
Weeding the Worst Library Books - benbreen
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/weeding-the-worst-library-books
======
stephaniepier
Having worked in libraries for many years, weeding is a _very_ contentious
issue. Many patrons (and librarians!) have an emotional attachment to books,
so to recycle them just feels wrong. Some libraries have resorted to putting
their weeded books into locked dumpsters - there have been instances of
patrons coming across a dumpster full of weeded books then going on a tirade
against the library for "throwing away knowledge."

A lot of people don't realize the detailed process that goes into deciding to
weed a book. When was it last checked out? How does it compare to other
materials in the collection? How many copies of this book are available
regionally, nationally? What's the monetary value of the book? Is the subject
matter outdated, and if so, does it still have value? It's a very complicated
process and unfortunately libraries simply aren't able to keep every book, nor
should they!

As a compromise I've seen some libraries offer weeded books for very cheap or
even give them away for free, which seems like a good way to please both
sides.

~~~
dingaling
I briefly worked in a public library and the problem they had was that there's
no practical way to maintain sufficient numbers and depth of subject-matter
experts who can answer the subjective assessment such as you list.

Ideally one or two shallow-SMEs in each field would be maintained over a
region, but that will never happen.

So you end-up with librarians making retention decisions based on what
publications tell them are the "most useful" books in a topic area and trying
to correlate that with check-out frequency. But those topic areas are coarse-
grained like 'history of aviation' or 'web programming'. It's a crap-shoot and
unfortunately a lot of good books are weeded instead of the dross.

My cheap solution: non-fiction is retained until a updated edition is
purchased ( or forever if that doesn't occur ), non-curriculum fiction is
weeded after 50 loans regardless of replacement. Curriculum fiction such as
Shakespeare probably shouldn't be weeded, just replaced.

~~~
stephaniepier
Right - "subjective assessment" being the key here. Hopefully each criteria is
considered at least a little bit, but even experts are going to disagree on
what's worthwhile to keep. Beyond that, many libraries out there have very
limited time/resources to make weeding decisions.

------
kragen
Historically I've noticed that libraries are often terrible at distinguishing
good from bad when it comes to technical books. Sorting through the books
being thrown out, I've often found real classics mixed in with the likes of
_Learn Excel 98 In 24 Hours_.

This also happens with used bookstores, but in that case the upshot is,
instead, that used bookstores won't buy technical books, so they never make it
onto their shelves.

Nowadays I almost entirely get my technical information online, in part
because of having moved to Argentina, where there weren't very many technical
books in the first place — our famous national abundance of bookstores are
dedicated almost entirely to fiction and opinion, rather than knowledge in the
sense of falsifiable propositions.

~~~
jandrese
Librarians aren't subject matter experts on these technical fields, so it is
very hard for them to know if a work is still relevant. They may be inclined
to keep the "Learn Excel Today (now updated for version 3.0!)" because they
know people still use Excel, while the Art of Computer Programming looks like
a relic from the 70s that surely can't still be relevant, right?

~~~
grimoald
A look at the blog mentioned in the article proves you right:
[http://awfullibrarybooks.net/knapsack-
problems/](http://awfullibrarybooks.net/knapsack-problems/) I don't know the
book, but it doesn't seem outdated to me.

~~~
empaone
This book is available as a PDF from the author's website:
[http://www.or.deis.unibo.it/knapsack.html](http://www.or.deis.unibo.it/knapsack.html)

------
mturmon
Reminded me of this old article about profiting by sniping the most valuable
books being deaccessioned:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/10/confes...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/10/confessions_of_a_usedbook_salesman.html)

~~~
mariodiana
The subtitle reads: "I spend 80 hours a week trawling junk shops with a laser
scanner. I don't feel good about it."

I had the bright idea a few years back to give this a try. I went to a couple
of library sales, scanning books and eyeballing others. I came away with a few
books that I could have made a 5-10 dollar profit on. But I came away with
something more valuable than that.

I looked at the other people at the sale doing the same thing I was, because
there were several of them. Call me prejudiced, but here was my take. They
seemed like older, retired guys who were probably earning a pension or
collecting social security, and basically out and about doing this "job" just
so that they could have an ostensible reason to escape the "Eye of Sauron"
(read: wife).

None of them looked like they were making a living. They looked like they just
wanted out of the house.

------
greglindahl
There's an interesting ecosystem around weeding. Many libraries send weeded
books to Better World Books, which is a major used bookseller. If BWB don't
want the books, then they pass them along to organizations like the Internet
Archive, which scans them & then loans 1 electronic copy for each physical
copy.

Better World Books averages 1 container of incoming books per day.

~~~
dingaling
Interesting, presumably BWB have a team of inbound screeners that make a
decision on how to route each book?

I've only dealy with them as a customer, they're not good at packaging books
for posting but if most of their stock is old penny-books then presumably
they're trying to make margin on the Amazon postal charge.

~~~
greglindahl
BWB has some fancy software that figures out if they're likely to sell a given
book soon enough to make it worth having in the warehouse.

I've bought several non-penny-books from them, never had a problem with
packaging, either.

------
sdegutis
Almost all the books I actually _want_ to read are pretty niche (programming
or Catholic), and because of that I can never find them in our local library
system. Only Amazon or Archive.org end up having them.

(FWIW Archive.org + Lulu.com is a great way to get an out-of-print book into
your hands for relatively cheap.)

So the way I see it, libraries are good for reading what people popularly
read. They're good for introducing our children to Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys,
or Lord of the Rings, or Dr. Seuss, or Amelia Bedelia.

~~~
zimbu668
You might have already looked into this, but a lot of public libraries are
part of larger interlibrary system that will include other public libraries +
college libraries. Where I'm at the consortium includes most of Colorado and
Wyoming, with a total of ~30M volumes. I can request them online and they're
typically available at my local library in a few days.

------
marklyon
I wonder, if part of the pre-weeding process, if books proposed to be disposed
could be run through Amazon's system for sale. If sold within a certain
window, then they go on to a new, more useful life. If not, they head to the
dumpster. Since they're already shelved and easily located, it should be
trivial for library staff to find, package and send any orders.

~~~
sliverstorm
You see that a lot on Amazon actually. I almost exclusively buy books from
various Goodwills around the country, via Amazon.

The ultimate solution might be delivering a palette to Amazon and letting them
manage & ship them for you (as Amazon does with some used sellers), but I can
see why Amazon might not want to shoulder that burden.

------
michael_h
> "Most people that come into a library are looking for a new job, or they’re
> facing a financial crisis, or they’re trying to do research on a medical
> problem,"

I worked in a library for ten years. I'd say, by a huge margin, _most_ people
come into the library looking for fiction books, and DVDs. And picture books,
lots of picture books.

~~~
harryjo
Looks like a difference in demographic -- urban v suburban, adult vs child

------
chalimacos
The criteria of "usefulness" is a slippery slope. Books like The Iliad are
completely devoid of any practical usefulness, they would have been discarded
centuries ago by the librarians at Alexandria. I've seen libraries in Spain
throw away good novels, even excellent novels, to make room for the latest
potboiler.

~~~
abecedarius
The library at Alexandria was where the early scholarship on Homer was _done_.

> The Alexandrine grammarians undertook the critical revision of the works of
> classical Greek literature,[3] particularly those of Homer, and their
> studies were profoundly influential,[4] marking the beginning of the Western
> grammatical tradition.[5]
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandrine_grammarians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandrine_grammarians)

(Not arguing with your point about usefulness in general; just twitching when
it came to the Iliad.)

------
nkrisc
The reality is there has to be some kind of weeding process. Libraries can't
forever hold an ever-increasing number of books, especially how woefully
funded public libraries are in some areas. I think as long as the process -
and list of weeded books - are transparent there's nothing wrong with it.

------
esoteric_nonces
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good public library in London?

I've often found myself wanting to read a reference book prior to purchase
(technical books are extremely expensive to buy).

Do any of the universities offer subscriptions to members of the public?

~~~
jjp
No recommendation for a good public library. For pre-purchase of a reference
book if it's current find the right bookshop and you could always do that way.
Many universities offer access to their libraries. UCL access policy [1], City
University Library [2]

[1] [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/membership/researchers-
public](http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/membership/researchers-public) [2]
[https://www.city.ac.uk/library/my-
library/external](https://www.city.ac.uk/library/my-library/external)

------
marincounty
I don't feel like aging myself today, but for too many years I haven't quite
figured out library discard policy, or buying policy.

In my local libraries, two I have been going to since I was child, there has
always been huge book sections on gardening, and cooking. Just racks, and
racks? I know these are popular subjects, but it just seemed like overkill.

While books on the hard sciences are lacking? I know a book on higher
mathematics isn't going to be checked out often, but these libraries should
buy these books for that one inquisitive person. That kid who's just
interested, and might never get the chance to go to college?

I also noticed a lack of technical/trade manuals.

I don't care like I used to because I don't use the library like I used to. At
one time, it was really the only way to learn how to do something.

But then again, what do I know. If I was in charge of buying, it would be
floor to ceiling with just reference books.

~~~
akuchling
There are two kinds of libraries: archives, which try to keep everything
relevant for ever, and circulating libraries, which try to be useful to the
public.

Municipal libraries are circulating libraries, so if they spend $80 on TAOCP
vol. 1 and it's borrowed once, they basically wasted $80. They should have
spent the $80 on something else that people would borrow multiple times, and
the person who wanted TAOCP could have gotten it via inter-library loan
(probably from some university library).

And I think online databases and Wikipedia are busily killing off physical
reference books.

