The gates at the door read the chip in every book that passes and alarm if the item is not checked out. Ours alarm most nights at closing, with the doors locked and the foyer empty, and the log shows the item number of a book the system says was pulped five years ago.
I am a library assistant on the closing rota, and the gates are the last thing I switch off.
How they work.
Two panels either side of the door read any chip that passes between them and check its status. An item on loan passes silently. An item that is not issued sets the gate off and the log records the item number, the time and which gate.
At closing we lock the doors, clear the floor, and set the gates to standby, and the log goes quiet until morning.
The gates alarm at about twelve minutes past closing, most nights, with the doors locked, the foyer empty and the lights on the night setting.
The item number is one I know by heart now. It belongs, according to the catalogue's withdrawn list, to a book that was withdrawn in 2019 as damaged and sent for pulping with that quarter's discards.
The withdrawn list is thorough. It shows the book, its last loan in 2018, its condition note, the date it was withdrawn and the disposal batch. The chip in a withdrawn book is deactivated before it leaves the building, because a live chip in a skip is a gate alarm at the recycling depot, which has happened, and which is why the procedure exists.
So the chip was killed and the book was pulped, and the gate reads it passing through the door every night.
What has been checked.
The gates, which the supplier has serviced and once replaced, and which read every other item correctly.
The log's item number, which has been searched for in every system we have, in case a new book had been given an old number. It has not. The number is retired.
The building, at twelve past closing, on nine nights, by me, standing in the foyer with the gates armed and watching them.
They alarm. The light on the panel comes on, the tone sounds, and the log records the number, and there is nothing between the panels, and I am eight feet away.
Direction.
The gates know which way something is going, because the two panels read a fraction of a second apart.
The log says out. Every night. Something with that chip passes from the library side to the street side through locked doors.
I have never once seen a log entry for it coming in.
The book.
I looked it up, because a number you know by heart deserves a name. A local author, a small press, a memoir of a childhood in the streets round the library, printed in 1974. We had one copy. It was on the shelf for forty five years and it went out eleven times, the last time in 2018, and the borrower's card on that loan was closed the following spring with a note that the borrower had died.
The condition note that withdrew it says water damage. I do not remember it being water damaged, and I remember it, because I was the one who withdrew it.
What is done about it.
It is a gate fault on the record, and the supplier's engineer has written that the gates are functioning correctly and are reading a chip that is physically present in the field, and that we should search the area for a mislaid item.
We have. The foyer is a foyer. There is nowhere for a book to be.
What I do.
I do the closing round, I set the gates, I lock the door.
The one change is the order. I used to set the gates last, from the foyer, and walk out through them. I set them first now, from the desk, and leave by the staff door at the back.
The reason is a night in November when I set them from the foyer as I always had and walked between the panels to leave, and the gate alarmed as I passed through it, for the number, going out, at the exact moment I was in the field, and I stopped in the doorway and the alarm stopped, and I stepped back inside and it did not sound again, and I stood there for a while before I went out the back way.