The case of the disappearing magazines should clear up soon at Spokane’s city libraries.

Starting Monday, the city’s library will add bar codes to new issues of the 1,000 or so magazine titles it checks out to readers.

Those thin black lines will let librarians keep track of who checked out the last issue of Cat Fancier monthly or the latest edition of Newsweek.

The change will help the system’s main computer keep track of all new magazines, and it will allow librarians to find out who’s got what and if the item is overdue.

Up to now, city library users could check out magazines, never return them and get no penalty, said Library Deputy Director Toni Savalli.

“There was no way of knowing who had a certain magazine,” Savalli said. Patrons or librarians also had no way of quickly finding out if a particular issue was on a shelf, she said.

Just how many of the library magazines have disappeared is impossible to calculate, said Paul Coffey, assistant manager for periodicals.

“We figure, as a conservative figure, that it’s 10 percent, or about 700 magazines a year,” Coffee said.

“One of the reasons we have had that loss is there was no penalty for not bringing the magazine back.

“Now that won’t happen,” he said.

Overdue magazines will cost 15 cents per day, Savalli said.

The bar-coding that starts Monday will affect only magazines received from now on.

Older magazines probably won’t be bar-coded until the library has enough staff to handle the job.

The main library downtown and four other branch libraries check out more than 5,300 magazines each month, according to library statistics.

The Spokane County Library District last year switched to a bar code system to track periodicals. Up to then, it used a card-in-envelope system that worked “fairly well” in tracking who had the item, said a spokeswoman.

, DataTimes