Here's a Washington Post article about a library system in Fairfax County, Va. that is employing new software to cull the least-read books from its shelves. Librarians still have some discretion, but among the books gone from the shelves and donated to the library sale are titles by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Maya Angelou:
Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively
to market preferences, calculating the system's return on its
investment by each foot of space on the library shelves -- and figuring
out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people
actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading
are gone -- even if they are classics.
I am so ambivalent about this. Portland's public library does a great job of ordering multiple copies of hot new titles, but they also have a deep back bench of the classics. I can't imagine them throwing out their only copy of The Sound and the Fury or Jane Eyre (Jane freakin Eyre!!) just to make room for the 47th copy of Chicken Soup for the Da Vinci Code Soul or Dave Barry's I'm 60...And My Son Wants an Earring!.
And yet...libraries are supposed to be responsive to community needs, not to dictate what the community should be reading, or doing (hence the proliferation of public Internet stations at any local library).
I don't know how librarians balance the curatorial part of their job with the needs and desires of their patrons. All I know is that it can't be easy:
Classics such as Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird are among the titles that haven't
been checked out in two years and could be eliminated. Librarians so
far have decided to keep them.
As libraries clear out titles,
they sweep in new ones as fast as they can. A two-month-old program
called "Hot Picks" is boosting copies of bestsellers by tracking the
number of holds requested by patrons. This month, every Fairfax branch
will display new books more prominently, leaving even less space for
older ones.
And, believe me, it's easier to see a used copy of one of your books for 1c on eBay than it is to see the book described with the words LIBRARY DISCARD.
Like I said, I'm ambivalent. All I know is that I like this woman:
Branch manager Linda Schlekau, who has 20 years of experience, says she discards about 700 books a month....
Schlekau hesitated over the volume of O'Neill plays, which was in
good condition but had been checked out only nine times in its lifespan
at the library, falling short of the system's new goal of 20. She
sighed. "The only time things like this are going out is if they're
[performing the plays] at the Kennedy Center."
But, she said, she's disinclined to throw O'Neill into the discard pile: "That's the English major in me."
