The Magic (and Hard Work) Behind Brooklyn Public Library’s Millions of Materials

Over the course of nine months last year, two librarians at a small library branch near Orlando, Florida, checked out 2,361 books to a fictional library patron named Chuck Finley. When the fake account was uncovered in an investigation, the branch supervisor admitted that he and another employee had conspired to protect certain books from being removed from circulation.
This would never happen at Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), a system that manages a collection of 4.1 million items and serves a