>As I've been taking a look at the whole situation I find it is very
>confusing. The tape case has a small corner, right at where the blue plastic
>leader attached to the end of the tape, pulled out so it will not pop back
>in and stay there. I have tried to bend the plastic back but it is very
>loose and I don't trust it now.

Geoff - You'll have to balance the economics of doing a costly Restore Volume,
        with the potential of pulling lots of tapes back from offsite if no
local Copy Storage Pool, versus doing something like supergluing that plastic
leader block tension tab through one last use of that tape.  If your CE is
at hand, she/he could assist to get this tape mounted and copied - particularly
considering that a robot hardware problem seems to have cause the damage such
that IBM should be eager to help compensate for the trouble.

>Now the stranger part is that I did an audit library and a completely
>different tape shows as having been removed from the library at the time
>this happened. ...
...
>I was also told a tape fell in the library over the
>weekend so I wonder if it was this one...... It may have been damaged then
>and the operator didn't look at it.

It sounds like your operator may have returned the fallen tape to some
cell at random instead of Cell 1, to have the robot put it away.
(I think people become operators when they flunk the test to become users. ;-)
I pasted conspicuous instructions on our 3494 for our operators to place
errant tapes into Cell 1.

  Richard Sims, BU