I am currently halfway done our annual shelf reading of the CCLA’s library collection. A shelf reading involves taking a printed list of everything that should be on our shelves, and actually checking each title, one by one, to see if it’s there. We do this annually to put the books in their proper order and to determine which books have gone missing during the past year. While our collection is non-circulating, we still have many books that disappear and never find their way back home. Many of these books are left around the courthouse or taken to a firm’s office. It is very costly to replace books that have gone missing, when it cuts into our budget to purchase new books that could help expand our collection. I have listed below some of our books that have gone missing recently from our collection:
- The 2010 annotated Ontario Family Law Act (Carswell)
- The law of contract in Canada (Carswell)
- Annotated Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security Act (CCH Canadian)
- High conflict people in legal disputes (Janis Publications)
- New lawyer practice series : civil litigation (LSUC)
- New lawyer practice series : family law : 2008 (LSUC)
- Economic negligence : the recovery of pure economic loss (Carswell)
- Best practices for commercial mortgage transactions (LSUC)
- Special lectures 2002 : real property law : conquering the complexities (LSUC)
- Probate essentials 2008 (LSUC)
- Construction Lien Essentials (LSUC)
- New developments in personal injury law 2009 (Middlesex Law Association)
- Libel (Butterworths)
- Corporate transactions for law clerks : the changing environment (LSUC)
If you come about any of these texts, or any other books belonging to the CCLA , we would appreciate it if they were returned to the library. You can give them directly to a library staff member, or even just leave them on a book cart in the library. Once I have completed my shelf read I will list a few more books that I have discovered to be missing, in hopes of seeing their return.
It really bothers me that, in a profession that prides itself on honourability, some people clearly are not.
Is it cost effective to put-in a security system? I would love to see a GPS system so that we can track these missing books and publish the identity of the people who have them – so that we can know who they are.
The Ottawa Public Library has a security system. Would that work in our case?
A security system such as the one used at the Ottawa Public Library is quite expensive, relatively speaking. The cost of the physical components (such as the gates at the entrances), and the labour required to put a security strip in each book, would be very expensive for a library of our size. We’re fortunate that not more of our books go missing, and we hope that with the renovations the CCLA would like to undertake that we can set up the library space better to hopefully deter theft. Ultimately, unfortunately, book theft is a reality of every library (I often think there are people everywhere who will steal a book, regardless of profession!) so we just hope that some of the books end up back here.