The Great Weed, driven by software, is happening in Fairfax County, Virginia, just a few miles from me. Who cares if a book is by Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald? If no one’s checked it out in the last 24 months, librarians just might weed it out from your local library branch, relying on the software to spot the laggards.
The Fairfax system notes that this simply means you’ll need longer to catch up with a title—to be hauled in from another branch. Regardless, although I grew up in Fairfax County and have been a booster of the system, I hope that Fairfax will reconsider. The Great Weed is entirely unacceptable; we’re talking about libaries, not Barnes & Noble.
Anti-browser
What about browsers, for example—not Netscape or Internet Explorer, but the human variety, including K-12 students. Doesn’t Fairfax care about serendipity? While librarians have only so much shelf space, they should be selective about what they weed out, not just what they buy.
No, I’ve nothing against e-books, I’m the one who’s been calling since the early 1990s for a well-stocked national digital library system, but nirvana hasn’t arrived yet, and most American still rely on p-books, whether because of the limits of screens or technical barriers such as the Tower of eBabel and Draconian DRM.
Lessening the outrage
Meanwhile I think that Fairfax should mitigate the outrage by promoting access to online public domain collections. I’d also like library trustees to take a stand against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act—target of Robert Nagle’s series in the TeleBlog. The Act will cost libraries, schools and the rest of us billions over the years. Fairfax County’s library system is hardly unique in its growing reliance on electronic resources, so we’re not just talking abstractions.
Additional links:
—Fairfax Focus : Fairfax Libraries Cull Classics for Room for the New… , from the Washington Post.
—Online discussion with Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda, who, among other things observes: “Libraries are free. When you’re a kid or an immigrant, you don’t have access to unlimited bucks for books. Plus, real education is always a matter of browsing the shelves, pulling books out at random and reading a page or two. You can do this in bookshops or libraries, but you can’t do it online. You buy books online when you already know what you want—and can afford it.” Actually, with the right technology in place, yes, browsing of e-books should be easier than ever. Problem is, p-books remain the predominant medium, the reason why the Fairfax approach is so, so wrong.
—Ezra Kelin‘s blog, with comments from librarians and others.
Related: Friends of Libraries USA is having a discussion on what Friends groups should and shouldn’t do when local public library systems shut down. I myself hope that Friends-style groups will follow a TeleBlog reader’s suggestion and care about making libraries responsive to reader needs, not just about plain, unquestioning advocacy. This actually would make librarians’ jobs more secure. The better a library can serve public needs, the less likely it is a candidate for budget cuts. And e-books could help—by reducing the need to pit one title against other in the quest for shelf space, even if there will still be competition in terms of budgeting.
Effective action on the weeding of classic books at Save Classic Books Campaign http://saveclassicbooks.blogspot.com/
Many thanks to Steven Cohen at Libary Stuff for passing along this communique from the Director of the Fairfax County
Libraries in which he debunks the stories of brutal, clinical weeding at the library and its branches.
“Recent media reports have misled readers to believe that we’ve eliminated all copies of classic titles from our branches. This could not be further from the truth.
http://www.librarystuff.net/2007/01/more-on-fairfax-libraries.html
As a new manager who is directing her first major weed at a library, I know what a difficult job this is! Be assured that although most of us do use circulation reports to inform our projects, that there is a great deal of thought and heart, and no small amount of anguish, that goes into the process. It’s been my experience that librarians tend to err on the side of caution, leaving on the shelf things that have not been touched for years and probably never will be again. At my previous job, we had all these awesome, ancient books written by early Arctic explorers like Peary and Shackleton that were falling apart and hadn’t been checked out for 5-10 years. They were not worth anything to collectors, and because I was in the midst of reading current titles about those expeditions, I couldn’t bring myself to pull those books. I don’t think that sentimentalism is considered a best practice in librarianship, but it’s pretty prevalent.
Rochelle, I really appreciated your giving the librarians’ side. I haven’t the slightest doubt that you personally use great care in your weeds.
As for Sam Clay, director of the Fairfax system, he’s a good guy, and if you click on the word “notes” in the above article, you’ll see that even before you made your comment, I was linking to the memo you mentioned. I just hope the Fairfax system and others will listen and increase the number of e-books and promote their use.
Libraries can use tech to serve patrons with a variety of needs. If e-book editions were available of the classics, especially public domain ones which patrons could keep, that would be wonderful.
Not that e-books are perfect. They have their share of flaws—one reason why it’s important to have on hand wonderful librarians who love p-books and can weed intelligently. The issue isn’t whether libraries should weed out, but rather what should go.
To give one example, I wrote a book on computers back in the 1980s. While The Silicon Jungle got good reviews from Booklist, etc., I’d rather that librarians weed out my book than a copy of David Copperfield.
Thanks,
David