Security
In 2005, the art thief Edward Forbes Smiley III, a well-known and trusted antiques dealer at that time, was caught slicing maps from rare books with an X-acto blade. He had dropped the concealed tool on the floor, and it was spotted by an alert worker. Smiley was arrested, and later served several years in prison for thefts of rare documents valued in millions of dollars from this and other libraries.
The Beinecke library operates under a closed stack system, and rigorous security rules now allow carefully controlled access to materials in a spartan subterranean reading room, under video surveillance.
The glass-enclosed central stacks (not accessible to the public) can be flooded with a mix of Halon 1301 and Inergen fire suppressant gas if fire detectors are triggered. A previous system using carbon dioxide was removed for safety reasons.
An infestation of bookworms was controlled by freezing books and documents at -33 °F for three days. All new acquisitions are given this treatment as a precaution.
Read more about this topic: Beinecke Rare Book And Manuscript Library
Famous quotes containing the word security:
“To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it ... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied ... and it is all one.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (b. 1908)