Statistics

So after the last post I was looking around the VPL collection for other X-Men comics. I quickly discovered a noticeable trend, and so decided to go through every volume that shows up on the site when you search for X-Men and limit the results to comic books.

There are 145 results. Now many of these aren't X-Men comics, but I'm willing to give the system the benefit of the doubt and assume that at least one of the X-Men show up in the comic somewhere.

Of those 145, six of them are not actually comics. Remember this is _after_ I've already limited my results to only give me comics.

Of the remaining 139 comics that show up, 55 are missing/trace. That's 39.6%!  And remember, those are just the ones that are tagged missing/trace on _every_ copy. Many more have only a sole copy left.

Of the remaining 84, 32 are currently in processing, checked out, being held, or in transit (which I've learnt can mean that the book is actually missing, and has been for several years, why can their system not alert someone if a book has been in transit for that long?). Leaving 52 "at any location" (including two that are only available in the reference collection), or 50 that you could theoretically walk into a library and borrow today.

How many of those do you think are actually there?

I was always aware that theft was an issue in regards to libraries, but I guess I didn't realize both the extent to which it is an issue, and the fact that stolen books aren't always replaced quickly/ever. I know that Marvel is pretty terrible at keeping books in print, but I also know that many of these books (or different editions of the same material) are available.

So I guess I've got an new question in regards to libraries that I'll have to consider: How do you deal with library theft?