A recent article from Coin Detector Forum and Boston.com

Overseeing a lost-and-found operation comes with the territory of running just about any public place. Schools, libraries, bus depots, shopping malls across the region -- all have their own way of handling found items.

Add to that list the increasingly popular route of -- what else? -- turning to the Web.

The Internet has revolutionized the age-old problem of misplacing things and has provided a regionalized twist. People can post their finds -- or losses -- in a town-specific listing, boosting the odds that the property will be returned to its rightful owner.

Visitors to TheFoundBin.com website can post photos of lost or found items on an interactive map. You can navigate the map with your mouse, and zoom in on your town to see if anyone's lost (or found) anything in your neighborhood.

The ever-popular online forum Craigslist even has a category -- "South Shore Lost & Found Classifieds" -- specifically devoted to things lost and found on the South Shore. The online bulletin board contains posts such as: "I found an iPod on the commuter train in Plymouth on Monday" and "I was at Cubby's Clubhouse in Hanover on Friday afternoon the 19th. I saw a Skip Hop diaper changing pad in the woman's restroom and thought that was a shame. I'm hoping, for that person's sake, they see this and make a connection to being there. Good Luck!!"

Many posts are about lost animals and often reflect deep local knowledge, such as this one, submitted Feb. 6: "Looking for lost black cat that walks with a limp. It used to live in the Page Terrace parking lot in Stoughton. Would like to know that it is alive and well. Any information would be greatly appreciated."

And lots of people turn to a website called The Internet Lost and Found (lostandfound.com ). If you lose your cat in, say, Stoughton, you can read a post by someone who has found one there. And attendees of Scituate High 30 years ago might want to see if the ring listed as found belongs to them. (The initials "KAL" are inscribed inside. Sound familiar?)

Even local sports organizations such as Braintree Youth Hockey and Hingham Little League have their own Web pages listing items that were lost or found at the rinks and ballfields during the season.

The Web has fostered a new interest in lost and found items, spawning websites, books, and blogs devoted to castoff items. Found Magazine (foundmagazine.com ) showcases the random things people find -- mostly notes and letters, cocktail napkins, scrawled-on $1 bills, to-do lists, photographs. More than a dozen of the magazine's "finds" hail from Massachusetts, including a mysterious Polaroid snapshot of a person wearing an evil-looking bunny mask. It was found in Weymouth.

Occasionally, readers discover their own stuff on Found, and their stories appear in a regular column called "Hey! That's Me!" Other websites are devoted to specific items, such as Grocerylists.org, which claims to be "the world's largest online collection of found grocery lists."

The Web's sometimes fanciful entry into the world of lost and found has not retired the traditional methods. You can still find notes attached by thumbtacks on bulletin boards in the lobbies of grocery stores, describing a missing pet or a piece of jewelry. And behind some of those finds are untold stories. Like the gold ring that has been in the Dedham Community Theater's lost and found for a couple of years. A date is engraved inside the ring, which makes theater operator Paul McMurtry believe it could be more than a century old. One can only imagine the circumstances, and perhaps consequences, of the ring's loss. Says McMurtry, 'I'd love to find the guy who lost that."

As the inadvertent steward of theater-goers' castoff miscellany, McMurtry sorts through everything and records the date each item was found, with the hopes that their rightful owners will return someday. More common are abandoned umbrellas, eyeglasses, earrings, and baseball caps. "We could open a store with what we have here... an umbrella store," McMurtry said with a chuckle.

"The Yankee hats that are left behind are destroyed after 24 hours," said McMurtry. "But the Red Sox, we hold on to and make sure they find their way home. " A theater employee recently discovered a check for several hundred dollars, and it was returned to the owner right away, he said.

The rest of the unclaimed stuff is eventually donated to charity -- a policy used by many lost and found repositories.

Items left around the streets and parks often end up at the local police station. Kingston police, for example, get an assortment of abandoned objects, from bicycles to coolers, sets of keys to piles of cash.

"We write a report and it goes down in the evidence locker," said Kingston Police Lieutenant Maurice Splaine. If, after a year passes, no one turns up to claim the goods, it will go to the auction block, he said.

Public libraries end up with DVDs and books that patrons turned in that didn't come from the library in the first place. And librarians find all sorts of makeshift bookmarks stuck between the pages of books, according to Brenda Rodrigues, the circulation supervisor at the Brockton Public Library. "Photos of children, grandchildren are left in books, utility bills, checks.... We find many things," she said. The contents of the "found" drawer in the circulation desk attests to that. Along with the usual array of notebooks and earrings were a Boston Medical Center health card, a 2005 yearbook from the Angelo Elementary School, and a Brockton High School teacher's planning calendar.

"We're always trying to find people," said Rodrigues.

Then there are folks like David Stone, an Onset resident who combines old-fashioned treasure hunting with the reach of the Web's lost and found. Using an underwater metal detector, he has found medallions, bracelets, necklaces, rings, and coins along the sandy shores of beaches in Wareham and in other parts of the world.

Stone recently launched his own website (ilostmyjewelry.com) to help him track down the owners. Other metal detecting enthusiasts share their finds with one another on several online bulletin boards, and clubs like the Massachusetts Treasure Hunting Association hold regular meetings. The Gateway Treasure Hunters Club has been based in Wareham since 1989.

Stone said he doesn't expect a reward or finder's fee from anyone; he just wants people to cover the costs of the postage.

"It would be more fun to know they got it back," he said, "and find out the story behind it."

Source: Boston.com