Many people who read love books. They consider
the physical volume a sacred thing; maybe not exactly in those words, but
somewhere deep down many people are horrified at the idea of throwing away a
book, any book. When people have to clean out their house or a relative's
house, the library gets lots of donations of books for this very reason. So why
do libraries throw out books?
If you search online, you will find news
stories about public libraries doing just that. The Pottsville Free
Public Library was mentioned recently in a story about someone who likes
to retrieve things from the city recycling center. This blog post is an explanation why the library throws out certain books that no longer belong in
our collection.
Libraries call the process weeding. Just as
you remove the weeds from your garden so there is space for the plants you want,
libraries remove the "weeds" from their book collections so there is
space for the books their patrons want to read. No library has an infinite amount
of space. If we purchase new books, we have to have someplace to put them.
So how do we choose which books should be
discarded? Books that are in really bad condition are obviously candidates. If
a book looks so "icky" you don't want to touch it, or if the book is
physically falling apart, who's going to want to read that?
Libraries also withdraw and discard books that
are out of date. We are responsible for providing our community with accurate
information, both for students doing homework and for adults trying to learn
new things. If we give you a book about financial aid for graduate school that
was published in 1990, will it be of much help? If you are trying to find the
best information for dealing with a chronic illness, do you really want to
depend on a book that is so old it doesn't include anything about recent
medical breakthroughs? If you need help with a legal question, how many laws
might have changed between 1995 and 2015? If a student needs to do a paper on
recent United States history, shouldn't that book include the 9/11 attacks? We
know that many people do not check the date a book was published before reading
it, so we need to make sure that the information we are providing you is
current and relevant.
But what about fiction? Why do we send some of
those books to recycling? They might fall into the "icky" category.
If a book is on the local schools' summer reading lists we try to keep copies
of those titles, replacing them with new copies if we can. However, other
fiction titles are discarded because no one has read them in many years. They
might have been read a lot when they first came out, but as the years pass they
get forgotten, or no longer of interest. This applies to the nonfiction
section, too. Here's an interesting tidbit: cookbooks may be the only subject where every single title in our
collection has received regular use by library patrons.
And if a book is not used in a long, long
time, it becomes like a weed. Think about a book shelf or a closet full of clothes.
If there are many old books, or old clothes, how likely are you to go through
it looking for what you want? The eye sees "old" and the brain says
"never mind, what I want isn't here." Even if it is, hiding among the
old.
Is there any way to prevent this situation?
Well, we could stop buying books. Then we wouldn't need the shelf space and
could leave the old books there to collect dust, only withdrawing the
"icky" ones. But that doesn't make the library collection useful to
our community. No one wants to go into a library and only see old books. That's
not a library. That's a storage facility.
Is there a way to only buy "the
best" books that won't go out of date? We do try. We can't read every book
that is published, so we select the books to purchase by reading reviews by
professional reviewers in respected journals. We try to find the most interesting,
relevant, and informative books for our library users, because that is what we
believe you deserve in your local public library. We look for positive reviews
of fiction, nonfiction, children's literature, and reference books, as well as
for our DVD and CD collections.
But even the best books get old eventually, and
the most popular titles now will be almost forgotten in a few years. Scientific advances will make our
current science books too old to use. Medical discoveries will change how
illnesses are treated. Current events will become part of our nation’s history.
We like books, too. But we have a
responsibility to use your tax dollars to help the community be informed and
entertained. And we can't do that with shelves full of "weeds."
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