In library school, one things I was taught was the way a library is organized allows for a great deal of serendipity. This isn't really a reference question and doesn't have anything to do with the way a library is organized, but when I came in to work one day, two of my coworkers filled me in on this odd case of serendipity.

About 10:45 that morning, a patron came to the desk and said,

I left my laptop here last night - did anyone find it?

My library is on two levels, so we have one lost-and-found at the Reference Desk (downstairs) and another upstairs near the Circulation Desk. The person on duty at the Reference Desk checked our lost-and-found box, and not finding a laptop there, went upstairs to check the other one.

Nothing there either, so she came back down to the Reference Desk to search a little more thoroughly - thinking that if someone had found a laptop, perhaps they put it somewhere a little more secure than just the lost-and-found box (which is a drawer in the Reference Desk). She searched all behind the desk, and after not finding it, started looking in the Reference Office (which is right behind the desk).

The only thing she found back there was a laptop in a Black & Decker bag that had been left here over a year ago. The battery was dead and we didn't have a charger for it, so we couldn't turn it on to try to identify it. I didn't want to just throw away a laptop, so it just sat in a corner of the office - literally for over a year.

The staff person knew that couldn't be it, but picked it up and showed it to the patron anyway saying something like, "this is the only lost computer we have."

Apparently, the patron looked at it intently, paused, looked at it again, and then said,

Well, wait. That is my laptop. It's not the one I lost last night, but it's mine - I lost it like a year ago just before I stopped working for Black & Decker.

How bizarre is that? Since he had the timeframe right, she gave it to him - but it still didn't help find his most recently-lost laptop.

By then it was 11:00 AM, and the second reference person was just getting to the desk to start her shift - and, it just so happened that she was the person who had closed the night before. She remembered the patron, because just before closing time the previous night, she had seen a laptop sitting unattended on a table, and asked him it if was his (since he was one of only two patrons still there at the time). He had said it was - but even with this reminder, apparently he forgot to take it with him.

Since the laptop was nowhere else to be found, she walked over to the table where she had seen it last night - and there it was.

The patron was happy to have both laptops back, and left - and the Reference staff were kind of baffled that he had them running all over the building looking for it, without even checking to see if it was where he had left it the night before.

Lost and Found Policy
I was happy too, because it made me feel vindicated for not chucking out that laptop long ago. I didn't want to get rid it of without knowing if there was private or personal information on it, but I also didn't feel right drilling or otherwise destroying it.

But this makes me curious what other libraries do with found laptops. For flash drives, I look at the files and 90% of the time find a resume that allows me to contact the owner and return it. Otherwise, our policy basically is keep everything until we run out of room, and then get rid of the really old stuff to make more room (and delete all files on any disk before we recycle it).

Posted under Uncategorized on Saturday, October 1st, 2011 at 7:19 pm, by Brian Herzog. Post and comments available via the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.