From Library Babel Fish, June 17, 2013
Many residents of Urbana, Illinois are not too happy with their public library director at the moment. Tracy Nectoux of Smile Politely, an online local culture magazine, reported last Thursday that a large percentage of the library’s non-fiction collection was being removed in a hasty and ill-considered project driven by an awkward glitch in planning. Some temporary workers had been hired to insert RFID tags into the books and it seemed foolish not to remove outdated books from the collection first, particularly since the RFID tags had yet to arrive. So to make use of the workers who were already on the clock, that removal project was suddenly shifted into high gear, and soon the whole thing was smoking and the wheels fell off, but not before thousands of books were discarded.
Public libraries, more so than academic libraries, select books to be removed from the collection on a regular basis because they add them constantly and have only so much space. This process – oh, heck, let’s call it by its common-or-garden-variety name: weeding – is generally done on the basis of a constellation of factors, but in this case apparently only one criterion was being used. Books more than ten years old were being purged en masse.
Since Nectoux’s post, the library administration has responded. Mistakes were made. Communication failed. Voices were passive. The director took responsibility, though managed while doing so to leave most of the blame elsewhere. Better World Books, the company to which the weeded books were sent, responded quickly, trying to return as many books as they could. It’s going to make a doozy of a case study for beginning library school students.
Though the failures here were numerous and catastrophic, all libraries face a certain amount of conflict over weeding. But weeding is just one aspect of a broader struggle over books.
The overlap of the cultural category “book” (which has all kinds of conflicting meanings) and the social institution “library” (almost equally full of variant definitions) is a place that’s both full of friction and slippery. In that space, a lot of questions arise. What are libraries for? Who gets to decide? What does the future hold? Or (as that question is often reframed in a more pugnacious way) what’s holding libraries back? Oddly enough, books symbolize both what many people love and treasure about libraries and what many librarians feel is an outdated and limiting vision of libraries.
This conflict shows up in newspaper headlines that use the phrase “more than just books!” These articles almost always include in the lede the words “dusty” or “musty.” Electronic resources and programs that are about things other than the promotion of reading are the man-bites-dog of the story. The conflict shows up at library conferences where librarians are urged to create maker spaces and celebrate local and unique materials rather than commercial products, or when attendees are urged to