give them the tools to actually live up to it, you've only created an incentive for people to cheat and find loopholes.

Which is not to say that I approve, or disapprove, of the librarians who created Finley. I hate the administrative pressure to weed everything that isn't shiny and popular but am annoyed by librarians who think that every book is sacred no matter how musty, fusty, outdated, and unappealing, and the article doesn't quite give you enough information to decide what's the case here. It sounds bad to weed Cannery Row but I've weeded dozens of classics mostly on the criteria of "we have three copies, none of them get checked out, we definitely don't need three." But there are differences between a huge library system, where you know that you can get the book from another library in a couple days if you need it, and a smaller one with fewer resources.
posted by Jeanne at 4:35 PM on December 31, 2016 [60 favorites]


The library at Alexandria was burned as a total weed-out because nobody had ever checked out a book from there, ever.
posted by hippybear at 4:43 PM on December 31, 2016 [15 favorites]


I just tagged another 50 or so books for weeding today! If you want new books, you need space for new books. I used to hem and haw over each one, but of late I've become a bit more bloodthirsty. 100 new books are added to the collection each month, so 100 have to go. I'll try to replace back catalogs of still publishing authors with paperbacks in a different collection, but really what gets weeded are promising first novels, random books from a series, and a lot of werewolf porn the previous librarian bought for some reason.

I even used a fake patron today! His name is Reaper Grim and he put holds on all the books by or about someone who died this year so I can add them to my In Memoriam display. I had to have some black humor in there as this was a pretty bleak year and they don't let us drink and cry at work no more.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 4:57 PM on December 31, 2016 [88 favorites]


I support the effort to deal with the flawed system for maintaining a library's collection and hope that other librarians with similar systems learn from the mistakes that tripped up East Lake County's efforts.

We're really going to need this kind of creative thinking among public sector employees to get us through the next 4 years.
posted by she's not there at 4:57 PM on December 31, 2016 [14 favorites]


The inspector general's report said creation of a fake library card "amounts to the creation of a false public record."

FFS.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:23 PM on December 31, 2016 [16 favorites]


A robust and easy-to-use interlibrary loan system would ease a lot of this pressure on individual libraries. Then it would not be necessary for a library to retain copies of little-used items, as long as n other libraries held copies.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:23 PM on December 31, 2016 [7 favorites]


When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that the library got rid of books. Library's were where the books lived. I never thought about shelf space. Then one day I walked up to the local library and the dumpster was full of books. I ran inside and told the librarian that someone was trying to throw away books! He laughed, and explained that for them to get new books, they needed to get rid of old books, and they only threw away books no one had read in a long time. He told me take any I wanted. Mom was not impressed when I came home with about 30, and the explanation of "Mom, they're throwing them away!" really didn't impress her. Still have about half of them...

The local library now has a program that tries to sell the weeded books, first locally, then through Amazon. They only turn a tiny profit, but the program is staffed with volunteers. But the program only works because they have enough room to store the weeds.
posted by Marky at 5:30 PM on December 31, 2016 [30 favorites]


No one would have noticed if they'd just a) spread it a around a bit (I mean Chuck sounds like the kind of guy who would have at least a baseball teams worth of kids and come from a big family) and b) didn't check the books back in immediately.

Having said that is there any sort of policy that prevents librarians from checking out books from their library? Seems like just checking them out in your own name; carrying them around in your trunk for a week; and then checking them back in would be legal, unquestionable and no more ethically shaky than the executed plan while enabling plausible deniability.
posted by Mitheral at 5:43 PM on December 31, 2016 [8 favorites]


Yeah, that's a thing. I know of a library (not the one I work for) where the first thing the student employees had to do every morning was to walk around and around through the entrance turnstiles to get that gate count up.

We do, however, have a fake patron we invented for testing stuff: Edgar Nopants. Sometimes he still gets real mail.
posted by lagomorphius at 5:45 PM on December 31, 2016 [10 favorites]


Metafilter: A Lot of Werewolf Porn the Previous Librarian Bought for Some Reason.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 5:47 PM on December 31, 2016 [25 favorites]


MetaFilter: sacred no matter how musty, fusty, outdated, and unappealing
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:06 PM on December 31, 2016 [15 favorites]


the first thing the student employees had to do every morning was to walk around and around through the entrance turnstiles to get that gate count up

At a library I once worked at, during a staff meeting when the subject of gate stats came up, the library director said, "If the counts are low, I'll tell [the funding body] we need more money, to promote the library; if the counts are high, I'll tell [the funding body] we need more money, to manage the demand." After that, I stopped worrying about statistics.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 6:11 PM on December 31, 2016 [10 favorites]


and a lot of werewolf porn

wait what
posted by Mike Mongo at 6:38 PM on December 31, 2016 [4 favorites]


I even used a fake patron today! His name is Reaper Grim...

At least change his name to Gabriel Reyes so it's plausibly deniable in case of slapdash examination.
posted by infinitewindow at 6:40 PM on December 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


...and another thing that caught my attention (also pointed out by Joe In Australia) was in the article itself:

The inspector general's report said creation of a fake library card "amounts to the creation of a false public record."

Spoken like a true Vogon.
posted by Mike Mongo at 6:48 PM on December 31, 2016 [12 favorites]


Perhaps uncharitably, this strikes me as far more likely to be about funding than about saving classics (from "maybe" being disposed of after "long periods.") Saying they were trying to save money by gaming the system, rather than obtain money by manipulating it, sounds better and classier after the fact. You could tell by looking at the list I suppose but 2300 checkouts seems about quantity rather than quality.

Also, I strongly suspect they named Chuck Finley after the alias on the Florida based Burn Notice then didn't want to admit they were big TV watchers.
posted by mark k at 6:59 PM on December 31, 2016 [4 favorites]


Oops, my above comment is off. The county library in question doesn't get the funding based on circulation. Other libraries do. Sorry.

I'll still see no comment in the article that the weeding is inflexible (ie, you can't save books you know are good) and I also still believe the Chuck Finley alias was inspired by Bruce Campbell.
posted by mark k at 7:03 PM on December 31, 2016


Are they sure it isn't retired baseball great Chuck Finley?
posted by waitingtoderail at 7:14 PM on December 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


Sort of tangentially, I guess: why would library funding ever be based on circulation? Public libraries are a pretty unambiguous public good, and whether people are checking out lots of books right now provides no indication of whether people will need to check out lots of books in the future.
posted by IAmUnaware at 7:19 PM on December 31, 2016 [3 favorites]


Because "accountability" in using public money demands that we have easy to understand metrics proving that the resource being paid for is actually being used. As an industry we are trying to move towards measuring impact, but most politicans and members of the public understand circ numbers (low circ = "no one is using the library - cut the budget", high circ = "with high volume you can find efficiencies - cut the budget"
posted by saucysault at 7:29 PM on December 31, 2016 [10 favorites]


I recall from my days of working at a local library that the "redistribution room" (where the unread, culled books went) was often full of timeless classics, while the books I had to keep putting back on the shelves for circulation were total crap. Not that I personally objected, since employees could buy the redistribution books for $1 each.
posted by jabah at 7:31 PM on December 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


Metafilter: they don't let us drink and cry at work no more.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:34 PM on December 31, 2016 [10 favorites]


I'm going to need mod input for verification of that.
posted by hippybear at 7:40 PM on December 31, 2016 [4 favorites]


and a lot of werewolf porn

wait what


A few days of the month it's Angela & Strawberry, but when the moon isn't full it's just that LBJ bio
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:15 PM on December 31, 2016 [10 favorites]


As someone who no longer uses a library I'm kinda stunned that people are totally fine with librarians fudging circulation numbers to obtain extra funding.

I appreciate that libraries are a public good, but how is this not stealing from the public?
posted by zymil at 9:37 PM on December 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


Are they sure it isn't retired baseball great Chuck Finley?

That is who they claim to have named the account after, though I would really find the Sam Axe explanation way more plausible.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:37 PM on December 31, 2016 [3 favorites]


Am I the only mefite who isn't a librarian?
posted by GuyZero at 9:43 PM on December 31, 2016 [42 favorites]


Gaming the system to keep important but infrequently checked out books on the shelves seems fine, but boosting your overall circulation by 3.9% to get a larger share of the county library budget not so much.
posted by humanfont at 9:50 PM on December 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


As someone who no longer uses a library I'm kinda stunned that people are totally fine with librarians fudging circulation numbers to obtain extra funding.

I appreciate that libraries are a public good, but how is this not stealing from the public?


Frankly, as tax-phobic and irrational as our society has become, I'm not going to turn up my nose at libraries (or schools, or other essential infrastructure departments) "stealing from the public". Until people can grow up enough to realize that taxes are important and necessary to the function of a real society, the money has to get there somehow, and I'm not willing to accept that we just let society rot so that some politicians can score extra points with their constituents.
posted by IAmUnaware at 10:02 PM on December 31, 2016 [37 favorites]


No one would have noticed if they'd just a) spread it a around a bit (I mean Chuck sounds like the kind of guy who would have at least a baseball teams worth of kids and come from a big family) and b) didn't check the books back in immediately.
Or lent the books to a real Chuck instead of a fake one. If the library distributed a list of titles to their subscribers saying "please help save these books by checking them out - because we think they are great but we'll have weed them out otherwise" - then they might have got some takers (maybe not for the one about why our ears pop)
posted by rongorongo at 11:10 PM on December 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


If my local library wants some assistance with saving certain titles, I am very willing to check them out to allow them a longer shelf life. I would just need a list of the ones on death row.
posted by LilithSilver at 11:14 PM on December 31, 2016 [3 favorites]


As someone who no longer uses a library I'm kinda stunned that people are totally fine with librarians fudging circulation numbers to obtain extra funding.

I appreciate that libraries are a public good, but how is this not stealing from the public?


Perhaps if you still used (and depended upon) libraries, you would be less stunned by those of us who are totally fine with the librarians' actions.

And library patrons are, of course, members of the "public".
posted by she's not there at 11:35 PM on December 31, 2016 [27 favorites]


As someone who no longer uses a library I'm kinda stunned that people are totally fine with librarians fudging circulation numbers to obtain extra funding.

While I would like to buy every book I want to read, my funds are limited, so I use my library all the time. I use it for both physical books and electronic resources. There are a few books I would like to check out or get on interlibrary loan. I haven't requested them yet - the only copies listed on WorldCat are in the Library of Congress. One of them is listed in my local library system on WorldCat, but they don't actually have a copy.

Since I research a wide variety of topics, if libraries were too quick to weed out their collections, there are several things I would never have been able to find. Fortunately, the Blaine County library in Montana didn't weed out "Forgotten Pioneers". It is a self-published book about the tiny settlement in North Central Montana where my mother was born. The town, Hollandville, was wiped out by a hailstorm on the Fourth of July 1922.

As a side note, I am particularly bothered by the euphemistic "de-accessioning" of library holdings.
posted by Altomentis at 12:02 AM on January 1, 2017 [10 favorites]


If my local library wants some assistance with saving certain titles, I am very willing to check them out to allow them a longer shelf life. I would just need a list of the ones on death row.

The thing is, books "on death row" are marked as such for a reason. Books that are demonstrably popular (i.e. via the evidence of ordinary borrowing stats) tend to be the books that remain in the collection.

At a recent symposium of my state's libraries, one of the presenters displayed a photo of a patron with a pile of about twenty books they'd taken from their library's 'freebies' giveaway - books that had been withdrawn during a weeding project. The librarian made the interesting comment that books like these wouldn't have been withdrawn if patrons had borrowed them with the kind of enthusiasm they had had for the contents of the freebies trolleys.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:48 AM on January 1, 2017 [8 favorites]


People with no clue of what they're administering using numbers to make boneheaded decisions to fix what isn't broken? Sounds like higher ed.
posted by persona au gratin at 12:52 AM on January 1, 2017 [6 favorites]


I have such mixed feelings about aggressive weeding.

On the one hand, I understand that to get more books you need to get rid of old books, bar some kind of futuristic and/or Unseen University storage solution.

On the other, I consider what a refuge the library was for me as a kid, and one of the reasons was that it had unpopular books. I grew up in a town where people did not really love to read, but I was able to read a lot of really interesting stuff - Michael Nava's Henry Rios (GLBTQ Latino detective) mysteries, old Tanith Lee (weird feminist fantasy writer), interesting popular histories from the seventies and eighties, etc. I'm sure I was the only one who checked a lot of them out. If they had been weeded based on not having been checked out within a year or two, they'd have been in the garbage until I came along, and failing that, they'd have been tossed a year after.

And something I've noticed in libraries I used to frequent as a kid: when I was young, each shelf would be about 3/4 or 4/5 full. If you were a kid and you wanted to browse, browsing a whole bay of kids' books would take a long time. In my HS and jr high school libraries, the shelves were on the 4/5 full side.

When I go back to those libraries, I notice that the shelves are only 1/2 to 2/3 full each. There are fewer books on display. Some books (in public libraries) have been moved to the stacks, so you can't find them if you browse - only if you actively look for them and request them. Other books are gone. So not only is there weeding, there's a commitment to having fewer books available to the public.

When I was working at a volunteer bookstore, our senior book person got in on this too - we cut back on our selection so that we could have enticingly empty shelves and a "curated" collection. Per that person, this is supposed to help with the "paradox of choice", like when you go to the grocery store and there's thirty kinds of jam and you leave without being able to choose. People used to come in and ask why we had so few books now when our shelves used to be so full, and of course we'd rarely have any but the most common, currently-popular books, so people couldn't rely on actually finding a book they wanted unless it was a hot title.

This really bothers me, and I notice that it's not something that our university library does. If you want to look for books there, you don't encounter 1/2 full shelves. They weed, I know, but they also use the space they have rather than creating "reassuring" empty shelves.

Books are not like peanut butter varieties. Having fewer books is a harm, even if it makes people feel that they can select easily between a smaller number of currently popular ones.
posted by Frowner at 1:04 AM on January 1, 2017 [26 favorites]


(I add that one reason I am sure I was the only person who checked out books was that until I was most of the way through HS, we still operated on a stamp system. So I could see when things had last been checked out. In my jr high library, we actually signed books out, so I could see even more clearly there.)
posted by Frowner at 1:07 AM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


I consider what a refuge the library was for me as a kid, and one of the reasons was that it had unpopular books. ... If they had been weeded based on not having been checked out within a year or two, they'd have been in the garbage

I would be interested to hear from librarians who were active in collection management decades ago. I assume some form of weeding has been done all along in libraries, since printed books naturally wear out over time. But are these current acute space issues truly recent developments? Is it because there are simply more people these days, and therefore more books being published, and therefore less finite space than there used to be, resulting in a necessarily more frequent turnover?
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 1:40 AM on January 1, 2017


In my jr high library, we actually signed books out, so I could see even more clearly there.)

I remember at an older library being pretty pleased with myself when I noticed the first time I'd checked out a book that was last checked out before I was born.
posted by sammyo at 5:03 AM on January 1, 2017 [3 favorites]


As someone who no longer uses a library I'm kinda stunned that people are totally fine with librarians fudging circulation numbers to obtain extra funding.

I appreciate that libraries are a public good, but how is this not stealing from the public?



I favorited that comment because it makes sense.


Frankly, as tax-phobic and irrational as our society has become, I'm not going to turn up my nose at libraries (or schools, or other essential infrastructure departments) "stealing from the public". Until people can grow up enough to realize that taxes are important and necessary to the function of a real society, the money has to get there somehow, and I'm not willing to accept that we just let society rot so that some politicians can score extra points with their constituents.


I also favorited this comment because it makes sense.


Now the resulting cognitive dissonance has me wanting to punch out an asshole politician or two - and the short-sighted constituents that keep sending them to the state legislature - while holding a bake sale to fund a retirement home for unwanted books.
posted by darkstar at 5:21 AM on January 1, 2017 [5 favorites]


This reminds me of one of the running gags in Connie Willis' Bellweather where the main character does the same thing with classic books at her local library for exactly the same reason, though just by checking out more books than she can ever read every week rather than inventing a person. And that book was released in 1996, so I guess this has been an issue for a while.
posted by eykal at 5:40 AM on January 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


Altomentis, have you checked out the Open Library? I've found more than 20 of the books I can't find in my own library there.
posted by waitingtoderail at 6:16 AM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


Cannery Row surprises me. At the mostly used bookstore where I work, we can't keep Steinbeck on the shelf. I have to order new copies of whichever one is currently on a school reading list, or we'd never have any at all.

We throw tons of books away, though. Directly into the dumpster with the stained, the torn, the split, the book club editions of James Patterson's 1997 output. People get very freaked out by this but after five and a half years in the used book mines it no longer bothers me one iota. There are a lot of books out there. More than you can imagine. And not all of them are worth saving.
posted by mygothlaundry at 6:17 AM on January 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm disappointed that the reporters did not ask the CIA for comment.
posted by bonehead at 6:45 AM on January 1, 2017


"But the general rule of thumb is that if something isn't circulated in one to two years, it's typically weeded out of circulation," he said.
That's no way to run a library.
posted by Catblack at 8:34 AM on January 1, 2017 [3 favorites]


> "Am I the only mefite who isn't a librarian?"

GUYS, HE KNOWS!

RUN!
posted by kyrademon at 8:58 AM on January 1, 2017 [5 favorites]


See, if popularity runs library book choice, we will need an electoral college for book retention to assure that smaller patron groups are not over-run by Texas-sized interest groups. I don't need to go there, though as Margaret Atwood has exposed that librarians are heros on many levels.
posted by childofTethys at 9:29 AM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


My favorite little public library was the one that used to be in Cammal, PA (or near there). It was somebody's living room. The town couldn't swing having a real library in its own building, but everybody really, really wanted a library. So somebody agreed to put all the books in their living room, and gave all the patrons a house key to come and go, signing books out on the honor system. (I believe they may have also had agreed-upon library hours.) This went on for years until the family sold their house, and the new owners declined to have the public library in their living room. But no worries, the town pulled a reverse Fahrenheit 451 and moved it to the fire station.
posted by lagomorphius at 10:16 AM on January 1, 2017 [24 favorites]


Sometimes the only way to save a library is to steal all the books!
posted by blue_beetle at 12:57 PM on January 1, 2017


Here's a question about circulation and weeding for all the librarians in this thread--does the library take ILLs into account when deciding what new books to buy? As in, do they look at which books patrons are having to go outside the local system for? Do some library systems keep books that are popular requests via ILL but not frequently circulated locally?
posted by zeusianfog at 12:03 PM on January 3, 2017


zeusianfog: I think it will be different in smaller vs. larger library systems. I used to work for one of the biggest public library systems in the country, and we definitely had more resources compared to smaller or more rural libraries. Most of our purchasing decisions were made before the publication date, and we purchased... some huge percentage of the books that came out from major trade publishers in any given year. So most of our ILLs were made up of things we couldn't or wouldn't buy, like expensive academic or specialized books outside the scope of our collection, or long out-of-print books, or some self-published books (which can be hard to get through the major distributors.)

I wasn't part of the collection development process at all. My sense was that the ILL process and the collection development process were pretty siloed off from one another, but library staff had the option to put a help ticket in to the collection development side of things if there were any "SHOULDN'T we have a copy of this thing?" issues. (The last ticket I submitted before I left was an inquiry about why we didn't have any copies of the original Star Wars trilogy. Turns out, it's only available direct from the distributor as Blu-Rays, and we don't collect Blu-Rays.)

We did have automatic processes in our library software to alert collection development people if some title was way more in demand than we anticipated, and there were a huge number of holds relative to the number of available copies, and new copies would get purchased on that basis.
posted by Jeanne at 1:28 PM on January 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


Here's a question about circulation and weeding for all the librarians in this thread--does the library take ILLs into account when deciding what new books to buy? As in, do they look at which books patrons are having to go outside the local system for? Do some library systems keep books that are popular requests via ILL but not frequently circulated locally?

ILLs: yes. Usually if someone asks for it via ILL, we'll try to buy it. A lot of our purchasing is done on a system-wide level so we just get these huge crates of new books directly from the publisher, but we also have a budget at the branch level for purchases/replacements.

It depends on what it is and how expensive it is and if we have other books in the system on the topic that circ OK. Since we are one of three NYC library systems, we are more likely to buy something if the other two also don't own it-- again, depends on what it is. Sometimes the only copy lives on Staten Island and is heavily circulated, so it just makes more sense to buy the thing than make someone wait. Sometimes it's actually cheaper and faster to buy a new book than it is to ship it in from somewhere and ship it back.

We don't currently work together formally on this-- I would describe the three NYC systems as "frenemys" and the policies and funding issues are all different for Reasons-- but people who work at different places will chat informally about what's trending and what they are seeing, and that seems to keep it going. Plus we're all paying attention to what people ask for and reviews and the news and what have you.

If a BUNCH of books on a topic get ILL'd (or even requested from other branches in our borough's system) we look into buying more of those, since there's an obvious demand. But that part sort of depends on if anyone notices (it's someone's job to check, but very slow-burning trends might slip by.)
posted by blnkfrnk at 12:09 PM on January 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


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