A recent article from the Washington Post exposes the sometimes “ruthless” practice of weeding in our public libraries.
I find myself more and more wondering if I’m a conservative man.
It strikes me that there is a very real danger in the glibness of this comment: “We’re being very ruthless,” said Sam Clay, director of the 21-branch system since 1982. “A book is not forever. If you have 40 feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that’s a cost.”
Of course the article isn’t concerned with forty feet of books about tulips. It calls attention to Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, and To Kill a Mockingbird. And that last one, in particular, is interesting, if only because there’s been a real resurgence in interest in that book, and in Harper Lee in general.
2 Comments for A book is not forever
Author comment by Steve | January 7, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Author comment by Steve | January 7, 2007 at 1:02 pm
This article illustrates to me the fact that librarians are poor at communicating what we do with our collections and services. The librarians interviewed should have impressed upon the the article’s author the significance of our modern solution to “aggregating the long tail” as the information scarcity problem is beginning to be called: Interlibrary Loan.
We deal with the demand for scarcity by participating in consortial, regional and national borrowing systems. It is not all doom and gloom for rarely requested titles. We can still get the materials if they are requested. And I would expect that a library who pays as much attention to circulation stats as the article suggests would also say, “Hmm, this has been requested through ILL 3 times this month. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to buy a copy?”
The thing that boils my blood is the closing quote: “That’s the English major in me.” This, I think, risks alienating the majority of the public and importantly the people who control a library’s budget because the majority of people were not English majors. It is blatant fiefdomism and quite frankly librarians are extremely vulnerable when the step into that kind of a fight.
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Dave, I am not sure I understand your meaning. What makes you conservative? Because you take the “well, duh” attitude, or because you are appalled by basic weeding?