[DCRM-L] records for stolen materials

[Karen Attar]

The message from the British Association of Antiquarian Booksellers is most emphatically yes, to keep the items visible on the OPAC. It really helps if a warning bell goes off in a bookseller’s head.

I’d make the current location “missing”, in order to scream out at people – don’t just rely on a note in the bib record, where there will be lots of other information and the record of theft won’t stand out.

Good luck!

Best wishes,

Dr Karen Attar
Curator of Rare Books and University Art
Senate House Library, University of London
Senate House
Malet St
London WC1E 7HU
Tel. 020 7862 8472
Dr Karen Attar | School of Advanced Study (sas.ac.uk)<https://research.sas.ac.uk/search/fellow/516/dr-karen-attar/>

From: DCRM-L <dcrm-l-bounces at lib.byu.edu> On Behalf Of Matthew C. Haugen via DCRM-L
Sent: 18 May 2026 22:39
To: DCRM Users' Group <dcrm-l at lib.byu.edu>
Cc: Matthew C. Haugen <matthew.haugen at columbia.edu>
Subject: [DCRM-L] records for stolen materials

Hi all,

In the course of a broader review of our records for manuscripts, I notice we have a handful of records in our online catalog for some of the manuscripts we know to have been stolen<https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/08/us/manuscript-mystery-22-rare-works-vanish-from-columbia.html> in 1994, and not (yet🤞) recovered. For missing items from general collections, we normally also suppress the record from the OPAC until such time as it is reinstated or replaced.

It seems these thefts were reported to ABAA and ExLibris-L <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1300/J111v38n01_10?needAccess=true> at the time, and that the broadcasting of the theft did help with identification and recovery of some of the materials by dealers.

For the ones still missing, does it also make sense to keep these records visible in our OPAC, even though the material can't actually be found or used? The records have notes "Stolen from Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1994" and I think continuing to display the records could similarly aid in identification/recovery, and also for the sake of potential users who find descriptions of these MSS in secondary sources, so they know that we don't in fact have the materials (as opposed to them simply being uncataloged or unfindable in the OPAC), so they don't waste their time and money coming to consult something we don't have. For the moment, these records misleadingly show up in the OPAC as requestable by users, but I'm trying to fix that. Or, we could suppress the records. For context, we're on the FOLIO ILS, with a Blacklight-based OPAC interface.

Do others have an institutional practice for deciding whether to display or suppress records for missing or stolen materials?

Thank you!

Matthew

--
Matthew C. Haugen
Rare Book Cataloger | Columbia University Libraries
matthew.haugen at columbia.edu<mailto:matthew.haugen at columbia.edu> | 212-851-2451 | he/they<https://universitylife.columbia.edu/pronouns>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserver.lib.byu.edu/pipermail/dcrm-l/attachments/20260519/5bcf46a8/attachment-0001.htm>