At least 10,000 books have gone missing from the University of Malta libraries after students failed to return them, Times of Malta can reveal.
That is two per cent of the 500,000 books that can be borrowed and although the figure is substantial it is still low when compared to what goes missing from other European universities.
Library director Kevin Ellul said the missing books did not include those taken from another collection of 450,000 publications which students were not meant to take out of the library.
“Some students take books and don’t bring them back for long periods of time. Others don’t bring them back at all,” Mr Ellul said.
Some chapters had been cut out of books using razor blades
The figure, calculated through a stocktaking exercise earlier this summer, is in line with that of previous years and forms part of a steady haemorrhage of books from university facilities.
Mr Ellul said efforts had been taken to curb the number of books lifted from the Msida campus, including the introduction of security tags attached to each book up for loan. But students began to cut the tags. Others, Mr Ellul said, would simply tear off the relevant pages from books they were meant to read as part of their course material.
“When a lecturer tells a whole class of students to read a book and only one copy exists in the library it is clear that there will be a problem,” he said, adding that some chapters had been cut out of books using razor blades.
‘Students can be quite cunning’
To put an end to the repeat disappearances, Mr Ellul said the library administration planned to re-tag each book with new security chips. These would be more difficult to remove than the plastic ones and would also allow librarians to track the location of books which were not returned or deliberately misplaced in the library.
“Students can be quite cunning when it comes to ensuring they have access to books.
“We even had cases of students hiding books in different sections or behind other books; this way only they can use them,” he said, adding that the electronic chips would allow librarians to scan entire sections of the library to look for misplaced books.
In total, 144,000 books were borrowed from the libraries administered by the University of Malta, including at the Junior College. The majority, 88,000, were taken from the main library at the university campus, meaning every student would have borrowed an average of eight books last year. The figure was substantially lower at the Junior College where students borrowed an average of four books each.
However, Mr Ellul pointed out that the success of the library could not be measured by the number of books borrowed.
More than 85 per cent of the library’s €2 million annual budget was spent on digital resources, such as e-books last year. This, Mr Ellul said, was the future of academic library content.
“Nearly a million books, journals and other publications were downloaded from the numerous electronic services operated by the library this year. This number is growing fast and it is what we are focusing on,” he said.