A Motown record checked out from the Boston Public Library almost 50 years ago has been returned — who had it and why they decided to return it now remain a mystery.
The pocket inside "Anthology" by Junior Walker and the All Stars says it was borrowed from the Egleston Square branch and was due back by Oct. 27, 1976.
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Librarian Shane Gellerman at the Jamaica Plain branch said it showed up in their drop box last week.
"Not sure who dropped it off or exactly when, but we were going through the book drop checking things in and it was sitting at the bottom," said Gellerman. "We had a book sale the same day, so we've been getting lots of donations. Maybe they thought it was a good time to return an old item, too."
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He said while the punch card in the record's jacket may hold a clue as to who borrowed it but, the library doesn't have the machines that can read it anymore. Over the last half century, the library changed its catalog to a computerized system using barcodes.
"I haven't seen one of these in a really long time," said Lisa Pollack, chief of communications for the Boston Public Library, as she examined the card. "These are sort of a very early form of inputting and exporting data into a particular system, and each of these marks actually refers to either a letter or a number, and so what you would do is you would feed the card into a machine and then it would export at the other side either on a screen or as a printout what this was."
Gellerman says the library stopped offering vinyl records sometime in the last decade, so this record will likely go into its local history collection.
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"It seems a shame to throw out a 50-year-old record that looks like it's still in good shape, and it's part of the library history with the punch card in it," he said. "It's a reminder of when the library lent out vinyl records."
The Boston Public Library also stopped charging late fees in April 2021, so the person who had the record doesn't owe any money.
