Comment by chuckee

I have a question: Librarians are fiercely protective of reading privacy, and don't want to hand the information on who borrowed which book to the police. Yet they still record that information. Why? Wouldn't it be better to, for example, require a cash deposit equal to the value of the borrowed books, possibly in the form of some token? And if some books were too expensive, you'd still have the option of presenting some personally-identifiable ID. But the record of what you borrowed would be destroyed after you returned the book.