Next to bookworms, it’s perhaps a librarian’s worst nightmare.
In July, an assistant came to Kathleen Weessies with an empty hardcover case. One of the MSU Map Library’s most valuable historic atlases was nowhere to be found.
Weessies, who became the map librarian only weeks before the incident, would find nine more books missing after a complete inventory of the collection. Another disappeared earlier this month.
“It was only the very most valuable ones that were missing,” she said. “It was really somebody who knew what they were doing.”
Another atlas has been found with the first 46 pages missing. The books, or their individual color pages, could find their way to a popular market on Internet auctions.
All totaled, $9,400 worth of 19th century atlases are gone and librarians can only track 10 of them to the last official inventory in July 1996.
But Weessies suspects the books disappeared recently.
“The empty box totally caught our eye, so I don’t think it was 1996 or 1997, but I just can’t say for sure,” she said.
The theft has led Weessies to put the remaining atlases of value in the collection under lock and key, and individual pages each have been stamped to identify them as property of the university.
“I’m going to make the collection so that its of value to the MSU community, but will virtually lose its retail value,” she said. “Having it as a valuable artifact is not important to me.
“We’re not a museum. We’re a library.”
But adding security measures is something the library has to balance with keeping MSU’s 4.5 million books accessible to the community, said Cliff Haka, director of libraries.
The collection is already protected using sensors at exits to the Main Library to detect items that haven’t been properly checked out.
“Users continually want us to make more things available,” Haka said. “There’s an inevitable tension between the desire of the community to access things and the desire of the library to protect them.”
The thefts of the atlases will probably mean more books are placed into the latter category, he said.
Nearly 250,000 items already are kept in the library’s Special Collections Division, which can only be accessed with staff permission.
But tighter security doesn’t help the loss the library’s collection has experienced already. The Map Library must now find the money within its budget to replace some of the stolen material.
None of the books were insured, Weessies said.
She is already in negotiations to replace some of the historic atlases, but the price tag on each replacement book will prevent the collection from being the same. And each replacement she buys means Weessies has that much less to spend on new maps and atlases.
“I’ll have to pick a Civil War atlas, rather than having more than one,” she said.
