5th floor vandalism

Boy, I dunno. Kids these days. (Adult students at a university these days?)

On Monday, Robert, a colleague, sent this email to his student workers:

Thanks for the great job you’re doing. I do have one question: when I left on Friday, there were some “dupes” on one of the book trucks – outside my office, waiting for me to review and take away for withdrawal – and this morning, Monday, the books are gone! (AND both book trucks were “parked” in a rather peculiar way, too.) Does anyone know what happened to these books? Were they taken directly to be withdrawn? I really need to see all the books before we make final decisions about them, AND I’m keeping a count that helps us know how much space we’re making available. Please fill me in if you can.

And then, after they were all shrugging their shoulders in consternation:

I think we were vandalized on Saturday sometime… It’s a real mess and we are trying to put things back in order now. I don’t see that there are any cameras around for Security to check but if there are some hidden somewhere I’d love to find out who did this…

And then this from another colleague, Mary:

We just discovered that someone has gone through our print reference collection and moved a lot of books randomly to other shelves putting everything out of order. We are in the middle of weeding the collection and this is going to now take longer because we need to put everything back in the correct order. On top of reordering all the HUM books, they also interfiled a cartload of Robert Means books to be withdrawn that he must have had parked outside of his office.

I’m guessing somebody or a group of people must have done this as a prank on Saturday after the desk was closed. Do we need to report this to security as a form of vandalism?

Then Mary's formal report to security:

Here is my report:

1. On Monday late afternoon/early evening, Madison noticed that there was a pile of humanities reference books on a HUMREF return shelf and asked me about it. When I looked with her, we realized that the shelves that were once emptied from the weeding we’ve been doing, were now full of books that belonged on other shelves. Upon closer inspection we also found that all the books that were once on two carts outside Robert Means’s office were also shelved among the scrambled reference books. These were not reference books, but rather circulating books he was reviewing for an assessment. Some people had pulled books from all the other HUMREF shelves and placed them on the shelves on ranges 4 and 5 and taken Robert’s cart of books and interfiled them with the mixed-up reference books. We estimate about 300+ books were moved in no apparent order. It was a lot of work to put everything back in place.

2. Lindsay shared that on Monday morning when she opened, she noticed that the spider webbing that used to cascade from the suspended mummy was detached. She’d assumed that it fell sometime over the weekend and tried to fix it. Later in the day some of us noticed that the mummy’s head was slouching and that the mummy seemed to be suspended from higher up. And we noticed that the gothic windows on either side of the mummy were now crooked and seemed to have been switched and no longer anchored above the way we originally had anchored them. One of our students had taken a photo of our Halloween display on Friday and so we looked at it and compared it to how things are now and it confirmed to us that someone must have taken the mummy and the windows down and messed around with them and then attempted to put them back up.

We think both vandalism events occurred on Saturday evening between the time the desk closed at 6pm and when the library closed at midnight. We checked the Gallery on Five and it doesn’t look like anything was disturbed there. I wonder now if there should be an additional camera installed in the central portion of the floor that could watch over the computer area, Gallery on Five and the help desk space. Yesterday I alerted a student security officer about what happened, and he said he would check the camera footage for Saturday evening and see if anything was captured. The current cameras are just on the north and south study spaces so I’m not sure if they would be able to capture any activity in the central portion of the floor. I haven’t heard from him yet and didn’t get his name, so not sure what he found.

Asking around, it was determined that a group of students asked for a media pass to film in that location. A girl had stopped to tell Mary this one day last week, but the girl said they would film after the workers had left (desk closes at six on Saturdays, though the building is open until midnight) and they would not bother them. 

Although there are no security cameras in the immediate vicinty, they were able to capture some of Saturday's action on cameras further away.

Thanks to the video footage it was determined that the students on the filming team were the culprits. The video shows them moving cart loads of books to ranges 4 and 5 that were previously emptied during weeding. They are seen moving things and filming for about three hours. They did not return the books to their original locations but just left them scrambled after finishing filming. There was a column in the way so the camera could not capture them moving the Halloween display mummy and windows, but we are fairly certain that they did remove the items for filming. Security also has footage of the students entering and exiting the building with their equipment and props. These students showed a total disregard and disrespect for others and were ignorant of the disruption they caused.

I asked Roger if he could contact the students who filmed and let them know they acted badly and irresponsibly and caused disruption to our work and collections. Personally, I think they should come to our floor and help us with the shift we will be doing soon as a sort of consequential “community service”. Roger told me that they do not keep records of who they give media passes to and so there was no way to contact them. Frankly, I was surprised to learn this. With all the concerns the library has about security, it seems records should be kept of who is approved for media passes. I suggest that in the future when people request media passes that we keep record of who they are along with a description of what they will be doing. I also suggest that some sort of document be presented to them that outlines what they have permission to do while recording. The document should include verbiage about not moving or altering anything in the space without permission from the space’s manager/supervisor.

So that was fun! Not. Hours of work to (hopefully) find all the misplaced items and get things organized again.

Also, picture evidence of them messing with the Halloween / Dia de los Muertos display: