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 Is the subject matter outdated, and if so, does it still have value?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.
The library at the university I attended as an undergraduate threw out (3 or 4?) volumes of TAOCP but kept "the magna guide to SQL" or some crap like this.
Their justification was that TAOCP had never been checked out. Which is funny because the year prior when I tried to check out a volume, they told me it was a reference book and could not be checked out.
I'm still completely confused about how that decisions was actually made, and why the books weren't given away or sold.
The manga guide to Calculus is a great book. It helps me reason on a topic that is hard for me to grasp. Someone must think SQL is a difficult topic too.
TACOP is extremely dense and put me to sleep every time I tried to read it. I recently donated my copy of 0-4 to my work library, where nobody was interested in reading it.
The fact that we both have opposite views of your example books shows that this is a difficult process for librarians.
I worked through Chapter 1 back in college, now over a decade ago, with a professor of mine one summer. It was a great introduction (and led us to Concrete Mathematics) for me to a lot of topics regarding algorithmic thinking and discrete mathematics.
That said, I never worked through the remaining chapters of the series, and likely never will. It's a reference book. Read the sections as they pertain to you. For instance, TAOCP was my introduction to sorting networks. This led to direct, measurable, improvements in a few embedded programs (where consistent, deterministic behavior, and optimal behavior, were strongly desired).
I mean, few people ever read a dictionary. I still have one on my desk at home and at the office. This isn't substantially different (though I do recommend skimming it so you are aware of what resources it contains for later reference).
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.
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.
But with your cheap solution, how do you avoid running out of space? (And if your space can grow, don't you still end up needing more hours of work to manage the ever-growing collection and more money to just physically maintain the larger speace?)
One of my mates was a DJ. He had the rule of 100. He only owned 100 records. Whenever he bought a new one, he had to purge another, to stay at 100. Some tough choices were made.
My local library auctions their books. The books I donate get added to the pile. Extras are probably bought in bulk by Powell's or thriftbooks.com
> 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.
Another option might be to try putting them on the "library book sale" shelf for ultra cheap... if that's legal.
Here in Finland all libraries seem to have a small shelf of weeded books free to take (or sometimes about 1-3€ each) next to the exit. I honestly thought it would be the same everywhere else.
That seems to be the case with our excellent public library in Los Alamos. I got one of my favorite Maths textbooks there for about 3€ (was five bucks).
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.
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
(Not arguing with your point about usefulness in general; just twitching when it came to the Iliad.)
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.
I recently picked up a first edition of K&R's C Programming Language my university was throwing away. I just couldn't bare to see such a thing given up, even if it's not particularly useful these days.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not a direct answer to your question, but you might also consider a subscription to Safari books online with the caveats that I don't know if it is available internationally and it is not necessarily cheap. My work covers my subscription and it has had a copy of virtually every technical book I have searched for.
I don't know about London libraries but the Bodleian in Oxford offers associate membership. It's about the same rate as other university libraries in the UK
I've struggled to find a good public library here. I've been able to find every book I was looking for at the British Library, but you have to request each book and can only read it there.
Having said that, the books I was reading there were mostly general programming books. I don't know if they have more specific technical books.
The British Library also has some scary note on their website about how you need to demonstrate why you need access. But that's not worth worrying about. I just went there and signed up, nobody asked me to justify why I want to read books there.
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]
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.
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.
46 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 39.6 ms ] threadA 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.
Their justification was that TAOCP had never been checked out. Which is funny because the year prior when I tried to check out a volume, they told me it was a reference book and could not be checked out.
I'm still completely confused about how that decisions was actually made, and why the books weren't given away or sold.
TACOP is extremely dense and put me to sleep every time I tried to read it. I recently donated my copy of 0-4 to my work library, where nobody was interested in reading it.
The fact that we both have opposite views of your example books shows that this is a difficult process for librarians.
That said, I never worked through the remaining chapters of the series, and likely never will. It's a reference book. Read the sections as they pertain to you. For instance, TAOCP was my introduction to sorting networks. This led to direct, measurable, improvements in a few embedded programs (where consistent, deterministic behavior, and optimal behavior, were strongly desired).
I mean, few people ever read a dictionary. I still have one on my desk at home and at the office. This isn't substantially different (though I do recommend skimming it so you are aware of what resources it contains for later reference).
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.
One of my mates was a DJ. He had the rule of 100. He only owned 100 records. Whenever he bought a new one, he had to purge another, to stay at 100. Some tough choices were made.
My local library auctions their books. The books I donate get added to the pile. Extras are probably bought in bulk by Powell's or thriftbooks.com
Another option might be to try putting them on the "library book sale" shelf for ultra cheap... if that's legal.
> 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
(Not arguing with your point about usefulness in general; just twitching when it came to the Iliad.)
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.
(that said not throwing away my copy of K&R 1st ed)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Better World Books averages 1 container of incoming books per day.
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.
I've bought several non-penny-books from them, never had a problem with packaging, either.
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.
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?
http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/using/getting-a-readers-card/ch...
Having said that, the books I was reading there were mostly general programming books. I don't know if they have more specific technical books.
The British Library also has some scary note on their website about how you need to demonstrate why you need access. But that's not worth worrying about. I just went there and signed up, nobody asked me to justify why I want to read books there.
[1] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/membership/researchers-public [2] https://www.city.ac.uk/library/my-library/external
(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.