To continue...

In my last post I was talking about the lifetime average rate of return. Naturally it's lowest with the newest submittals and highest with the oldest ones, because by the day I submit them some of those people might not have been contacted at all. So the lifetime average is about 50%, whereas in the latest period, August through January it was 34%. The agency doesn't formulate reports on a month by month basis, only by periods. In truth, the return for the last three periods I looked at was around the 35% mark, not exactly stunning. I think the higher lifetime average is caused by actions on older accounts, like them either being waived and deleted or bankruptcy claims (not that there's many of those), as well as actual returns and payoffs. But that means that we can expect about 70% of items to be returned after as long as five or more years. At any given time, we're losing items that are current (think popular dvds) and only getting back 30% of those being collected on. This brings me to the point I really want to make. I don't think there's a stat for this out there because we don't want to advertise how much of our collection is missing.

First off, there's items that just go missing. They're misplaced and nobody knows where it is. Second, there's items that are stolen. That's most of East Branch's dvd collection. Third, there's items people lose but we claimed return them. Fourth, there's items that are checked out that go to lost. Of all these, we only make efforts to retrieve items in one instance: when lost items on a patron's card exceed $50 in value and fees, with the exception of when those items are on temp cards, which we do not collect on.

Let me illuminate the issue for you. Last year, in September I think, I was asked to process a list of expired temp cards (they hadn't been used in at least 3 years). I was to delete all those that didn't have fines and fees and keep those that did as well as total up the fees on those records. Some of those temp cards that had only two items on there had in excess of a hundred dollars in fees. At the end of this list, which was several hundred cards, we still had 200 borrowers with temp cards who had fees of over $10,000. Keep in mind that was only temp cards from about 97 to 01. There's at least 3 more years worth of cards to go through, and the newer ones would have higher amounts because of all the dvds we've added and the higher fees we have now.

At the moment I have no way to even guess how much stuff is in the hands of people with regular cards that are lost but are less than $50. I have one very solid number, which is that we have sent almost 12,000 people to collections. I bet that the other category, those not sent to collections, also has a very significant number of people in it. I don't know, but I would imagine it would equal those sent to collections. Remember that paperbacks cost maybe $4.99 plus a $5 fee, so there's plenty of cases where people could have lots of items but not be sent. Now some of those 12,000 are still in there simply because they haven't paid the $8.95 fee, but most just haven't returned their items, and because most of them have multiple items, you can easily imagine they have something like 10-40,000 items out. It's conjecture, but I would guess that people (of all categories) not in collections have another 10-50,000 items out. Because of the inexact nature of the numbers here, I would say that the range of items lost can vary between as little as 25,000 items and as much as 100,000. Either way, that's some serious numbers, and I'm telling you we're not doing much about it.