You may come upon some fairy tale haters

The Story:  Unbeknownst to anyone on library staff, a patron comes in looking for a DVD of a 3 Little Pigs story.  They search it up in the catalog, and as luck would have it, only one of the several versions we have is available at the moment:  the Fairy Tale Theatre version.  As anyone who has seen even a snippet of these movies knows, these are some strange films.  They're technically for children, and not inappropriate, but they take a 5-minute fairy tale and turn it into an hour-long production, which includes some jokes and references that only adults would get.  Honestly, the biggest problem with showing this version of any fairy tale to a young child is that they will get bored.  However, this patron seemed to be incredibly offended that the library would have this available for preschoolers.  What one needs to keep in mind, however, is that it is cataloged as a juvenile non-fiction DVD, which is on the opposite end of the shelving unit from the preschool-aged DVDs.  We actually have them separated.  JJ DVDs for younger children, J DVDs for older children, and J Non-fiction DVDs after that.  This movie was not sitting next to Barney or Caillou.  It is even on the top shelf, where small hands can't reach it accidentally.  The real problem is that all the preschool-geared versions were out at the moment, and the patron never bothered to ask a librarian for help.  Had they done so, we would have recommended that they request a different version from another library, as this one is a little long for four-year olds.

I do appreciate a few things about this patron's complaint, though.  Firstly, it was done so nicely, handwritten, on nice stationary, sealed and dropped off with the DVD in question upon return.  Secondly, they didn't seem to want a confrontation, as they wrote the note and left.  They didn't march in demanding to speak to the person in charge.  We later did look them up and call them, offering to put other versions of the story on hold for them, and explaining that had they asked, we wouldn't have recommended this particular title for a four-year-old.  Thirdly, they didn't foam at the mouth and demand that all traces of this item's existence be removed from the library at once.  They merely thought it should be kept in a section for older children, which, ironically, it already was.

The Lesson/Resources:  Basically, just know your stuff.  Know your collection, categorize it appropriately, and have your policies to fall back on should a real challenge appear.  In that case, ALA has some good resources here, here, and here.  While library school did try to prepare us for dealing with book challenges and the like, they didn't prepare us for the non-challenge that happened here.  "Keep this movie in the section for older children!"  Okay, job's done!

Unsolvable Mysteries: The case of the missing DVDs

If only these DVDs could talk...what a story they would have to tell.  Let me set the scene for you.

It was a dark and stormy night...

Wait that's not right.  Let me try again.

Once upon a time...

That doesn't sound right either.  I guess I'll just cut to the chase, then.

In my library, we have been having a rash of missing and mixed-up DVDs for about a month and a half now, as if some elf is going through the section when nobody's looking, rearranging which DVDs go in which cases, and removing some of them all together.  We never saw anyone over there looking suspicious, and while some of the mix-ups were clearly the same patron, there were far too many of them not connected to the same patron's record for it to be solely them.

Then one day, we get the following stack of disks in the book drop, in a ziplock bag - no note, no cases, nothing.

There were thirty DVDs there, all children's movies, and most of them were ours.  There were three oddballs, though.  Movies without cases from other libraries, but not just any libraries -- libraries from another state.  We're not even particularly close to the state border, either.  Also, some of the movies we got back were missing for so long that we deleted or reordered them.  Whatever has been going on, it has a history longer than our knowledge of it.  It's all very strange.

Popular theories include:  a child stealing DVDs for kicks and a parent discovering the stash while cleaning their room and being too embarrassed to return the DVDs in person and force the child to apologize, someone who doesn't understand how borrowing works at the library, and aliens trying to learn more about Earth's history before they decide if we're a good candidate for contact.  None of these really explain the out-of-state ones, though.  We'll never know what really happened, but if you've got some interesting ideas on the subject, we'd love to hear them in the comments.

Anyway, it's now a side-project to make new cases and/or catalog records for the prodigal DVDs, re-unite known empties with returns, and hunt down empty cases we didn't even know were missing their movies.  The out-of-state libraries in question will also be receiving a mysterious package soon with their wayward movies nestled inside, and a note explaining their bizarre circumstances of return, causing more librarians to puzzle over this unsolvable mystery.