WORLD CONFERENCE ON RECORDS AND GENEALOGICAL SEMINAR PRESERVATION FROM OUTSIDE DANGERS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP73-00402R000100140013-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 19, 2006
• Sequence Number: 13
• Publication Date: August 5, 1969
• Content Type: REPORT

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WORLD CONFERENCE
ON RECORDS
AND GENEALOGICAL SEMINAR
Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.A.
5-8 August 1969
Part I
Controlling Theft and Facing the Riot Threat to Records
By
Charles F. Hinds, M.
"Record Protection in
an Uncertain World"
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Part I
Controlling Theft and Facing the Riot Threat to Records
By
Charles F. Hinds, M.A.
Theft and riots are age-old problems. Rare books and not so rare books are especially
desirable subjects of theft. They are relatively easy to take, even the most expensive and rare
items. Books are to be handled, read, and analyzed. We can lock them up, but if they can not
be used, the principal value of a book--its content, accompanied by a feel for the book itself--is
lost to the book lover and to the book user. Copies can be made of the book, of course, and
the copies can be used in lieu of the book in many cases, but if a bibliophile wants to see and
examine the book, out of the shelf, case, safe, or drawer it must come, except in rare instances.
And how many books have been taken by book authorities from shelves of book
innocents, through the borrowing process (without benefit of a library charging system),
through purchase at a ridiculously low figure, or through actual theft of the book? in
Kentucky a few years ago, the best known club of bibliophiles gave themselves the name of
"Book Thieves." the members, of course, were not thieves, but the title suggests a high degree
of opportunism among book collectors.
Our subject today is concerned primarily with thefts and riot threats in libraries. To what
degree are book thefts and riot threats problems? In this age of professional competence and
technical skill, are we troubled with losses because we are not as professional as we should be
or because we simply are not properly equipped with the right hardware or properly
organized? Right away, it should be freely admitted that if we want our books to be used, we
are going to minimize, not eliminate, the problems, at the best. Security has been excellent in
the British Museum, the National Archives of the United States, and the Biblioteque Nationale,
for example, but even with tight controls and protective devices, books and other materials are
taken. In 1847, twenty-seven volumes containing political and religious pamphlets were taken
from the British Museum. One of these turned up at Georgetown University in the library after
being lost for over a hundred years. (1) Three nineteenth century letters, one written by
General Ulysses Grant in 1866, were recently recovered and returned to the National Archives,
which promptly placed a tighter security on such materials. (2) The Biblioteque Nationale is
known to have excellent control systems over its book and manuscript holdings, including
burglar alarms and an active guard force. Early in January, 1967, four of eight leatherbound
notebooks comprising the manuscripts of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" were taken with no traces
of forcible entry or clues as to how the material was taken. So good is the security that the
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manuscripts constitute the first major publicized theft of the French National Library since
1804 when the "treasury" of Childeric, King of the Franks, was lost. (3)
How widespread is the problem today? Is the theft problem in American libraries
becoming more serious? The answer is a resounding yes according to the American Library
Association. I n one year alone, 1963, the American Library Association reported "a veritable
epidemic of thefts of books, manscripts, and documents." A committee was established by the
A.L.A. to handle reports and complaints from victimized libraries. And what was the principal
problem in that year? Rare books and journals were being borrowed for the purpose of
microfilming and not returned. (4) A celebrated indictment in a United States District Court
was returned in this same year, 1963, cited by the A.L.A., against a bookseller and a former
head librarian of the library of a major U.S. city, who allegedly were appropriating library
property for their own use and personal benefit. (5) According to the College and Research
Library Division of A.L.A., most of the complaints from libraries to this special committee of
the American Library Association have been associated with the borrowing of books and
journals for copying purposes. (6)
So even the librarians and the booksellers are causing headaches in libraries, which in the
1960's are resulting in record losses. But even more serious because probably less can be done
about it are the illegal removals from book stacks in college, public, and school libraries of the
United States, just how serious can be determined by examples of egregious cases, but not by
accurate accounting which simply does not exist in library systems of this country.(7)
One library in the United States, the Brooklyn Public, recently, made a detailed study.of
its losses and made an astounding discovery that book losses over a brief period of time
represented the equivalent of the entire book holdings of six of its branch libraries,
representing a loss of over a half million dollars or a little more than 7% of the total library
budget. So serious have the losses of this library been that a special Security Investigative Staff
of ten members was developed to make a study of the theft problem and to develop measures
which may reduce these-large losses substantially. (8)
A 1"966 inventory at five Washington, D.C. university libraries--Georgetown, Catholic,
Howard, American, and George Washington--revealed that a staggering 9,000 volumes were
missing, presumably stolen from the stacks by users. Far from being in-print monographs,
which are inexpensively replaced, or relatively so, at $10 a volume or for a total cost of
$90,000, the study showed that basic reference tools which are quite expensive were among
the favorities of the book thieves, such as, encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, and books on
antiques. According to the librarian of Catholic University, the theological students at the
school are as bad about taking books out without authorization on a "temporary basis" as
other students, if not worse. (9)
Isolated examples of book losses such as those just given illustrate what we suspect to be
true in any heavily-used library in the United States. We are losing books through thefts and
careless handling at a very high rate, and often the books which are missing are among the
most needed and the most expensive. Two summers ago, we found at Murray State University
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that we had lost over a hundred of our key books in our Reference Collection which had been
on hand the previous summer. This fact made it a little easier to decide to go to an open
stack--check out system at the main door of the library. A few of these books are so difficult
to find at any price that we have not to this day been able to replace them.
In the main, it is a commonly known fact that we really do not know in precise terms
how many books we are losing annually in the United States every year due to unauthorized
removals. Our manual system of record keeping of books does not include in by far the
majority of cases a method of inventorying books against the shelf list file. We do read book
shelves, as we call it, but principally what we are doing here is to maintain order, not
determine losses. Will the new PL-1 programming allow us eventually to establish a routine
system of checking the inventory of books annually? Perhaps. Librarians have been slow to
change, to modernize, and to employ new techniques of administering libraries, but the newly
accredited library schools are moving to meet the challenge, and the modern library
administrator--primarily because of rising costs in the library and demands for greater
efficiency--is much more disposed to change to new ways of doing things than was the library
administrator of yesterday.
What about an honor system at our universities and colleges? We hear a lot these days
about the desirability of treating students as adults. According to Williams College, the honor
system, which for them has been in effect since 1840, does not work any longer. Williams
made a study which showed that approximately 6,000 books were being taken annually
without having been first checked out at the circulation desk and that about 1,000 of these
were never returned. Five of the six doors at Williams have now been locked, and a student
inspector is on duty at the sixth to back up the honor of the student adult. (10) In defense of
the student, however, for whom I have a great deal of respect, adults, themselves, are often
more irresponsible about unauthorized withdrawals and failure to return college books which
have been checked out but which are more difficult to regain because either the adult is a
faculty member and does not choose to cooperate because of his special status or because he
or she is outside the disciplinary control of the college community. (11) I do not claim to
know the answer to the theft problem, but I and other librarinas do know that it is apparently
one which is becoming increasingly serious. We need more facts, however, before we can fully
identify the problem and fully maximize the solution. Certain measures, can be and are being
taken. These will be discussed later in the paper as these techniques also apply in large part to
riots, an old, old problem which is causing libraries very serious difficulties as we approach the
1970's.
Riots are not a new phenomenon in society. It would not be difficult to devote a book to
this subject showing that mass defiance of law and order has been with us a long time.
American history has its share of riots, such as Shay's Rebellion and the draft riots in New
York City during the Civil War, but they have been minimized, perhaps, because until recent
years our national problems have been less complex and our leadership much more respected.
Truly, we are faced today with a national test, not one of cities and country side in isolation as
we have known thorughout our history. This test centers in part on the emerald, nutmeg, and
snow-covered campusei of institutions of higher learning, where maturity and immaturity must
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face anew our nation-old problem of balancing security against freedom or freedom against
security.
And back of the national security vs. freedom struggle is a deeply changed society which
can not fail, it would seem to me, to increase the importance of the sociologist over the mere
historian, the interpreter of what has happened and is happening in terms of the past
experience of recorded history. Philip M. Hauser of the University of Chicago in his 1968
presidential address to the American Sociological Association made the point, which it seems
to me, expresses best the problem in America today which is distrubing the nation and even
affecting the existence of library collections and indexes to those collections. He said that our
society today in many ways is not unlike socieities which the historian has observed in his
study of civilizations. But there are areas which make our dangers unique and large:
(1)Contemporary society contains a far more complex array of cultural layers both in quantity
and quality which make self-identification and self-analysis far more difficult and (2) We are
facing the real danger of collective suicide in the possible employment of the atomic bomb or
some other great destructive force. (12) Do we have the knowledge in social sciences to
dissipate confusion and restore order, as Dr. Hauser puts it, to avoid collective suicide? The
University of Chicago sociologist thinks so, but he questions "the will and the organization to
utilize available knowledge to this end." (13)
Many of us would go a step further. Sound work in the social sciences has been
accomplished in the last fifty years in the world and in the United States, but to many
observers, social scientists on college and university campuses are not exercising the disciplines
of their repective divisions but are more concerned with involvement or politics than they are
with a stoical presentation of truth. The fictionalized and emotionalized versions of
knowledge should be left to a politician who is an expert in the art of getting things done.
Social science is being disserved when the theoretician descends to the fishwife level, reducing
his scholarship to a level as debased and confused as everyman's society, which the "scholar"
serves so ill.
There is little question that the social science faculty with some help from their
colleagues in the humanities are in large part in the background of student unrest on campuses,
either unintentionally or intentionally. The scholar does not or should not take sides. The
ill-equipped and incompetent student is often permanently scarred or hopelessly confused.
These students deserve more careful screening. America is the land of opportunity, but it
would appear that many students are going to universities and colleges who are not
intellectually or emotionally equipped to understand and to assist in the improvement of
society and our country. It also appears evident to many of those on campuses that there are
som Ph.D.'s who received their degrees too easily or are too emotional and undisciplined as to
be problems themselves. Instead of assisting students to mature, they often contribute to their
basic immaturity and permanent incapacity to be leaders in society.
This paper was prepared well in advance of its presentation as it is to be published with
others which will be given at the World Conference on Records at Salt Lake City, Utah, in
August, 1969, and, therefore, it may not contain the most current and best examples of the
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effects of student riots on libraries, but already enough has happened to enable us to see the
trend and the seriousness of this phenomenon on American campuses. ROTC's may be
condemned, but random and senseless destruction is taking place mainly in administrative and
academic rooms, including libraries.
At the preparation of this paper in early May, the evening news described a major fire in
the University of Indiana Library, destruction of the contents of several rooms, and an
overturning and dumping of library catalog cards on the floor. In January, ten or fifteen
radical students toppled 60-drawer catalog cabinets and, to insure increased damage, destroyed
or damaged the contents of some 25 catalog trays. In a matter of minutes, extensive damage
was done. (14) A few weeks later, a similar occurence took place at the University of Illinois.
Their library cards were removed completely from the card catalog when no one was around
and destroyed, making it difficult, if not impossible, to know which books have been lost to
the user because the indexes have been completely removed and eliminated. (15)
Wanton destruction of library cards is a recognition by students that libraries are
especially vulnerable in this area. Few libraries--the University of Illinois being an
example--have duplicate public catalogs. (16) We do have the shelf list, but as has been stated
before, American libraries have not been able, as a very practical matter to inventory
periodically their book collections, nor have ways been devised to inventory periodically the
main card catalog.
What has happened in America that has resulted in an increase of thefts not from
confirmed criminals, but apparently from book dealers, librarians, and from Mr. and Mrs.
Average American and their sons and daughters. Taking books by faculty members and never
returning them, what is this if not stealing? Borrowing a book overnight or for a few days
without going through standard procedures, what is this if not stealing? And, of course,
everyone agrees that books tossed out of windows or concealed deliberately fit into this
category. Where is honor, ethics, and consideration for one's fellowman?
And if to confound the problem of morality, what is generally considered to be a basic
good in America, that is the recognition of common and individual rights, now we must be
confronted by another ethic, that of the pseudo social scientist, who, like the theoretical
Communist several decades ago, yearns for the withering away of the state and for the
replacement of all evils with the natural goodness of mankind.
Two world-wide conflicts and a threat of another which may be World War III or the Last
World War, two large scale police actions, devastating civil riots, and rearward kicks by our
militant college sons and daughters surely should have taught us that good isn't necessarily the
oppostie of bad, but rather a sun or a heaven of suns, with which to illuminate the world's
problems. Just as no millinium can be promised for Americans in general, though some are
donning their ascension robes and climbing to the tops of our highest mountains, there will be
no perfect solutions for the nation's record keepers or for anyone else. But many of the
records keeping problems are being studied and are being illuminated with some success.
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Business men, librarians, archivists, and rare book and manuscript specialists are tested
daily by thieves and now weekly by rioters. We have vaults and safes, locked cages and
cabinets, open and closed stacks, whose access or control is assigned to mature, trusted
employees, sometimes armed with legal authority such as the right of replevin or restoration of
rightful ownership, sometimes as in the example of the Biblioteque Nationale with guards or at
the security checkpoint by police. The techniques used are very common and will not be gone
into detail for this reason.
We may make extra copies through forms-management pre-planning. This could take the
form of an extra copy for State Civil Defense of the most recent organizational chart of the
State Police force; it could be an extra copy for cataloging control of a temporary catalog slip
which has been filed in the Main Card Catalog; or it could be an additional copy of an
accessioning record for a manuscript collection. Additional copies may also be made by various
copying devices, examples of which are 914-generated catalog cards, IBM cards in a data text
system, or by a 3-M aperture card copy of the original micro-recorded document. And often, a
printed, processed, or second copy of a manuscript can be purchased from a dealer in the open
market, a source which is often used but rarely mentioned, for it may take much sleuthing to
discover that additional copies exist and may be found and purchased.
One of the best ways, though not always the cheapest as advertised by self-interested
companies, is to make photographic copies in various sizes, often in miniature form, of hard
copy. These copies consist of at least one security copy and at least one use copy in most
cases; although this is not always the case. The best example of what can be done in this area is
the excellent work on a large scale by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, our
host, who not only makes available in the large research libraries of the world excellent copies
of records, but provides maximum security of the film under ideal conditions in the heart of a
granite mountain. This is not cheap, and we owe, of course, a lasting debt of gratitude to this
religious group with headquarters here in Salt Lake City.
In the mid 1960's, there was much talk in the library profession about the new electronic
devices on the market--Sentronic and Bro Dart "Book Detectives," probably the two
best-known. These devices are expensive, with the Sentronic running in this period $6,500 for
5,000 books and the Bro Dart, $6,800 base cost plus 25cents each for the bomags. Certainly,
the smaller libraries may find them so costly as to be prohibitive; whereas, the larger libraries
may be able to afford them, but may find that thieves can spot the devices easily either by
observation or through detection devices carried on their persons. A 10cent pocket compass,
for example, one author says, will indicate books containing the metal, which is not fool proof
enough even for average system beaters. (17) Another author, writing in 1968, terms the
electronic devices impractical because of high costs and unworkable because of inherent
weaknesses in the system (18)
Department stores expect losses and are content when they do not exceed a certain
percent of sales. Some library administrators argue that libraries should employ good
surveillance and circulation practices, but should expect certain losses. But as a California
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librarian wrote in 1962 on this subject, following a nationwide survey on professional practices
and book losses, most libraries do not take inventories and do not therefore know what
acceptable loss levels are and if we had national standards would not know about their own
losses. Of thirty-two libraries completing the questionnaire only five had taken complete book
inventories. No wonder that this author concluded that librarians who are willing to take
losses, in the main, "are having to take a pretty subjective approach in estimating the
seriousness of the problem".(19) Another researcher discovered in a four-year study of book
thefts that the facts were few, but academic libraries lose books in "considerable numbers."
His answer was that acceptable loss levels must be determined for each environment and that
cooperation be sought with patrons as the chief answer to the problem. (20)
And what about library cards? How can we protect ourselves from destruction or
misplacement of library cards? Some answers are at hand, though too expensive, probably, for
most libraries. A second catalog could be created and kept up to date in another location by
xeroxing the catalog and thereafter making another complete set of cards for every new book
added to the collection. The catalog could be photographed, and from this reproduction, a
book catalog could be created with cards representing additional books collected elsewhere
and held for supplementary editions of the catalog. Finally, the day is probably not too far off
when the entire book collection of many libraries will be stored in the memory of a computer,
from which a complete card catalog could be created at will, but of course at a price.
No library today has all the answers, but it is encouraging that library schools are
stimulating, on the one hand, a more businesslike approach to libraries and, on the other hand,
a quality of scholarship which is already showing signs of courageously attacking problemsone
by one. Instead of ignoring real problems and following the leadership of pseudo-scholars, who
prefer the arena of."the now" to a world view of the best possible ever changing truth. The
new researcher is anxious to identify the problem, and after identified solve it as scientifically
and objectively as may be accomplished.
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1. Library Journal 88 (Nov. 1, 1963), 4186.
2. Ibid.
3. Willson Library Bulletin 41 (March 1967), 655-6.
4. Library Journal 89 (April 1, 1964), 1574-5.
5. College and Research Libraries Vol. 25 (march, 1964), 139.
6. Ibid.
7. Library Journal, 91 (Feb. 1, 1966), 642-3.
8. Ibid., 87 (July, 1962 2509.
9. Ibid., 91 (Oct. 1966), 4609.
10.. Ibid., 93 (Mar. 1, 1968), 4086.
11. College and Research Libraries, 28 (May, 1967), 191-6.
12. His three factors. were combined and reduced to two. Philip M. Hauser, "The Chaotic
Society: Product of the Social Psychological Revolution," American Sociological Review,
Vol. 34 (Feb. 1969).
13. Ibid.
14. Library Journal (Feb. 1, 1969), 481-82.
15. New York Times, Feb. 18, 1969, Pg. 25.
16. Ibid.
17. Library Journal, 90 (April 1, 1965), 1617-21.
18. College and Research Libraries, 29 (July 1968), 259-75.
19. Library Journal, 87 (Spet. 1, 1962), 21843.
20. College and Research Libraries, 29 (July 1968), 259-75.
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