You can't please all of the people EVER

Due to budget cuts, I have recently lost a significant portion of my storage space, which has left me in somehting of a pickle. I had previously used that space to hold back issues of the institute's in-house publications. They took up about as much space as my living room. The communications director has worked out a system with our printers where they will store back issues for us and we can order more as we need them, which should work out. The only thing is, the section of the library that generally holds a few of these publications is looked at as an all-you-can-take sort of buffet. People regualrly come and clear out entire stacks of publications to send to their friends or give to visitors or start small fires in their office because the heat's so low.

In order to counteract this, I put a simple policy in place. I left a list of all the publications at the end of the aisle and asked eveyone to just mark how many copies of something they take. That way I can keep an eye on how many publications remain and re-fill as needed, without having to go and count everything every day, which is not only time consuming, but incredibly tedious.

But apparently my policy wasn't simple enough because I recieved an angry email telling me how stupid it was to expect well-educated adults to inform me that they've removed something from the library. Silly me, expecting people to be responsible for their own actions.

I'm actually not upset about it. in fact, I find the situation quite funny. And the truth is, I didn't expect many people to follow my policy. Which begs the question: why bother with the policy? Just because librarians love rules?

Maybe.

But really, I think it has more to do with the concept that, while 15% of patrons won't follow the rules, the remaining 85% who do make up for it. I remember in the good old days at the public library, when I had a problem patron who refused to accept their fines, or the limit of items they could request through ILL at one time, I was constantly reminding myself that, while this guy may really annoy me, I'll have ten patrons who think the library is wonderful, and thank me for doing whatever it is I do.

So sure, a few of the library users here will never let me know when they take a publication. They'll gleefully empty the shelves and expect me to magically refill them. But if 85% of the users let me know when they take things, I'll be that much more on top of keeping this section of my library useable.