Amy Ryan, BPL Conservation Officer Lauren Schott and the prints.
The Boston Public Library reported this afternoon an employee found the two prints that had gone missing more than a year ago. They weren't stolen, they were just misfiled.
The Rembrandt and Dürer were found together in Row 14B, Bay 3 on Shelf 2, approximately 80 feet from where the items should have been filed. Fourteen staff members searched 180,000 of the print stack’s 320,000 items (including 200,000 prints and drawings in the Print Collection and 120,000 chromolithographs), totaling 38 rows of the 60 rows of print stacks, or about 60% of the inventory. Nine offices, work rooms, and reading rooms had also been searched. The Durer and Rembrandt have been refiled.
Suddenly outgoing BPL President Amy Ryan announced the find not long after at-large City Councilor Steve Murphy called for all of the library trustees to quit immediately.
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Comments
If we could now just misplace
By anon
Thu, 06/04/2015 - 8:16pm
If we could now just misplace the Olympics bids for six months.
We need Library Police...
By Miss Villen
Thu, 06/04/2015 - 9:16pm
...with detectives and everything.
http://www.shigabooks.com/bookhunter.php
Call for
By anon
Thu, 06/04/2015 - 9:59pm
Mr. Bookman
So what you're saying is
By eekanotloggedin
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 12:50pm
that something needs to be done about problematic library usage?
Sweet Twitter spat going between David Bernstein and BostInno.
By MC Slim JB
Thu, 06/04/2015 - 11:00pm
Bernstein criticized BostInno for jumping the gun on reporting this incident as a crime without any apparent law-enforcement source. He did a Nelson-like "Ha ha!" when the art turned up in the stacks, and instead of apologizing for it, BostInno is now calling him names like "obsolete".
Here's a hint, BostInno: Bernstein might be from old media, but he's got scads more cred as a political and media reporter and analyst than you've managed to accumulate in your short life. Responding to a fair criticism of your shitty reporting with social-media insults is just one tiny example of why.
Mr. DeLuca seems like....
By Michael Kerpan
Thu, 06/04/2015 - 10:15pm
... quite a douche. Bostinno doesn't seem like a site I'll be spending much time on.
It's glib sophomoric mediocrity.
By anon
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 10:03am
Kinda like Dig.
Blue Mass Group is more geriatric mediocrity with flashes of excellence from individual diarists.
There are some very good comment makers too. Best Defense, Judy Meredith, J Conway and Hester Prynne are about as astute as anyone gets.
"ernie boch III" was completely repulsive, more like your basic goon comment flogger here.
There is also a great skeptic, Paul Simmons, who likes to poke holes in the whole faux progressive conceit.
And people in politics take it seriously. Elizabeth Warren shows up now and then. State Senator Jamie Eldridge is helpful. David's most valuable role is probably convening the whole thing. The design is archaic and funny.
Old school media people suffer from years of calculated dumb down design from the days when the model was top down gate keepers like Mindich and the Taylor family. They wrote for an imaginary readership and the locals were kindly enough to go along with it when alternatives took too much effort. Now that alternatives are everywhere, the remnant gate keepers like the globe are being abandoned.
And yet there is always room for excellence. Charles Pierce is as ink stained as they get, but his excellence as a writer and thinker put him at the side of Mark Twain. Part of it is that he is ballsy enough to just write and not sweat any dumb down calculations or cute pirouettes.
So much of media consumption here is looking for particular glimmers, diamonds in the coal bin.
Charlie Pierce....
By Michael Kerpan
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 10:21am
... is a national treasure.
The others over at BMG are also really good.
By anon
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 11:29am
Judy Meredith is a sagacious Beacon Hill watcher and voice of reason. J Conway did a study on an Olympic plan for Chicago.
Best Defense seems to be from the South Coast and goes overseas for humanitarian projects in places like Southeast Asia. He can take eyeglaze stuff like the details of masshole bond issues and actually make them interesting.
Paul Simmons is one of the best race relations analysts for the local scene you are likely to find. His skill at pointing out hypocrisy and inept implementations is as good as it gets.
It is like the full circle of gifted amateur media people who have unique insight from their time in various trenches and great writing skills making the Shirley Leung and Boston Inno circuit look very un-compelling, to be charitable.
People are doing better stuff for free as a gift to the community than people who get paid dumb money to stupefy us with pom pom waves.
Oh, man, if only this were eight months ago ...
By adamg
Thu, 06/04/2015 - 10:41pm
I'd say the BostInno guy had a bright future at boston.com, but, to be honest, boston.com's calmed down quite a bit since then.
Hilary Sargent was on All In With Chris
By Anonymous
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 4:35am
Talking about boston.com, Hilary Sargent was on All In With Chris Wednesday talking about Usaama Rahim and JTTF.
I thought Bostinno was state media for Marty Walsh. I used to comment over there. It's a waste of time.
Things get misfiled in libraries and archives
By bibliotequetress
Thu, 06/04/2015 - 10:34pm
ALL. THE. TIME. All the time. Constantly. Often.
Important things misfiled. Unimportant things misfiled.
Sometimes the misfile is understandable and traceable-- a letter filed under "Correspondence: Incoming: King Stephen" instead of "Correspondence: Outgoing: Stephen King." Or filed under "1902" instead of "1920."
But sometimes, when you panic, looking for a document or book you know your library owns, you aren't so lucky.
In archives and with print/photo collections, sometimes it's as simple as two papers getting stuck to each. If that photo of Curley happens to be in the queue to be refiled the same day as a bunch of Harvard 2010 graduation photos and gets intermingled, chances are you will not find it two years later when someone shows up looking for it-- why would anyone think to look in the Harvard graduation collection?
Shelving and refiling is done in most sizable public libraries by high school students and/or interns. Maybe a small contingent of library aids. Perhaps volunteers, if it's not a valuable collection. It is usually the lowest paid position, and can be boring beyond belief sometimes.
Most of the shelving in the library where I work now is handled by work-study students, and I think the world of them. But of course, I've found a handful of books shoved thoughtlessly on the wrong shelf because the worker got bored or wanted to leave or who knows-- but this is a smallish library, we shelf-read and do inventory regularly, and nothing valuable is in our general stacks.
And, key, everything is barcoded, so we can actually do an annual inventory.
I don't know if the BPL has ever had the money to do any sort of automated inventory control outside of the public stacks. It takes money and personnel, and the BPL rarely has enough of either.
The BPL has suffered from the fact that while much dough is raised for the building, the collections are treated as an afterthought. A lot of people do not realize that the Boston Public Library Foundation, of BPL Gala fame, only donates towards the maintenance of the building. Not the collections, or the books, just the building. Back when I worked there, during the early 90's recession, we definitely felt the loss of both city funds and collection development/maintenance donations because many people thought the library was getting masses of money from the Foundation.
Hah!
By Michael Kerpan
Thu, 06/04/2015 - 10:41pm
We can't find own home copy of Sondheim's Into the Woods DVD -- and we have only a relatively limited number of (sane) places to look -- so it must have been put someplace totally irrational and unexpected.
Thanks for the info that the gala does nothing to fund the _functions_ of the library.
Literary Lights,
By cw in boston
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 12:54am
the gala run by the Associates of the BPL, a different group from the Foundation, does fund preservation projects of rare books and other items in the collection. They fundraise and sponsor other events throughout the year.
Thanks you, cw! That's great!
By bibliotequetres...
Sat, 06/06/2015 - 10:30am
So glad to hear it. I'll find it on twitter & amplify any of their fundraising drives.
From one librarian to another
By Katie
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 10:31am
From one librarian to another, I'm offering you a high-five! Inventorying and shelving a massive collection like the BPL is not for the weak.
amen
By bibliotequetres...
Sat, 06/06/2015 - 10:33am
Can you imagine the army you'd need to get through that? Somehow, I don't see that funding coming through any day soon, no matter what Stephen"I'll Just Let My Ass Do The Speaking For Me" Murphy says.
That was me once upon a time
By KellyJMF
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 10:33am
In high school I worked at the local library branch and I spent a lot of time starting at the start of a section and working my way to the end, getting it back to proper order. I could pull a carts-worth from adult fiction every time. 30 odd years later, I still get twitchy in bookstores and start re-homing the misfiles.
Ditto
By Michael Kerpan
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 10:35am
(Only I worked in a library while in grad school). Also used to feel compelled to fix errors in record/CD/DVD sections of stores.
Yep
By KellyJMF
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 12:27pm
Yep, I'm a compulsive alphabetizer.
Heist Anxiety: The Myth Of Mass Media Outrage Over Stolen Art
By theszak
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 4:25am
Heist Anxiety: The Myth Of Mass Media Outrage Over Stolen Art
https://digboston.com/heist-anxiety-the-myth-of-ma...
Questions for Murphy and Walsh
By anon
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 9:21am
Have you ever been inside a library in your life?
Have you ever used a library to check out a book?
Will you apologize for your grandstanding ?
I think we already know the answers.
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