Why university libraries are tossing millions of books

Authored by csmonitor.com and submitted by avec_fromage
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Freshman Dierra Rowland of Philadelphia, studies at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania library in Indiana, Pa. on Jan. 25, 2018. Nearby is a shelf of books marked with red stickers indicating possible removal. IUP is planning to remove tens of thousands of books that have little or no readership.

—A library without books? Not quite, but as students abandon the stacks in favor of online reference material, university libraries are unloading millions of unread volumes in a nationwide purge that has some print-loving scholars deeply unsettled.

Libraries are putting books in storage, contracting with resellers, or simply recycling them. An ever-increasing number of books exist in the cloud, and libraries are banding together to ensure print copies are retained by someone, somewhere. Still, that doesn't always sit well with academics who practically live in the library and argue that large, readily available print collections are vital to research.

"It's not entirely comfortable for anyone," said Rick Lugg, executive director of OCLC Sustainable Collection Services, which helps libraries analyze their holdings. "But absent endless resources to handle this stuff, it's a situation that has to be faced."

At Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), the library shelves overflow with books that get little attention. A dusty monograph on "Economic Development in Victorian Scotland." International Television Almanacs from 1978, 1985, and 1986. A book whose title, "Personal Finance," sounds relevant until you see the publication date: 1961.

With nearly half of IUP's collection going uncirculated for 20 years or more, university administrators decided a major housecleaning was in order. Using software from Mr. Lugg's group, they came up with an initial list of 170,000 books to be considered for removal.

Faculty members who make their living in the stacks voiced outrage.

"Unbelievably wrongheaded" and a "knife through the heart," Charles Cashdollar, an emeritus history professor, wrote to the president and provost. "For humanists, throwing out these books is as devastating as locking the laboratory or studio or clinic doors would be for others."

Though "weeding" has always taken place at libraries, experts say the pace is picking up. Finances are one factor. Between staffing, utility costs and other expenses, it costs an estimated $4 to keep a book on the shelf for a year, according to one 2009 study. Space is another; libraries are simply running out of room.

And, of course, the digitization of books and other printed materials has dramatically affected the way students do research. Circulation has been going down for years.

Libraries say they needed to evolve and make better use of precious campus real estate. Students still flock to the library; they're just using it in different ways. Bookshelves are making way for group study rooms and tutoring centers, "makerspaces" and coffee shops, as libraries seek to reinvent themselves for the digital age.

"We're kind of like the living room of the campus," said Oregon State University librarian Cheryl Middleton, president of the Association of College and Research Libraries. "We're not just a warehouse."

It's a radical shift. Until recently, a library's value was measured by the size and scope of its holdings. Some academics still see it that way.

At Syracuse University, hundreds of faculty and students objected to a plan to ship books to a warehouse four hours away. The school wound up building its own storage facility for 1.2 million books near campus.

At IUP, a state university 60 miles from Pittsburgh, faculty reacted with alarm after school officials announced a plan to discard up to a third of the books.

Mr. Cashdollar argued that circulation is a poor indicator of a book's value, since books are often consulted but not checked out. Substantially thinning a library's print collection also ignores the role of serendipity in research – looking for one book in the stacks and stumbling upon another, leading to some new insight or approach, Cashdollar and other critics say.

"We're going to throw away as many of them as the library can get away with, which is not a strategy," said IUP history professor Alan Baumler. "They say they want more study areas for students, but I find it hard to believe there is no place else for students to study."

The library project is more about responsible stewardship of the state's resources than it is an effort to free up space, Provost Timothy Moerland said. But he understands his colleagues' passion.

"There are some who will never be comfortable with the idea of any book ever leaving this mortal coil," he said.

Libraries say the goal is to make their own collections more relevant to students while also making sure weeded materials aren't lost to history. A large digital repository called HathiTrust has commitments from 50 member libraries to retain more than 16 million printed volumes. Another 6 million have been preserved by the Eastern Academic Scholars' Trust, a consortium of 60 libraries from Maine to Florida.

An IUP faculty committee is reviewing what Moerland dryly calls the "hit list" to make sure important works stay on the shelves. The final number of books to be removed has yet to be determined, but the potential scale is readily apparent. Librarians have affixed large red stickers to the spines of hit-listed volumes.

Some students say they worry about missing deadlines if they have to wait for a book the library no longer has. Others, like freshman Dierra Rowland, say they're on board.

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"If nobody's reading them," she said, "what's the point of having them?"

This story was reported by The Associated Press.

swimmingmonkey on February 22nd, 2018 at 14:00 UTC »

Libraries are about access to information, not access to books. It just so happens that books were the primary way to capture information for a long time.

I'm a librarian. I tossed 500 books last year - and I have a small collection. Why? Because they were out of date. They hadn't been touched in years. I'm a hospital librarian, so it's also a liability issue: having that old info available could be dangerous for patient care.

Keeping everything just because it was printed and bound as a book isn't preserving information or providing access, it's hoarding. I'm not keeping volumes of the New England Journal of Medicine from 1970. I have them online, and no one has consulted them in decades. Libraries do this all the time - we get rid of old material to make way for new or to change up our space. Most of us are not getting more space, so we have to make due with what we have.

edna-pontellier on February 22nd, 2018 at 13:12 UTC »

The library at my old college did this. The books they got rid of were out dated scientific journals or publications that were digitized. I imagine this isn’t as disastrous as the headline sounds. Plus, if it gets more people in the library, I’d count it as a win.

Edit: reading through this, that’s pretty much what most libraries are doing.

Portarossa on February 22nd, 2018 at 12:23 UTC »

To everyone outraged by this, I'd urge you to look at the other side of the equation: libraries are not just about books, and they never have been. University libraries (and let's not forget that this is a university library) have more of a case to be respositories of uncirculated material than your average public library, but even in this case, we're talking about getting rid of books that haven't been checked out -- perhaps even looked at -- in two decades. What we need here are digitisation programs, to ensure that a record of the material is kept for those students working through those most esoteric of PhD proposals, and then by all means get rid of them so that students can have space for new books, space for desks and computer access -- hell, even things like a place to grab a coffee so that that six hour shift they're planning come exam time doesn't feel quite so daunting. A housecleaning is not always a cause for doom and gloom.

If we want libraries to continue, concessions must be made. If that includes making space for things that will encourage people to actually spend the day in their library by getting rid of things like -- and I quote -- 'A book whose title, Personal Finance, sounds relevant until you see the publication date: 1961' -- I think that's perfectly justifiable. As much as we'd like to believe that books are forever, sometimes they just aren't. New knowledge can replace old knowledge, new books can replace old, and that's OK.

To want to keep everything regardless of its actual value isn't conservation: it's hoarding, it's unsustainable, and it's not a virtue no matter how unpleasant the idea of getting rid of books might at first seem.