"The days of libraries saying, 'We must have that, because it's good for people,' are beyond us."

GIVE ME THE TULIP BOOKS.

Same here.

jesus, my university [of london] has books that no fucker has looked at in years (often quite surprising ones); that's not a good reason to get rid.

The article didn't say this, but I wonder if they are getting rid of every copy of Mockingbird or just a particular version like a hardback or something.

xpost about Mockingbird

In Manhattan, the people who queue up to get in the branches when they open are generally the homeless and people over 60.

Oh heck yes.

Yeah, stories like this, and I've heard plenty similar, are definitely one reason why I am glad not simply to have access to UCI's collection (even if I didn't work here I'd be able to get a free card since I belong to the UCLA Alumni Association) but to be actually employed at the place.

One of the worst stories I heard was from my folks -- apparently the public library up in Salinas closed because there was no demand any more. Fundamentally depressing on many levels.

yeah I agree that Mockingbird should be available from the library--I just wonder if they really are trashing every copy of the book.

also, don't people use public libraries for webpron and DVD's more so than checking out books? really really depressing but true.

Even the case here, and there's a huge book turnaround obv. But it's also obvious what most people are here for (and now that we've allowed people to bring in food and drink -- something I'm irritated by but there we are -- that trend will accelerate).

Dig up any number of stories and reports on this trend. People essentially want their libraries to be Starbucks with books.

The news story is just hideously depressing. They can't store all the books forever, but "No-one's reading this" is a rubbish reason both because reading something's not the same as checking it out, and because finding something you weren't looking for in a library is one of the best bits.

Well, as Kingfish notes, it depends on the storing arrangements. The UC system, being pretty high-end, created two storage facilities back in the eighties for all the campus libraries to send little-used items to, one for northern California and one for the south (I worked at the southern one, at UCLA, all through my undergrad years). So we're lucky there, but this is an exception, not a rule.

There is no need to continually take up so much redundant space and time and kilowatts of climate control for anything out of copyright.

I was heartened, however, when I saw someone in the checkout line holding Gore Vidal's Hollywood.

This I'd actually agree with, and it's of a piece with online-only music reissues and the like (or just freefloating downloads, like at the UCSB cylinder archive). But as the continuing extension of copyright law means an ever-increasing amount of titles never fall out of copyright, things get problematic.

This is the Audubon Field Guild to North American Wildflowers. I bought it from the Chilmark Library book sale. They must have had duplicates—no way they'd get rid of the only copy of such an essential book. These other libraries should at least have sales and/or giveaways and not just trash the books. Sheesh.

MINOR DETAILS

Someone mentioned upthread working at B&N and being asked to photocopy pages. When I worked at a B&N (in the Twin Cities suburbs), I was astounded at the number of parents of kids doing book reports who didn't seem to know what a library even was or how to use it. The public library was right down the street!

OK, not really. I'll return the books.
I missed the library amnesty week - it was Thanksgiving week at my local library, and all the other libraries do amnesty at Christmas. So I called them. "Hi, are you doing that amnesty thing?" "No, we did that at Thanksgiving."
Big discussion of fines ensued. And, basically, they don't go farther than $3.00 per book, no matter how long you neglect to return them. It's a very forgiving system.

In my experience, most of them do. I have picked up a lot of books that way.

I had a guy do this to me when I worked in a charity bookshop. The bloody book was only about €6, and he just 'wanted a couple of articles' out of it. He was really insulted when I wouldn't let him 'borrow' it to take across the road to the copy shop. People are dicks.

WTF??! (i work with rare books and have actually had nightmares about patrons drinking/eating at the tables)

yay for suburbs

I enjoy going to the tall library just because it's fun to wander through the stacks. I'm particularly fond of the "reserve" floor, because those librarians (often students) have a clock that ticks away the time you have to borrow a "reserved" book. it's a very stressful floor. Like, they actually time it to the minute - the two hours that you get to take something from the reserves. "9:47 a.m. GO!" And you best be getting that book back by 11:47 a.m., because they fine you $50.00 an hour, and the hour starts the minute you failed to return the book.
How do I know this? Well, you figure it out.

Anyway, I live in the "five college" area of Mass., so the local libraries are very good, and the borrowing system among the colleges/university is splendid.
The colleges are very nice about letting the libraries be open to anyone. Lots of crazy, failed PhD. candidates (or so I assume)sitting in the comfy chairs at the Smith library, for instance.
The private colleges have the most comfy areas for reading. I might have to write a field guide to comfy college libraries!
Mount Holyoke is beyond the pale - SO comfy.
I'm very fortunate to have the library wealth that I do.

And Beth Parker? I still have my CLAMS card. (Cape and Islands Library System).

they may say it, but not "generally"

This is the Audubon Field Guild to North American Wildflowers. I bought it from the Chilmark Library book sale. They must have had duplicates—no way they'd get rid of the only copy of such an essential book

More essential than the Newmark or the Petersons?

my local branch is always fantastic.

Haha the official answer to this would be "no" -- the person quoted here is just slipping up and mixing stuff around. Leslie meant to say "we're beyond it," but had the "it" part of the subject at the beginning of the sentence.

(The main idiomatic use of "beyond" here will always be the exasperated "it's beyond me/us" for "I can't understand/imagine it!")

Which is a dodging answer - the question the article would seem to want to ask is "Yes, we know, but why aren't you getting rid of last year's Catherine Cookson novels, which are in a burst of popularity but will wane, instead of stuff that there will always be a steady but low demand for?"

(xpost beaten by nabisco!)

As for "what do they do with these books?", a lot of liberries have books sales to help with the underfunding aspect.

From the horse's mouth:

http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=libraryfunding&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=139034

except the zillions of americans that hate to read

it is an incredibly complicated balancing act and they are fucking saints

There used to be an actual Starbucks in our main library when I first moved here. It is gone now.

I don't really mind it so much in a public library, but at a university library it's a bit ridiculous. I really think there's a difference between what a public library is supposed to do (keep people who can't or won't buy books reading and thus literate and thus better citizens; give them access to information) and what a university library should do (promote deep research; archive materials). The systems need to be connected, and all, but coffee is a public library doesn't seem to be the end of the world.

Hmmm, maybe I should send a resume?

oh or maybe you mean B&N. oops. I bet people do it in both places, though.

Even worse: when a customer would approach and earnestly ask, "Excuse me, do you sell books?"

I prefer Borders over B&N: more knowledgeable staff; better coffee; I don't see the same Henry James books on the shelves, whether it's a store in Hoboken or West Palm Beach.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/nyregion/02library.html

xpost: Inter-Library Loan for the Henry James!

My pinko heart wanted me to be a public librarian so badly, but alas, it was not to be.

You actually learn in library school that if you become a young adult or children's librarian, you may have to deal with "babysitting issues."

This is why I could never teach K-12.

Do you sell globes of Mars?

Which is why I will never work in a public library. It's not that I hate kids...I just hate the kind of kids that end up left unsupervised in a library.

I think a public library can and should have a collection development policy that's a mix of pandering and educating. I don't think it's a science.

Much of this comes down to how cities make budgeting decisions. They want to see some concrete numbers, so library administrators tend to give them circulation statistics (at least where the collection is the issue).

I also see collection standardization increasing as a byproduct of certain integrated acquisitions/cataloging systems. (To some extent this depends on how much money an institution spends on the system they use. More money buys you more flexibility.)

It seems really unfortunate that at a time of increasing media concentration, public libraries would go for a more corporate model of collection development. The internet is obviously a huge counter-balancing force to that trend, and public libraries provide access to it--but then I think their collections may be making themselves obsolete by narrowing down precisely at a time when the internet is exposing larger and larger chunks of the world. I'm just concerned that when patrons look for books or CDs or DVDs in the library's physical collection, they aren't going to find the sort of collection that would reflect the richly global view of the world that the internet provides.

Fuck 'em. Let them go to grad. school if they want that.

(I quit the job and went full-time)

Library school = I have never been so drunk and stoned in my life

I made my first reliable w33d connection in library school.

Amen to that. We have "The Annex" for our storage purposes, but it's filling up. It's this cool old telephone company building not too far from campus. We have a fairly efficient Annex Request system running, too.

I fucking love our university one, though. The books it sells are truly dire, but that's because it keeps *everything*. The philosophy stacks are both great and obscure as all hell.

Well, the thing is that a lot of big bookshops do sell stuff like this. In the local Waterstone's there is a floor for travel books and they have an extensive selection of globes, including political, geographical and space ones. So it doesn't strike me as incredibly odd to ask this at something like Barnes & Noble. If it was asked in a library, however...

You stopped the story too soon. What did you say to the customer then?

650 0 Folk poetry, Spanish ǂz Spain ǂz Cartagena ǂx History and criticism.
650 0 Folk poetry, Spanish ǂz Spain ǂz Cartagena ǂx Criticism, Textual.
650 0 Miners ǂv Poetry.

Yeah, these people are my opposites then. I have no idea wtf I'm doing in clothing stores.

I like that you can search by SuDoc number. I honestly don't know how many people would do a search with that, but it's a nice feature to have.

Here's ours (I don't love it)

Good ol' triple III. Sometimes it goes in fits and starts but ever since the major upgrade for reserves a few years back I've not had a major problem with it.

OTM.

Nautical books! They're always blue. I was poking around in the home of a retired Yacht Club president once (courtesy of his caretaker), and his bookcase was a symphony of blue.

Years ago I worked as a housecleaner for a woman who asked me to remove all the "thin books" from her bookshelves.

I feel your pain. Anytime I have an urge to punch a computer screen, it's usually due to SIRSI (or something dumb like the dreamgirls thread).

Okay, this is my hometown library system. Actually, it is not underfunded. Fairfax Co. is one of the richest areas in the country. And Fairfax Co. has a large, well-regarded suburban system. Right now, the system has an excellent collection. There are about 20 branches, so if you ever want something that is not at your local branch, you can get it pretty quickly. I work at the library system in the next city over, and between the two systems, I rarely want for books.

I had a class with the director of this library and he is very smart and proactive and has been director for about 20 years. He is influenced by business practices, such as increasing interoperability and ease of use and seamlessness. He is influenced by the movement from bank tellers to ATMs and tried to incorporate modern practices into the library system. I think that he wants to intorduce more public meeting spaces into the libraries, which will take the place of some book storage. He thinks that this is what the public wants. Fairfax County also does very proactive environmental scans to determine what their community base is and how to serve it.

I think (I hope) that this article may have been misreported. I can't really see the wisdom in getting rid of these classics. Probably better to weed the multiple copies of the really popular books that people aren't reading two years later after the buzz has died down. I think that they will at least keep copies of the classics at certain branch libraries, if not all. Hopefully Fairfax Co. will publish a response to this article, which left a lot of things unclear.

I'm not really into ILL so much. Part of the pleasure of the library comes from browsing and finding the unexpected. I think that ILL should be a last resort, for the rare item. The library that I work at, a small city library with four branches, has a excellent collection. But sometimes I feel like I am the only person who reads certain books. I'm not sure if this is problem of marketinng, or if their is just not such a great audience of literary fiction and academic-ic nonfiction. I'm really greatful that the selectors at my library have such great taste, but I think we could go more in the other direction, and offer more popular materials. Though I hate bestsellers and their like with a passion.

I don't have to babysit at all in my children's library. We are really lucky in that we are not immediately next to a school. Another branch is next to a junior high school and apparently the students use the library after school to hang out, but not to use the resources or anything.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing this story developing. My library is rolling out the e-audio-books right now with the Overdrive system. But I'm annoyed because Mac won't play nice with libraries and it only works on PCs.

-- TOMB07

lmao, this thinking worked SOOOO well with microfilm

Obviously I check the local system (13 libraries including three university libraries) first when I want something, but if they don't have it, ILL isn't a first or last resort, it's the ONLY resort.

So do I! I feel your pain.