I read an article from The New Yorker the other day. It reported that a library director from California weeded roughly 40,000 books from the shelves of his library over a summer. Protesters angrily gathered. The director gave his perspective, explaining his perfectly acceptable reasons for this 'purge'. 1000 protesting people signed a petition insisting he step down. And then, he did. The man was bullied from his job.
There's a few things people should remember about Librarians and Libraries.
1) We appreciate books. We know books. And most of all we know which books haven't been borrowed in two years, because out library systems tell us so. "Ahh, but what if someone had looked or used the book in the library without borrowing it?" I hear you cry. This is a possibility. However the people that work in libraries often know their shelves like the back of their hand. Some books don't move from their shelf positions, ever. They are dusty and unappreciated and untouched. Sometimes it's better for them to move on and free the shelf space for a book that someone needs.
I'm not even sure what a Valentine Potato is
2) Times move on. When I was at LibraryCamp back in 2014, I head a tale about a library where books on homosexuality were still classified under 'criminal activity' because no-one had weeded that section in forever. Some books do hold their own against time, such as classic fiction and philosophy. But the truth is most non-fiction books get to a point where they can be wildly offensive or dangerously inaccurate. Would you give a trainee doctor a book on mental health treatment from the 1960's? No. God only knows what horrors they would inflict upon their future patients. Books from the fifties on how to be a perfect housewife, cookery books that have old measurements in, medical volumes that still recommend segregating bathrooms...they all need to go!
"A very lovely training manual" OhGodWhy
3) As the article mentions, libraries aren't necessarily museums. Yes some of these older books are nostalgic and remind people of past times or are culturally significant. But that's the responsibility of a museum to house those treasured antiques. More often than not, a museum wouldn't take a library copy of a book anyway. Too many stickers and alarms and suspicious stains.
Museums don't want this. This isn't culture.
4) Library books tend to wear out faster than those at home. Sometimes these books can be taken to hundreds of different homes in one year and they begin to fall apart. Then you repair them. Then they fall apart again. After a few rounds of this there's often not much worth keeping. From my experience, tatty books are always checked over before they go to book Nirvana to see if a replacement copy is worth buying.
No-one, however, is going to replace this. Ever.
5) Where do people think these books go? Yes a large proportion do go on to be pulped, but then some of those books deserve that fate. Some go on to be re-sold. You know amazon market place? It's full of ex-library books looking for a new home. Some companies, like Better World Books sell the books on for a library, to reduce their workload. Some are donated to anyone who might want them. But again, books such as a very, very out-of-date law book could be dangerous if someone used it in practice. Some books need to go.
Doctors in the 21st Century that's who.
The article story made me so mad. The main niggle of the protesters, was that they wanted to know what had been weeded and why, so the article states. Why? We don't tell anyone else how to do their job! Librarian's are trained for this work. We don't just waltz through the shelves employing crazy reasoning like "oh, this book has a orange cover and I hate carrots, so it must be burned immediately."
So as a last note, please trust us. We won't be getting rid of anything useful. For one, libraries as you might have noticed, are struggling financially, so getting rid of perfectly good books is hardly our number one priority...and finally people complain sometimes that libraries are 'old' or 'only have out of date' books. Quite often that's not the case. But by persecuting and bullying those who do try and weed, you're only increasing the chances of this being the reality.
Over and out.
P.S: If you need cheering up after this, Awful Library Books is a blog dedicated to posting the weirdest, most hilarious and creepy books that libraries decide to weed. If you're still not convinced that weeding is a good thing, check out their site. All images on this post are credited to this blog.
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