Allow me to say first that I love the public library. At any given time, I probably have at least twenty books checked out between the two public library systems I use. There is just no way I could read as widely as I do without this marvelous public service. It rocks.
But I’ve witnessed a disappointing trend in these institutions. As someone who cares about the preservation of cultural heritage, my one general complaint about public libraries is that they have a terrible penchant for getting rid of anything that doesn’t see a certain level of usage. As Don Borchert observed in his Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library, if you want anything removed from the library’s shelves for good, simply encourage others to ignore it. If you’re successful, the item will disappear from the library’s catalog within a year or so.
My fear is that public libraries have a primary goal of being edutainment purveyors. When I walk into my library, there’s no shortage of the latest and (dubiously) greatest of what the publishing industry has to offer. But when I walk to the back of the library, the places where the old stuff resides – even materials that were published five years ago – I’ve noticed that section getting smaller and smaller. The banality I complained about in my last post is partly inspired by the current state of what I see in the public libraries I frequent.
As the director of a small special collection library, I am proud to say we don’t get rid of anything. Anything new we pick up is placed right alongside the old. And it’s the most beautiful sight in the world. It is true we don’t work on a scale of most public libraries, but having worked in public libraries before, I can say it’s possible to keep at least some copies of everything.
Sure, you won’t always need 300 copies of The Da Vinci Code, but you’d better always keep at least a few. My own view is that public libraries can easily step up their rightful role as research libraries by making this one simple change. Rent storage if you have to. PASCAL was a great idea.
The Denver Public Library has an interesting system of managing the lesser-used parts of its children’s collection. Older, less-popular books are stored in the basement of the Burnham Hoyt building (one of Denver’s great international-style architectural examples, incidentally) located at the Central Library. Called “the lowers”, books stored in the basement show up as such in the library’s catalog. That way the staff knows which books are stored on the main level and which are stored in the basement, making retrieval relatively easy. Having “the lowers” is one part of proper librarianship, in my own humble opinion.
Now that I’ve been in the biz for a while now, I understand perfectly the need to keep new stuff on the shelves. There’s no doubt that a continuous shiny and new look keeps people coming back. But that doesn’t mean you have to get rid of some materials entirely just because they haven’t seen any action for a while. If this taxpayer found it there once, he wants to find it there again 30 years from now.
Document your community’s interests. Don’t wipe them out. It matters.
