Reposted from the Allied Universal Blog

From welcoming guests with a warm friendly smile to giving directions to the nearest ATM to recommending the best local restaurant, the role that security personnel play in a building has changed dramatically over the past few years and is still evolving.

Property professionals wear many hats, and that’s true for security personnel as well. A security team may perform a wide variety of tasks as a concierge or lobby ambassador for a property. Security professionals may go the extra mile, escorting visitors and tenants to their vehicles after hours, putting out umbrellas during inclement weather and even delivering critical medical services. Many commercial building owners and managers view these traits as crucial elements of an outstanding security program, necessary to add a special touch for a positive tenant, employee and visitor experience.

Security personnel’s uniforms make them easily recognizable, so that people can quickly seek them out for assistance—and not just in an emergency. Their commanding presence acts as a crime deterrent and gives customers peace of mind.

As property teams become more and more customer-service oriented and office workers work longer hours, the role of the security team has expanded to include the following roles: 

Caretaker: Assisting everyone who enters the building requires a high level of customer care. Security personal can take ownership of lobby and visitor management services and technologies to make every visit enjoyable and productive.

Greeter: Security professionals build relationships and welcome staff and tenants by name, offering a personalized level of service.

Custodian: As important custodians of the building and its tenants, security professionals know who should and should not have building access, allowing them to quickly make important security decisions.

First Responder: Trained security professionals can even save lives by delivering first aid, CPR and emergency medical services.

A security professional is often the first representative people see upon entering the building, whether they are a regular occupant or a one-time visitor. This role has the potential to make a big impact on meeting tenant and visitor expectations.

For building owners, a balanced, integrated approach of employing the right mix of security professionals, services and technology can provide the best possible tenant experience. The future of building security means being there for building tenants and their needs—no matter what or when.

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Reposted from OHS Online

A June 4 afternoon session at #Safety2018, "The Fatal Flaws in Your Active Shooter Protocol," addressed the unfortunately highly relevant issue of active shooters from a workplace violence perspective. Speaker Bo Mitchell, President of 911 Consulting and a retired police commissioner, laid out the statistics on workplace violence and how employers should prepare.

According to the Department of Justice, the average workplace is 18 times more likely to experience an incident of workplace violence than a fire. Mitchell cited FBI statistics that measured one or more active shooters once a month on average for the five years previous to the Sandy Hook shooting; now these incidents are averaging once a week.

Almost all active shooter situations are over in 4-5 minutes, which means it's difficult for police to deploy in time. Because officials can't arrive instantaneously, Mitchell said, the true first responders in a workplace violence incident are the employer and employees, and training them to call the police is not enough.

In active shooter situations, the Department of Homeland Security says to Run, Hide, and Fight. According to Mitchell, this protocol's fatal flaw is that the first step should be Alert. He stressed that in a chaotic workplace violence situation, employers must have multiple methods to alert employees as to what is happening and what areas to avoid. He listed options such as a PA system, two-way radios, panic alarms, or alerts via cell phones, text messages, or locked computer screens. He emphasized that redundancy and multiple alarms are best.

Appropriate response and protocol in an active shooter situation is complex and not intuitive, Mitchell said, so there are many points that are vital to include when training employees. "We don't rise to our occasion, we sink to the level of our training," he explained.

He underscored that the main duty of police when entering an active shooter situation is to find the shooter, and that employees should be trained to understand that police officers cannot help them emotionally or medically in this instance. Employees also should be prepared to put their hands in the air and be treated as suspects and searched, he said.

Generalities in emergency action plans are dangerous, Mitchell said, adding that employers must prepare a protocol for workplace violence and active shooters that is specific for employees at each work site. He said that OSHA does not have regulations on workplace violence, but preparations would fall under the standards for emergency action plans and the General Duty Clause. Mitchell recommended creating an emergency action plan based not only on each specific work environment, but the emergency action/management standards set by OSHA and NFPA and the workplace violence standards set by the security organization ASIS International.

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Reposted from Illinois News Bureau

A new book by a University of Illinois expert on rare-book crimes tells the story of the theft of valuable antique illustrations and the destruction of rare books from the University of Illinois Library.

Travis McDade, the curator of law rare books at the U. of I. law school, wrote a recently released book about the crime spree. “Torn from Their Bindings: A Story of Art, Science, and the Pillaging of American University Libraries” was published by the University Press of Kansas. It is the fourth book by McDade, whose training both as a librarian and a lawyer gives him a unique perspective on rare-book crimes.

Robert Kindred ran “the art world equivalent of a chop shop,” McDade wrote, cutting prints from academic libraries across the country during the summer of 1980. He was caught at the University of Illinois and prosecuted for the crime in central Illinois.

Academic and public libraries were particularly vulnerable to thieves like Kindred, McDade said, especially in the ’70s and ’80s, when libraries invested little in preserving or protecting their rare books. Thieves could easily sit in a remote corner of a library and cut illustrations from such books undetected.

McDade first learned of Kindred’s thefts in 2008 while preparing to teach a class on rare-book crimes. He remembered purchasing some inexpensive antique prints being sold by the University Library when he was in library school at the U. of I. He bought four prints at $5 each, and on the sales receipt was a note that the prints were recovered from a theft. The prints were not among those stolen by Kindred – they were recovered from a different theft – but McDade began looking into rare-book thefts and found Kindred’s story fascinating.

Kindred – who grew up in Villa Grove, Illinois – and an accomplice, Richard Green, broke into the University Library through the window of a first-floor men’s restroom. Kindred entered the library stacks, found the books he wanted to steal, tied them with a nylon rope and lowered the bundle out an eighth-floor window to Green, who was waiting below on the low roof of an adjacent building.

Unfortunately for the thieves, a maintenance worker arrived to check on the library’s air conditioning system and found the first pile of stolen books – a three-volume set of 19th-century lithographs with scenes of the Middle East and an 1832 book of illustrations of Italy – just as Kindred was in the midst of lowering a second bundle of books out the library window to Green.

“There’s this nighttime maintenance guy who stumbles on this crime. There’s this heart-pounding scene of these guys running across the street, hiding the items and getting in the car. And you get Kindred coming back to the scene of the crime, for reasons I can’t figure out,” McDade said. “This never happens in book crimes. There’s never any excitement.”

The book also highlights the painstaking work of the U. of I. librarians who sorted through thousands of stolen prints recovered from Kindred’s car and tried to determine what they were and where they might have been stolen.

“There’s these two librarians in the police station trying to reverse-engineer what happened. It’s this quiet-but-heroic effort by these guys,” McDade said.

His interest in this case arose not only from its connection to the U. of I. and Champaign-Urbana community, but also because Kindred was prosecuted both at the state and federal levels – a rarity.

Kindred was prosecuted for theft in Champaign County and received probation, to the disgust of the librarians who had spent months helping determine the value of the stolen items. But after another prominent library theft that included items from the University Library, the FBI’s interest in Kindred was renewed – he was prosecuted in federal court for interstate transportation of stolen property and sentenced to five years in prison.

“In my research, the federal prosecution of these crimes has really been the hero. The U.S. code takes these crimes seriously in ways that state codes don’t, and they punish these crimes accordingly,” McDade said.

He researched court records for both the state and federal cases, U. of I. police records and newspaper articles, and he interviewed many people involved with the case, including librarians, police officers and, finally, Kindred.

After years of research and work on the book, McDade tracked Kindred down and called him. To his surprise, Kindred was willing to talk, although not about the details of the thefts. McDade asked him about who he was and how he got to that point in his life.

“He was nice and gregarious and talkative, and remembered all these things,” said McDade, who had a complicated response to Kindred.

“Kindred, while a villain to me, is also this guy from east central Illinois who had a rough childhood. I tried to put myself in his position, and I thought, this was a guy who found himself in a position to be a success at something. He’d never been a distinguished guy, and he was all of sudden in a position where he was good at something. He was making money. People were paying attention to him. He was a success. That was a powerful motivator,” he said. “I understand how he got to that place, even if I don’t like him.”

Since Kindred’s crime spree, many of the books at the University Library that would be susceptible to theft have been moved to the rare-book stacks or to an off-site storage facility, McDade said. Other academic libraries have followed suit, but “across the country there remain really nice books in libraries that are vulnerable,” he said.

Unfortunately, many of the valuable prints have already been stolen from them, he said.

“The heartbreaking part of this is the looting and destruction of all these gorgeous books,” McDade said. “ I went to the library and looked at some of these books that had things cut out. It’s sort of visceral when you open a book and expect to find this gorgeous bird print, and you find nothing but a stub of where it was. It makes you angry.”

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Reposted from Bloomberg News

Last month, a Banksy print valued at about $40,000 was stolen from a Canadian exhibit of the artist’s work. It was a seemingly effortless crime—a man walked in, took the work off the wall, and walked out—but then, most art crimes are. The heavy lifting comes later.

“The main rule is that it’s not that hard to steal art, even from museums, but it’s almost impossible to translate that art into cash,” says Noah Charney, a scholar and author who’s published multiple books on art theft. Paintings can be quickly cut out of frames, and small sculptures can be tucked into bags—even jewelry can be secreted away—but finding a buyer for your art or diamonds is often impossible.

“Criminals don’t understand that, because their knowledge of art crime is based on fiction and films,” Charney says.

There are exceptions, of course, including a much-reported theft from March 2017 when four men from an Arabic-Kurdish crime family in Germany broke into Berlin’s Bode Museum and stole a 221-pound gold coin made by the Canadian Mint. Using DNA testing, the German police managed to hunt down and arrest the men in less than four months (one of them had worked as a security guard in the museum), but the coin was long gone.

The theft was notable, not just because the perpetrators were caught—a rarity in itself—but because they’d allegedly managed to sell what they stole for a significant sum of money.

If art thieves knew how hard it really was to sell the art they’d stolen, Charney says, there would almost certainly be far fewer art thefts.

The Good News (If You’re a Thief)

“We’re very bad at catching art thieves,” says Charney. “We have a very low recovery and prosecution rate: Something like 1.5 percent of cases of art theft see the art recovered and the criminal prosecuted.”

So, should a thief have a buyer waiting in the wings, or simply want a painting or art object for himself, there’s a very good chance he’ll get away with it. Add to that the cachet of being an art thief (“Art’s always been associated with the social elite, so it’s an aspirational thing” to take, Charney explains), and stealing art seems like a pretty good deal.

The Bad News

If you don’t have a buyer before you steal the work, you’re in trouble.

“People assume that they’ll find criminal art collectors,” Charney says, “when in fact, we have very few historical examples—maybe a dozen to 20 who fit the bill.” Keep in mind that many hundreds of art objects are stolen every year. Those, needless to say, are bad odds.

The Worse News

“When people don’t find those criminal buyers, they end up offering stolen stuff to people who look like the criminals they’re expecting to find,” Charney says. “And those people always end up being undercover police.”

In other words, people often steal art thinking they can sell it, realize that it’s not so easy (if it were, everyone who wanted to be a legitimate art dealer would be rich), end up doing a low-key but obviously indiscreet marketing effort to attempt to sell the art, and get caught.

Even if criminals aren’t desperate enough to start hawking their wares to strangers, once they discover that there isn’t a large group of shady businessmen willing to spend “whatever it takes” for a mediocre landscape painting, they fall back on a Plan B: “The backup plan is to ransom it back to the victim, or the insurance company,” Charney explains.

But given that this tactic is a clear sign of desperation, the victim/insurance company is in an almost unassailable negotiating position, which results, at least historically, in the ransom being reported to the police and the criminal getting caught.

“There really is no Plan B,” Charney says. “Unless it’s gold.”

And that leads us to the only real solution for thieves: steal something you can turn into something else, like the gold coin in Berlin. Charney cites the 2004 theft of a bronze sculpture by Henry Moore, valued at about 3 million pounds ($3.98 million).

The sculpture weighed about two tons, “and it was almost certainly chopped up and melted down, then converted to ball bearings,” Charney says. Hertfordshire police determined it was cut up on the night of the heist, moved through various scrap dealers, and shipped abroad. The raw material was worth just about 1,500 pounds.

This might seem like a raw deal to most, but Charney says you should look at it from the thieves’ perspective: “They’re going to say, I worked for three hours in one night and got 1,500 pounds.”

In the case of the Berlin coin theft, the thieves were in a similar position with a much more valuable commodity than bronze. Police suspect that the group melted the coin down and sold the gold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Of course, that’s a fraction of its intact cultural value,” Charney says. “There’s almost never been a criminal who knew about, or cared about, art.”

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Reposted from Yahoo News

A bibliophile who worked in a Hong Kong public library has been arrested for using the personal information of about 130 customers without their permission so she could quickly borrow their loaned books.

The 25-year-old woman, who formerly worked for a contractor company for Tseung Kwan O Public Library and was responsible for handling returned library materials from readers between 2015 and this year, was arrested on May 24, according to the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, which operates the library, and police.

A police source said she had used the personal data of users to file loss reports for library cards on their behalf. After the report, customers would no longer be able to renew loaned books and were required to return them immediately. That would allow the woman to borrow those items.

No financial losses were involved and no books were said to have been stolen, the source said.

The personal data included names, Hong Kong identity card numbers, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses, a spokesman for the Leisure and Cultural Services Department said.

The department was alerted earlier when the library received inquiries from registered users regarding unsuccessful access to their online accounts.

A department investigation showed the users’ accounts were suspected to have been improperly accessed, and 129 had filed lost library card reports, or had changed the account passwords, resulting in the holders not being able to use the library’s online services.

The department then reported the incident on May 23 to police and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data.

It also tried to contact the suspected affected users, of whom 86 users were reached.

The spokesman appealed to all registered users to change their passwords as soon as possible

A task force led by an assistant department director was set up to review the security measures concerning the management of registered users’ personal data and to enhance the monitoring mechanism on outsourced service contractors’ performance, the spokesman said.

“The department is very concerned about the incident and would like to apologize to the affected users,” the spokesman said.

The woman, who was arrested for accessing a computer with criminal or dishonest intent, was later released on bail and must report back later this month.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data said it had launched a compliance check.

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Reposted from ArtNet

On a recent visit to an Indigenous cultural center in Nova Scotia, Canadian politician Bill Casey found himself admiring an intricately embroidered robe. He was surprised to hear from a curator that what he was looking at was not the real thing, but a replica.

Held behind glass at the Millbrook Cultural and Heritage Centre near Truro, Nova Scotia, the stunning 19th-century Mi’kmaq regalia was a convincing facsimile of the original. The real regalia, however, is currently tucked away in a drawer at a museum in Melbourne, Australia.

Millbrook’s Mi’kmaq First Nation have been fighting to reclaim this unique piece of heritage for a decade. Their plight is familiar to many Indigenous communities in Canada and beyond. But now, for the first time, an unprecedented groundswell of support is growing to buttress their efforts.

A Global Shift

The push for restitution in Canada comes at a moment when long-held assumptions about the rightful ownership of cultural heritage are coming under renewed scrutiny worldwide. In Europe, French President Emmanuel Macron has promised to make restitution of French-owned African heritage a priority over the next five years, while Germany recently published guidelines on how to handle its own massive collections of colonial-era artifacts.

But former European colonies like Canada find themselves in a categorically different position. The so-called source communities asking for restitution are not an ocean away, but squarely within their own borders. Meanwhile, some of the contested items are held by foreign countries, creating a diplomatic and bureaucratic obstacle course. Arguably even more painful, other objects are in the collections of Canadian museums—visible but still out of reach for Indigenous communities.

Casey, who is a member of Canada’s federal parliament and represents Millbrook, was deeply affected by his visit to the cultural center. Since then, he has set out to help create a national strategy to help Indigenous peoples get their objects back, both from foreign nations and institutions within Canada’s own borders.

This February, he introduced a bill called the Aboriginal Cultural Property Repatriation Act (also known as Bill C-391) that aims to clear a smoother path for repatriation. The bill was unanimously voted forward through two rounds, most recently on June 7. Now, it will go to a Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage for further study. There is still a long way to go before it becomes law, but it’s off to a promising start. Parliament will debate the bill this autumn.

“From talking with many Indigenous stakeholders, I know that this strategy that would obtain artifacts being held in foreign museums and bring them back to Canada is long overdue,” Casey said after the vote in early June in the House of Commons. “For many Indigenous communities, the ceremonial artifacts that were removed by explorers over the centuries are a keenly missed part of their cultural heritage and identity.”

A Surprise Bill

When news first broke about Bill C-391 earlier this year, it caught several in the museum world off guard. “This bill, C-391, frankly came as a total surprise to us,” said John McAvity, the executive director and CEO of the Canadian Museums Association, which advocates for the museum sector in Canada. “It’s a well-meaning piece of legislation, but not really necessary as Canadian museums have been repatriating artifacts for over 35 years.”

Indeed, museums including Chicago’s Field Museum and the BC Royal Museum in Canada have repatriated objects to Canadian Indigenous communities over the years. But the new bill seeks to establish a national support system to make these requests more feasible for Indigenous communities, in part by providing funding for the transfer and storage of objects.

McAvity says he supports the bill overall and believes it will empower communities to gain access to their own cultural heritage. But he also points out the need for certain amendments. For one, he notes, human remains are not currently included in the list of qualifying objects, even though they are very often a top priority for repatriation.

Where Did the Artifacts Go?

So how, exactly, did Indigenous cultural property end up leaving the hands of its creators and landing in museums?

While some objects may have been legitimately purchased or donated, others are alleged to have been illegitimately confiscated by Canadian officials. From 1885 to 1951, the federal government banned potlach ceremonies—rituals practiced by Indigenous people in the Northwest to mark important events—in an effort to compel Indigenous people to assimilate and restrict their cultural expression. In the case of the notorious Cranmer potlach in 1921, officials arrested 45 potlach participants and swept up many important cultural objects in the process.

Over the years, artifacts from these ceremonies, including ritual clothing and dancing masks, ended up in museums including the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

“These important cultural objects were taken or stolen under our colonial regime’s disguise of superiority of ‘cultural preservation,'” a spokesman for Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly told CBC in response to Casey’s legislation.

Despite a growing willingness to address the issue, however, deep divisions about restitution remain, and a number of highly contested requests remain unresolved. The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh holds the human remains of the last two members of Canada’s Beothuk tribe, APTN News reported last December.

Though the Beothuk slowly died out following European colonization, other local Indigenous community members in the region have been actively trying in vain to reclaim the remains. National Museums Scotland, which now oversees the collection, has said it would only consider a request from Canada’s federal government.

Finally, Canada submitted an “official” request in 2016, but the matter remains unresolved. As of this writing, the remains of Demasduit​ and her husband, a chief named Nonosabasut, as well as 10 burial items removed from graves, remain stored in the Scottish capital. The Scottish Museums Association has argued against restitution, in part because there are no living Beothuk descendants.

A Long Road

McAvity, the Canadian Museums Association director, remembers when he first heard the word “cultural repatriation.” It was at a Canadian museums conference on the West Coast in the 1970s. “A lone woman from the Haida Nation stood up and talked about repatriation,” he recalled. The room fell silent. “Most of us had never heard the word or concept before. It was a defining moment for me.”

Much has changed since then. The current conversation is part of a much broader discussion in Canada about the federal government’s need to make amends to Indigenous communities.

In 2008, Canada established the landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission which, in 2015, released 94 calls to action to bring restorative justice to Indigenous peoples. From the 1880s to the end of the 20th century, the Canadian government operated a brutal residential school system that separated Indigenous children from their parents for extended periods and sought to “‘kill the Indian in the child,'” as Canada’s former Prime Minister Stephen Harper put it in an official apology in 2008.

A call to action targeted at museums seeking a national review of current policies and practices to determine their compliance with the United Nations’ 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; In response, the Canadian Museums Association initiated a 15-member working group this May with key members from its national museums and Indigenous cultural institutions.

“What we’re dealing with is one of the steps in reconciliation of the residential school experience and all of the ways in which heritage and knowledge were denied to Indigenous communities, or how the transmission of culture and traditional knowledge from generation to generation was interrupted. That is really the heart of this whole discussion,” says Sarah Pash, the executive director at Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute and a member of the working group who also sits on the Canadian Museums Association’s board.

Over the next three years, the task force will tackle a range of Indigenous art-related issues, including restitution. Casey’s bill is also on the table for consideration.

“For years, restitution was a no-no word in the museum language,” says McAvity. “This is changing fast, and it is about time for this new reality.”

A New Conversation Emerges

In recent years, Canadian museums have been working increasingly closely with Indigenous communities. But Pash says institutions must be careful to let Indigenous people take the lead on restitution-related matters, particularly in cases where their elders have specialized knowledge that can help retrace objects’ lost ownership histories.

Advocates argue that one of the most important parts of the bill is the proposed financial support that would enable communities to establish storage facilities or cultural institutions to house their own artifacts. McAvity notes that in that past, some communities have opted not to pursue restitution simply because they were unable to safely preserve the objects.

Still, others worry that increased funding could turn the current stream of repatriation requests into a flood. If the bill were to pass, would Canada’s museums end up empty? No, says McAvity. On the contrary, the law would likely result in the creation of more museums—ones run by Indigenous communities who have expertise in their own histories.

“Our treasures are family,” the artist and educator Lou-ann Ika’wega Neel, who has recently been appointed a repatriation specialist at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, tells artnet News. “To know that our family is being stored away in museum cases or in basements or attics in far away lands has always been heartbreaking.” (The Royal Museum, for one, owns several objects that were confiscated from potlach ceremonies in the early 20th century.)

In her new role, Neel has developed an intriguing idea. She suggests that Indigenous Nations artists create replicas of cultural objects for Canadian museums as the originals are returned to their respective communities.

“These replicas could remain with museums along with much more information, so they can continue to serve as educational tools for people of all cultures,” Neel says. “[Visitors] will know that we are not a dead or dying culture. We are still here.”

In recent months, the Australian ambassador to Canada, Natasha Smith, has reached out to Casey, the Canadian politician, about the contested Mi’kmaq regalia that inspired his new bill. The Millbrook cultural center is now in active discussions with Australia and the First Nations museum there where it is being currently stored; The goal is to establish a plan to repatriate the robe as soon as possible.

“This is not a country-to-country negotiation, it is a First Nation-to-First Nation negotiation, and they are 15,000 km apart,” says Casey. “When the Ambassador contacted me, she pointed out, ‘How could we ask other countries to repatriate, if we’re not prepared to also do the same?’ I was floored. Already, this has had an impact.”

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Reposted from The Hindu Times

Who could have imagined that the next big Hollywood movie was going to be about a rare book heist, or that an actual rare book heist would take its cue from Mission Impossible? The just released American Animals happens to be a movie about a bunch of college misfits trying to rob the rare book library of an American university, while that rather audacious real-life robbery of expensive rare books last year from a London warehouse featured three thieves who broke into the place by rappelling down the roof’s skylight, skillfully dodging motion sensors, in the stunt that Ethan Hunt-Tom Cruise made famous. 

In American Animals, which also happens to be a true story, they don’t quite get away with it (no spoilers — this is clear from the beginning), while in the warehouse heist, they do; making away with books worth 2.5 million dollars. 

Everything about this warehouse rare book theft remains a mystery: who were they, who hired them, and how did they know of this cache of rarities stowed away in an otherwise nondescript warehouse? One more nagging question persists: where are the books now, and why have they not surfaced in the market? If they were not stolen to be sold, why were they taken?

A year later it’s slowly becoming clear that the whole thing was very possibly masterminded by a collector who desired these books. That explains why the books have stayed hidden — they were taken not for profit but to disappear into the private collection of a collector.

On the other hand, the motive of the kids in the movie feels straightforward enough, if amateurish: it was to be a dare. Could they do it, and still profit from it? What starts out full of swagger and bravado turns into a comic nightmare as things go wrong.

Unlike art objects where the security is sophisticated and high-end, rare books, prints and maps are an easy — or easier — target. Valuable books often disappear from bookshops, book fairs, storages, libraries and even private collections. They are vulnerable in a way other pricey collected objects are not. Every now and then alerts pop up on the rare book world radar, indicating books that have gone missing.

The alerts list and describe the books, noting ownership marks in them, so that when a bookseller is approached with this stolen loot, he or she can sound the alarm.

Sometimes bookseller codes are shared — these are minuscule acquisition notations in pencil in some corner of the book that the thief will miss or ignore, but something other booksellers can watch out for if a suspicious lot of rare books comes their way for sale.

Typically, the more experienced book thief will not offer his recent loot to the market, but wait a few years before trying to sell, in the hope that not everyone will remember these books had once been reported stolen or missing.

India had  Stephen Blumberg who, you will remember, as that notorious book thief who stole more than a million dollars’ worth of rare books from several libraries.

Blumberg went by the name of Bharani, but this was probably not even his real name. He wore long, shabby coats with deep pockets stitched everywhere to slip books into.

He scorned bookshops in India as offering nothing in the way of rare books (which was, and is, true), and confined himself to prowling the institutional libraries across India. He had a fake identity card made out as Professor John Vidyasagar and presented himself as a numismatics scholar to librarians.

Unlike Blumberg, Bharani did not lick away the glue from library card pockets and labels but applied some sort of chemical mix he had concocted himself to make those traces disappear. Or he would painstakingly erase out perforation stamps and other telltale ex-libris marks. He was a skillful book restorer and was able to discard pedestrian library bindings, and replace the valuable antiquarian volumes in a simple but elegant contemporary binding.

And then he would offer them for sale abroad to unsuspecting European collectors. Bharani has not been seen or heard from in some years now — some say he was caught trying to make off with some precious government artifact and is serving a jail sentence somewhere, others say they know for a fact that he has returned to his ancestral home in Mauritius and lives in some anonymity there.

American Animals is not the only book-themed movie this season; Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop is finally a movie. This slim novel published in 1978 about a woman who risks opening a bookshop in a small town has earned a small but devoted following, and this movie version will give this obscure literary gem a little more traction. There’s a sentiment in the book, caught nicely in the movie, that all bibliophiles will give fervent assent to: “You’re never lonely in a bookshop.” 

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Reposted from Insider

Adults aren't the only ones who have caused some serious damage to a number of famous places and landmarks.

Kids have been known to be just as destructive — whether by accident or not.

We rounded up nine incidents where children were accused of ruining everything from a piece of artwork to a famous landmark.

Keep scrolling for some stories that are sure to make you cringe, no matter if you're a parent or not. 

A child was caught on camera knocking over a $132,000 statue, and his parents are being asked to pay for it.

A boy accidentally punched a hole in a $1.5 million 17th century painting after tripping in an art exhibit.

A 12-year-old boy tripped while exploring a Leonardo da Vinci-themed exhibit at the Huashan 1914 creative arts center in Taipei, in August 2015. Footage from inside the gallery shows the boy reaching out to catch himself, but instead punching his fist into a $1.5 million painting that was on display.

The painting, titled "Flowers," was created by Baroque artist Paolo Porpora and dated back to the 1600s. One of the exhibit's organizers told CNN that insurance would cover the cost of repairing the hole, meaning that the boy's family would not have to pay for the damage.

A child reportedly destroyed over $1,000 in makeup displayed in a Sephora store.

Sephora shopper and makeup artist Brittney Nelson shared a photo of an eyeshadow display that had been completely destroyed at one of the chain's locations in Augusta, Georgia, in November 2017. The display featured over $1,000 worth of Make Up For Ever eyeshadow. According to Nelson, the damage was done by a "small child."

Although she never saw the child actually wreck the display, Nelson told INSIDER that as she walked into the store, she passed a woman who was rushing her child out of the store. "The glittery footprints helped us decipher it was a tiny human," Nelson said.

A young boy knocked over a $15,000 Lego sculpture, causing it to break into pieces.

Two children played with and damaged a piece of artwork in the Shanghai Museum of Glass as their adult chaperones filmed them.

CGTN, the English language news channel of China Central Television, captured footage of two young boys playing with, and breaking, a sculpture on display in the Shanghai Museum of Glass in May 2016. Even worse, the children's adult chaperones filmed the incident, instead of trying to stop them.

The boys ended up breaking off a piece of the wing-like sculpture, which then shattered after hitting the floor. Titled "Angel in Waiting," the piece of artwork took artist Shelly Xue 27 months to create. Hyperallergic reported that instead of fixing the sculpture, Xue simply renamed it to "Broken" and left it as is. It's unclear whether the adults were ever held accountable for the damage, but the museum did install a video of the incident next to the display.

An unattended boy went on a rampage in a Dollar Store, throwing things off the shelves and threatening customers.

A group of teens pushed a rock off a crag at Brimham Rocks in North Yorkshire, England, causing irreparable damage to a landmark that's millions of years old.

A group of kids pushed over a stone pedestal that was a famous landmark in Oregon.

A teenager carved his name onto a 3500-year-old Egyptian sculpture.

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Reposted from the New York Post

A “promposal” may end up landing someone behind bars after a national monument in Colorado was vandalized last month.

The National Park Service’s Colorado National Monument posted about the vandalism on Saturday. It shows the words “Prom…ise?” and “I promise to love you forever + always” on the rocks, located outside of Grand Junction.

National Park Ranger Frank Hayde told FOX31 the vandalism was reported on May 23 by someone who lives near the site.

The graffiti is still up because preservationists need to analyze the damage and make sure there aren’t any historic works of art, such as subtle paintings, that have been damaged due to the message, according to Hayde.

The National Park Service can apply a maximum penalty of six months in prison and a $5,000 fine for that kind of vandalism, according to federal law.

Hayde told FOX31 officials will be far “more lenient” with those charges if the culprit decides to come forward.

It’s also just not federal parks that are struggling with vandals.

Geoff Jasper, ranger operations supervisor for the city of Boulder, told FOX31 that city crews try to eliminate any graffiti or vandalism on trails within 24 hours of receiving a report.

“It is incredibly frustrating,” he said. “We know that most people come here, and visit the parks because of their natural beauty, or habitat or the natural qualities that the park has, and then seeing something like graffiti or vandalism, it really detracts away from the beauty of the park.”

At Colorado National Monument, where “towering monoliths exist within a vast plateau and canyon panorama,” park officials will use a “meticulous” plan to get the graffiti off to not further damage the monument, Hayde told FOX31.

Park officials are asking anyone with information to leave a tip with the visitors’ office at 970-858-3617 ext. 360.

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Reposted from Security Management

In March 2013, a student at the University of Central Florida (UCF) was poised to carry out a gun attack in Tower 1, a dormitory that hosts 500 students. He planned to pull the fire alarm, then start shooting his classmates as the building was evacuated. When it came time to carry out the attack, however, his weapon jammed. As responding officers closed in, he took his own life.  

While security cameras at the Orlando-based university captured the incident, first responders were unable to view video during the situation because it was hosted on a local server and getting to the recorder would possibly put them in harm's way. Similarly, during the investigative period, the building was locked down, and the video could not be accessed.

In the immediate aftermath of the active shooter situation, it took more than eight hours to get in touch with the person in charge of the video management system for the building, says Jeff Morgan, director of security and emergency management for UCF. The sworn campus police department ended up having to confiscate the local network recording device as evidence.

The active shooter situation, which highlighted the limitations of the campus video infrastructure, helped the university realize it was time to reevaluate its security technologies. "We knew we were one weapon jam away from our own Virginia Tech here at UCF," he says, referring to the April 2007 massacre that resulted in the death of 32 people in Blacksburg, Virginia. "That's when we realized we needed someone to come in and fix it. We can't have folks without access to those cameras when needed, and not being able to get a hold of people in the middle of the night." 

Strategy. The department decided to hire a subject matter expert from the security world–someone who could bring in a mix of technologies that were scalable for the growing campus and user-friendly.

In December 2014, UCF hired Joseph Souza, CPP, PSP, as its assistant director of security. Souza says he was immediately interested in integrating the university's disparate video systems into one platform. 

"We had 58 different camera servers run mostly by IT across the university, and there were no standards on how the camera systems were run," Souza notes. "There was no standardization on what cameras were purchased, recording resolution, frame rate, duration, or retention." 

The access control system was also in need of an upgrade, he adds. "We had several different access control systems, several different key systems; none of that had been consolidated in any way."

Part of the security team's solution was to hire coordinators for both the camera and access control systems. The two hires were university employees who came from the IT department. "They had strong IT backgrounds but also security experience, so for me it was the best possible fit, because both technologies rely heavily on IT," Souza explains. 

The security team began partnering with the UCF IT department to benchmark new products before buying them—a practice that continues. "That's something we do constantly," he says. "We evaluate new products, we establish and approve product lists, and then that allows us to implement cameras and access control for new construction." 

Souza has helped his department get involved in construction projects on campus so that security is integrated from the start. "We've been involved at the ground level of planning and design," he says. "We attend the weekly meetings with the construction team and we make sure that all the security products are put in all the proper places with security in mind." 

One such project is the university's new downtown campus in the Paramore district of Orlando. UCF is partnering with Valencia College to build an academic center, which will have a housing facility, parking garage, utility plant, public safety building, and academic structure. The security and emergency management teams were involved in the planning, design, and now construction of those buildings on the new campus.

The downtown district is being revitalized, and Souza notes that the project is not without its challenges. In the leadup to the campus groundbreaking, UCF partnered with Orlando Police, Orange County public schools, and Orange County emergency managers to increase security in the area. Together, they worked to expand contract security and police presence, as well as cameras and emergency call towers.

"It is already paying dividends, as our staff and students appreciate the additional security presence," Souza says, "and we have seen a decline in the nefarious activity in that area."

Video management. After the active shooter incident, UCF wanted to upgrade to one platform that could manage video across the entire campus. This would make upgrading units easier as well. 

"In the past, we had a few hundred folks that had access to cameras, and if we needed to push an update or a patch, we had to go through every individual computer," Morgan explains. "We had disparate servers throughout the campus…a lot of them were reaching end-of-life, so we knew eventually we'd have to do an consolidation effort." 

UCF put out a call for proposals to vet various video management system vendors, and brought in the finalists for panel-style question and answer sessions. 

In April 2017, the university chose Pivot3's hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform, which uses VMS software from Milestone. "Pivot3 stuck out far and above everyone else's capabilities for what we wanted to do," Souza says. 

The Pivot3 HCI platform consolidates servers, storage, and client workstations into one solution managed from a single administrative interface. It took UCF two months to migrate its old recordings from its various VMS servers to the new system, and completed the project in July 2017. The system has redundancy built-in, so that if hardware failure occurs, previously recorded video is protected. With several research projects and laboratories across campus, this type of data protection is crucial. 

"On the maintenance side, if cameras go down, cameras need work, or lightning strikes–whatever it is–it's a lot easier for us to see what's down and repair it as soon as possible, with everything all in one platform," Morgan notes. 

The university also has to abide by certain privacy requirements for some of its research and education initiatives. "We have a lot of applications where the cameras are used to help people train to be counselors," Souza notes, "and we have labs with cadavers where medical research is conducted." With Pivot3 HCI, the video server environment can be segmented to isolate those cases, and privacy rules can be applied.  

Every user with access to video now undergoes training. "By and large, we no longer allow servers to export video," Souza says, noting that keeping a lid on video access helps the university better protect its students. "We put very tight policy around that, and training, to make sure our university isn't going to end up on a news story for misuse of surveillance systems," he says. The university limits exporting privileges to campus police and other law enforcement.

Cameras. With the new video infrastructure, surveillance has become a more user-friendly experience, Morgan says. The campus is better equipped to deal with any situation that may arise, from emergencies to everyday activities at a large university, because there is a single login to watch cameras across the entire campus. 

The advantages of the new system recently came to light when campus police were tracking two suspicious individuals moving across school grounds. "When they traversed from one building to another part of the campus, we could stay in one logged-in environment, versus trying to log into two or three different areas to try to track them," Morgan says. "The new system has made a huge change in response, and a big impact on investigations." 

The new system offers integrated mapping that displays available cameras in a specific location. "Now [officers] can just look at a campus map, click on a building, see what cameras are there, and click on that camera to pull it up," Morgan adds. "So you don't have to memorize where the cameras go."

In two to three years, UCF plans to expand its inventory to more than 3,000 cameras, including a greater number at the new downtown campus, which will be managed on the Pivot3 platform. The university has a mix of cameras from Axis and Oncam Grandeye.

One area where security has recently expanded camera coverage is Spectrum Stadium, where the UCF Knights play football. "We work every football game, including tailgating leading up to the game and post-game, to make sure there are no incidents," Souza says. Recently, 43 additional cameras were placed in and around the stadium, which holds 45,000 people. 

The school partners with a company called CSC for event security at the football games. "When an incident happens, we're right on it with surveillance," he says. "We can do situational awareness, whether it's a fight or a medical incident. We're proactively monitoring the crowd for anything that's going on."

The last two years, UCF has played host to the Florida Cup, an international soccer tournament. Souza says the enhanced situational awareness is invaluable at that event. "It's a more excitable crowd, they are really excited about soccer, so they bring in the smoke bombs and get into fights in the parking lot, and fights in the stadium," he notes. 

UCF was also able to take full advantage of the upgraded cameras during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, when then-Republican candidate Donald Trump visited campus, as well as then-President Barack Obama, who was campaigning for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. "We partnered with the U.S. Secret Service…we were also working with all of our law enforcement partners who worked with the candidates, helping them and giving them awareness of what was going on," Souza says. 

Access control. In addition to the video server and camera upgrades, the university wanted to enhance several aspects of its access control system, including provisioning and deprovisioning of cards. Souza is leading an effort with IT and human resources for granting and revoking card access for students, faculty, and staff. 

The campus is in the midst of a project to tie the HR directory to the access control system, "so we can have provisioning and deprovisioning of employees that ties them to their academic semesters, hiring and termination, or retirement of employees," Souza notes. 

Smart cards for students and faculty and card readers were also upgraded. "Our form of access control was magnetic stripe readers, now it's HID iClass" Souza says, which are contactless cards that are swiped in front of a door reader. "Not relying on magnetic stripe is a huge benefit."

The university has a contract guard force responsible for locking and unlocking buildings that are not automatically controlled. They also check to ensure the buildings that are automatically locked and unlocked are properly secured. 

Outlook. UCF has several ongoing security initiatives that it hopes to expand in the future, including its drone program, which was a major asset to the school during two recent hurricanes. UCF purchased a DJI Phantom Pro 4 drone and accessories, and used the vehicle to assess pre- and post-hurricane damage during Matthew in 2016 and Irma in 2017. The drone images were combined with data from cameras and access control systems to paint a holistic picture of how the storms affected the campus.

 "After the storm, we provided our facilities damage assessment team with immediate images of damages across all of our campuses, then flew drones the day after the storm to get high resolution images of the overall damage to buildings, as well as debris and fallen trees," Souza explains.

The school has a student intern, certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, who pilots the drone and trains others who seek certification. "We want to use drones for security and emergency management, but also use them safely and securely, with no privacy concerns being violated or safety issues with them crashing into people or things," Souza says. "We're reaching out to many different universities and public entities, drone companies, and drone detection companies to try to form a base on what drones for education programs looks like."

This spring, UCF finished renovating a media briefing room into its new global security operations center (GSOC). The security team actually rode out Hurricane Irma in 2017 in the center, before construction was finished. The school included the word "global" because security can keep track of students and faculty who participate in programs abroad. 

The GSOC has a large video wall that projects news, weather, pertinent alarms, and allows for control of digital signage across campus. There is also a conference room for briefings.

"We have the ability to track pinpoints on a map, track itineraries…and [use] a mass notification system to reach out to those students in whatever country for whatever incident may arise, whether it's a student that's sick, a large natural disaster, or terrorist attack," Souza notes.

Although the 2013 active shooter incident did not result in disaster for UCF, Morgan iterates that it spurred them on to make positive changes at the university, all of which ultimately strengthen its security posture. "We said, 'Okay, let's do what we need to do and be proactive–and let's try not to be reactive," Morgan says. "Now we have experts that can help us put the right solutions in the right places." 

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