I just started an on-the-side student job at my university library as a cataloguer (stamping, putting pockets in, tattletape) and etc. My first day I got to play with the withdrawn books, ie, cross out the stamps, rip out the pockets, and throw them in the dumpster!
Kill me now. Please. End my misery.
I understand why but I don’t understand why. Though they did say I could keep anything I saw that was useful to me or my English studies, throwing a duplicate Hebrew Bible into the dumpster, watching it fall, spine strangled against other garbage, f-in sucks, man.
Hear, hear! There’s absolutely no reason they can’t have both if they must.
I doubt you read science fiction. In the Connie Willis book Bellwether, a subtext is the heroine checking out books from her library to ensure they showed activity, and would not be disposed of to make room for the latest glurge about angels.
I agree, with a few caveats or at least sidenotes.
Such a sudden purge seems a bit odd to me in terms of a coherent collection development policy. Maybe the policy always leaned toward the Charlie Robinson* theory and the previous director just didn’t follow it closely.
You’re dead-on correct about libraries having to choose what best serves the greatest number of users. (* Charles Robinson, former director of Baltimore Public, pioneered a ‘bookstore’ approach, i.e. service=giving people what they want, even if that just means bestsellers.) And never forget that tight financial times can be pitiless for nonprofits. Service statistics, i.e. circulation, can mean the difference between staying open or being shut down.
It can be a very fine balancing act.
The whole shebang comes down to the “best” use of money and space. Of course “best” is the tricky part. Most information can be obtained other ways than books-at-hand, e.g. electronic formats, interlibrary loan, etc. But those are additional factors for cost and what serves best as well. Some of those alternate options certainly can be relatively expensive. The little voice of my Inner Librarian suspects that too often those ‘alternate options’ are preferable only because readers are tacitly discouraged from pursuing them.
The issue of library personality here puzzles me. I would think that a massive system like NYC Public would have some sort of collection development plan that incorporates both resource sharing and branch identity. This is barely analogous, but my library (and branches) participate in a library consortium of about 50-odd libraries of various types, across several cities and a state line: public, university, hospital, corporate and school libraries. Years ago we all crafted a Cooperative Collection Development policy that specifically addressed identity and specialization.
Of course we all have core collections appropriate to our library type, but each agreed to build and retain in specific areas. For example, my library specializes in literature (the beloved old things–and they still circ!), cooking, gardening, fundraising and foundations, and various ethnic areas, fiction and nonfiction. We basically just divided everything up. Any user can access the shared catalog from home or their home library, and request (circulating) materials to be delivered to the library of their choice.
But nothing is weeded before without being checked whether it’s a ‘last copy’ within the system.
It ain’t perfect but overall it’s worked very well to prevent wholesale purges.
Sidenote I: I loved Willis’s take on library fads in Bellwether, even though it was wince-worthy. Even down to sending out fines for a lost copy of Browning because it had been misshelved in the cooking section. And oh, the fad books…
Sidenote II: Libraries that don’t at least try to sell weeded books are professional disgraces, IMO. (Caveat: we won’t sell outdated medical books out of principle.) We make @$15K a year selling discarded and donated books and magazines, and people love the chance to buy them. It keeps book in the hands of people who love reading 'em.
They keep using it in “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” and it’s always driven me nuts not knowing where it’s from. Not nuts enough to actually put any effort into looking it up, of course, but nuts enough to hijack a thread to find out the source.
I’m hoping that you’ll update here if/when you get a response from the library. It’s a bit unsettling to think that first-edition books, some nearly 100 years old, would just be “weeded” out and made available for sale on the used book tables. The authors were not unknowns or even lesser-knowns, imo. Could the library have possibly taken them out of circulation for preservation purposes? The paper and even the bindings could be starting to deteriorate. Or maybe a decision was made to move them to another branch. At any rate, I do hope that they will still be available through the NYPL system.
I am with you on this, Eve. I once checked out a book at a University library that hadn’t been checked out since before my parents even met! And yet, there it was, faithfully waiting for me all that time. Call it Fate, call it Kismet, call it a Lax Library Oversight Committee, I called it great luck.
WTF? Isn’t there enough space in the new library for all the books? Even the really crappy ones? They raised my tuition for this? …did they even get any NEW books?
"Your concern about our Christopher Morley essays is understandable. We do have guidelines for weeding the collection which we need to follow in order to add new materials and these we adhere to, although this may seem harsh at times.
"One of the major problems with the older books is their condition. When pages are brittle and corners break as you turn pages, such a volume is unacceptable for patrons to borrow. In addition, book lice (live) were evident in some of the discards. We do not remove books from the collections without considerable thought.
"The open areas of shelf space you now see are the result of careful selection and not indiscriminate weeding. The books do need space to survive in decent condition. Being packed tightly together is not the optimum way for them to last.
“The Morely books that were discarded did become part of our book sale [Here is where my heart breaks–they are closed weekends all summer, so I missed out on that sale!]. However, if you wish to borrow any of the titles you noted, this can be done through our statewide lending service at your home library.”
Damn her for her politeness and reasonableness! I wanted a convenient villainess, not a swift, thorough and intelligent answer!!
(I still say the Morelys should have stayed . . . They were all in excellent condition and were not “lousy” in any sense of the word.)
FWIW, I have never been unable to find a title, no matter how old, obscure, or even academic, through the interlibrary loan thingy. Of course it’s much better to browse and find surprises, so this is a low second best option, but–as I’m sure you know, Eve–it’s a great resource if you know what you’re looking for.
Totally off topic, and yet in a way not, and I suspect something that will touch you: I recently reread Wallace Hamilton’s Kevin (which my wife picked up at a used-book sale when we began to become activists). If you know the story, you’ll pick up on the point quite well; if not, I recommend it.
But near the end of the book, Bruce, the older of the two protagonists, and the heir to a long line of his family, with keepsakes and old furniture galore, who gets a new lease on life in the story, is hosting a close friend, Amory, after having moved away.
Somehow your remarking about having purged your book collection reminded me immensely of that quote, and I thought I neede to share it.
You should be so lucky! I have just discovered that the principal of my old highschool whom has basically been fired for some dodgy things, got rid of the school library completely - and was originally hailed as a hero for trying to make the school into a school of the future.
Anyone who thinks that you can find all you want on the internet, shouldn’t be in a learning environment, as far I’m concerned.
If anyone wants to find a collection of old books at the library, just head over to the computer section. Let’s see, “Using your Vic-20”, “CP/M Internals”, “Getting Started With the TI99/4A”…
