Ross, you'll be glad to know that Liverpool has a pretty good security system these days. Too late alas, especially as Liverpool's onetime wonderful collection of music books has now been largely dissipated through public sales.

BTW., and apologies for the thread drift, but some time ago I needed to access a scarse and important audio anthology of child ballads. Naturally I enquired of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Yes, they'd got a copy listed on catalogue, but the entire set had disappeared. The best guess that Malcolm Taylor could make was that they'd been stolen, probably in the 1970s when a lot of stuff got nicked from VWML. Somebody who figured they could sell them for a bob or two perhaps? Even worse, could it have been one of the army of wanabee folksingers who were knocking around in those days, who figured he could make a career for himself singing Child ballads? I don't know, but the abstraction of such valuable resources is just despicable.

"I had a similar experience in Liverpool many years ago - perhaps mid-70s. The Reference Department card-catalogue showed four volumes of Bronson - only two could be found. Similar gaps were found when I looked for other folk-song collections. The librarian I spoke to had no explanation other than theft - unimaginable to me at the time, but far more expensive volumes have been systematically looted from British libraries, both from public collections and from University libraries where you might expect a higher level of security. But it is also deplorable that reference books such as this have been arbitrarily discarded for space-saving reasons in the way you describe. Equally criminal."