Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 10:04:59 -0700
From: kathleen <kathleen@sjsuvm1.sjsu.edu>
Subject: Re: Defacement of Serials (Florence Schreibstein)

In reply to Florence Schreibstein:

Florence, sometimes we're just plain lucky! In the case that I mentioned
in particular, it was a fellow student who noticed that she was slicing
out articles; he came to the public service desk and told us, pointed
her out, and then stuck around to talk to the police and was willing to
be a witness in court.  He said that at first he was tempted to mind his
own business, but as he was studying for an Ethics In Business course,
he decided that ethically he should report the crime.

In some cases, if we find the damage soon enough and there is a subject
pattern, we notify faculty in that field -- if a student turns in a
paper with all those articles listed in the bibliography, bingo! you've
got a pretty hot suspect.  When I first started work here, we had a rash
of destruction in the psychology journals; faculty at first refused to
cooperate with the library in locating the guilty students, but when
their own departmental library began to show the same sort of damage,
they decided to help. In the end, a couple of graduate students (too
poor to pay copying fees) were expelled from the university.

By the way, as the campus police here are state troopers, guilty persons
find they have a permanent police record.

Kathleen Thorne
Serials Librarian
San Jose State University