Staff at the city's Millennium Library have had to deal with a racially-abusive man, teenagers throwing food and a girl punching another girl in the face.

A security assistant also had his shins kicked in an unprovoked attack at closing time, according to the library's staff logbook.

A customer was banned for a month after he became abusive and threw a pencil when asked to stop drinking water in the heritage section.

And a drunk woman started being 'overly familiar' with staff, and another report describes how 'unnecessarily loud moaning' could be heard from a man using a computer.

Other incidents included an 'ongoing Facebook dispute' which spilled over into real life and a man shouting and ranting because of a lack of table space to read his newspaper.

The Evening News can reveal there were just 32 incidents recorded by staff from March 2010 to July 2011.

Norfolk County Council has welcomed the low figures as the Millennium site is the busiest library in the UK, with almost 1.5m visitors in 2010/11.

James Carswell, pictured, county council cabinet member for cultural services, said: 'We want all of our customers to enjoy using the library and employ staff to work with young people to ensure they are able to make the best use of the wide resources the library has to offer. Serious incidents in the library are thankfully very rare but we do have a CCTV system and keep a record of all of the incidents.'

Thousands of books have disappeared from the shelves of smaller community libraries in favour of Norwich's Millennium Library, council figures reveal. Great Yarmouth and Diss are among the 30 libraries to have seen book stocks decrease between 2000 and 2010. In 10 years the number of books at Norwich's main library site has risen by 90,084 books, while Great Yarmouth lost 23,526 of its 62,505 books.