Every loan is a scan of a card against a book, and the system holds forty years of them. Borrower 00417 has taken out one thousand nine hundred and six items and has never once been fined.
I have been a librarian in the same small town library for twenty two years and I was a Saturday assistant here before that.
The system is the whole of this so here is what it does.
Every borrower has a card with a barcode and a borrower number. Every item has a barcode. A loan is one scanned against the other, with a date, and a return is the item scanned back in.
We are on our third system since 1986. Each migration brought the borrower records and the loan history across, because a library that loses its loan history loses its ability to chase anything.
Borrower 00417 is the seventeenth card issued when the town went from cards and tickets to barcodes in 1986.
The account is active.
One thousand nine hundred and six items borrowed. The most recent was three weeks ago.
Nothing has ever been returned late. Not once in thirty nine years, which is a thing no other account in this library can say, including mine.
There is no address on it. There is a name and a borrower number and the address field has been empty since at least the 2004 migration, and possibly always.
How a loan happens on our system, because this is where it stops being a database curiosity.
The card is scanned. Not typed. The staff terminal does have a manual entry, and it is logged as manual entry when it is used, and every one of 00417's loans is a scan.
Which means a physical card with that barcode on it goes across a scanner at our desk.
I have never seen it. Neither has anybody else.
I have asked all four of my colleagues, over the years, casually, and all four say they have never noticed a card like that, and all four have issued loans on that account, because the terminal records which member of staff was logged in.
The self service machine.
We got one in 2016 and about seventy per cent of our issues go through it now, which is the point of it.
Since 2016, every single one of 00417's loans is on the self service machine.
The machine is in the front lobby, six feet from the desk, and it is in view unless you are in the office or in the stacks.
I have gone through the CCTV twice. There is a camera on the lobby for the entrance and the machine is in the bottom of the frame.
The first time I pulled a specific loan, in 2019, and the lobby is empty for four minutes either side of the timestamp.
The second time, in 2023, there is a person at the machine. Their back is to the camera. They are about my height, in a coat, and they are there for about forty seconds, which is how long it takes to do three items, and three items were issued.
They leave through the front door and out of frame and the camera on the front step, which is a different camera, does not have anybody coming out at that moment.
What is borrowed.
I find this the hardest to set down without sounding like a man who has made it into something.
Local history. That is the bulk of it. Parish records on microfiche while we still had a reader, town histories, the bound volumes of the local paper, and the Ordnance Survey reprints.
Then, from about 2011, a lot of books about how to find people. Genealogy guides, how to use the General Register Office, how to read a census, three different books about tracing a family through the twentieth century.
And in the last four years, nothing but large print fiction. Westerns, mostly.
The name.
I am not going to write it and the reason is not squeamishness.
In 2018 I did what any librarian with access to a local studies collection would eventually do, which is look the name up in the burial registers we hold on fiche.
It is there, in the town, in 1974.
That is not conclusive of anything at all. It is a common enough name for this county and there will be dozens of them and I know that, and I have said it to myself many times.
What makes me keep saying it to myself is the date the card was issued, which is in the ledger from 1986 with the seventeen others from that week, and which has the words NEW CARD in the reason column, and which for every other one of those seventeen says NEW CARD too.
Except that in a different pen, at the end of 00417's line, somebody who worked here before I was born has written REPLACEMENT.
What I do about it.
The account stays open. I have thought about closing it and I am not going to, and my reasons are two.
The first is administrative and it is genuine. A borrower with an unblemished record and no fines has done nothing that would justify closing an account, and if I closed it I would have to write a reason in the field, and there is no reason I could write that would not end up in front of my line manager.
The second is that the books come back.
One thousand nine hundred and six items, and every one of them is back on a shelf in this building or has been withdrawn in the normal way, and I have checked a sample of forty across the decades and every single one is accounted for.
Whatever that card is, it has never kept anything.
The last thing.
Three weeks ago the loan was two large print Westerns and one other item.
The other item is a book we do not lend. It is a bound volume of the parish magazine for 1968 to 1975 and it is reference only and it has a red REFERENCE label on the spine, and the system will refuse it, because the item record has a loan type that cannot be issued.
The system refused it. There is a line in the log for the attempt and the refusal.
And then there is a line, eleven seconds later, where the item was issued anyway, by a member of staff, with an override, and the staff number on the override is mine.
I was not at work that day.