Librarians pore over books to keep out the bedbugs

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Lincoln library officials say librarians have been inspecting each item checked back into the eight branches, committed to keeping out any bedbugs.

The library system discovered bedbugs in some books in 2014, amid a national rash of bedbug reports from a variety of places, including theaters and thrift stores, college dorms and apartment buildings, hotel rooms and surgical centers.

The bedbug committee worked with state experts to come up with detection procedures and a training program for all library employees who perform the checks when items are returned.

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They flip through pages, look down the book spines and loosen the tight spaces that bedbugs like. Librarians sometimes find food stains and the occasional $100 bill. A piece of bacon was once found being used as a bookmark.

Certified bedbug detection dogs sniff through the aisles of each branch every three months.

Once or twice a month staffers at the Bennett Martin Library find evidence of bedbugs in returned items.

“We’ve had everything from one dead bug or a few smears, to opening things up and seeing three bugs run across the page,” a librarian on inspection duty, Scott Clark, told the Lincoln Journal Star .

The solution? The books or other items are kept in a freezer at zero degrees (minus 17.8 Celsius) for four days, long enough to kill the bugs and any eggs.

And the person who checked them out is notified and asked that any other library items be returned in plastic bags to be checked.

People notified about bedbugs hitching rides in the items are surprised and sometimes defensive.

One woman notified about problems with a recipe book she took back in November paid more than $100 for a pest company to check her house. It found nothing, and she’s filed a claim with the city, asking for reimbursement.

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Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, http://www.journalstar.com