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Re: [ARSCLIST] Interesting WSJ Article on when libraries should discard their holdings.
There are circulating libraries and research libraries. They perform
different functions.
Steven Smolian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Ramm" <Stevramm@xxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 10:01 AM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Interesting WSJ Article on when libraries should discard
their holdings.
Since there are many Music Librarians on this list, I though this article
in
today's Wall St. Journal might be of interest. The subject is what books a
library should retain if they haven't been checked out in two years. If you
change the word "book" to "Sound recordings" it really hits home. Having
seen
some major libraries give away or dispose of their 78 rpm collection to
build a
new theater or - in the case of Temple Univ. in Philadelphia - a new
Student
Union, this raises some interesting questions. I'm not prompting a
discussion here; just sharing. Also, this might be of interest to those on
the MLA
newsgroup (of which I'm not a mrember, so someone may want to forward).
(BTW, I
heard MLA was meeting here in Philly last week. Wish I knew!).
ALSO< please note that this article is Copyrighted by Dow Jones & Co,
Enjoy
it.
Steve Ramm
BOOKS
Should Libraries' Target Audience Be
Cheapskates With Mass-Market Tastes?
By JOHN J. MILLER
January 3, 2007; Page D9
"For Whom the Bell Tolls" may be one of Ernest Hemingway's best-known
books,
but it isn't exactly flying off the shelves in northern Virginia these
days.
Precisely nobody has checked out a copy from the Fairfax County Public
Library system in the past two years, according to a front-page story in
yesterday's Washington Post.
And now the bell may toll for Hemingway. A software program developed by
SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians
of
which books are circulating and which ones aren't. If titles remain
untouched
for two years, they may be discarded -- permanently. "We're being very
ruthless," boasts library director Sam Clay.
As it happens, the ruthlessness may not ultimately extend to Hemingway's
classic. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" could win a special reprieve, and, in
the
future, copies might remain available at certain branches. Yet lots of
other
volumes may not fare as well. Books by Charlotte Brontë, William Faulkner,
Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have recently been
pulled.
Library officials explain, not unreasonably, that their shelf space is
limited and that they want to satisfy the demands of the public. Every
unpopular
book that's removed from circulation, after all, creates room for a new
page-turner by John Grisham, David Baldacci, or James Patterson -- the
authors of
the three most checked-out books in Fairfax County last month.
But this raises a fundamental question: What are libraries for? Are they
cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said?
Or
are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or
Mitch
Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?<REPRINT
If the answer is the latter, then why must we have government-run libraries
at all? There's a fine line between an institution that aims to edify the
public and one that merely uses tax dollars to subsidize the recreational
habits
of bookworms.
Fairfax County may think that condemning a few dusty old tomes allows it to
keep up with the times. But perhaps it's inadvertently highlighting the
fact
that libraries themselves are becoming outmoded.
There was a time when virtually every library was a cultural repository
holding priceless volumes. Imagine how much richer our historical and
literary
record would be if a single library full of unique volumes -- the fabled
Royal
Library of Alexandria, in Egypt -- had survived to the present day.
As recently as a century ago, when Andrew Carnegie was opening thousands of
libraries throughout the English-speaking world, books were considerably
more
expensive and harder to obtain than they are right now. Carnegie always
credited his success in business to the fact that he could borrow books
from
private libraries while he was growing up. His philanthropy meant to
provide
similar opportunities to later generations.
Today, however, large bookstore chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders
bombard readers with an enormous range of inexpensive choices. An even
greater
selection is available online: Before it started selling mouthwash and
power
tools, Amazon.com used to advertise itself as "the world's biggest
bookstore." It still probably deserves the label, even though there are now
a wide
variety of competing retailers. (Full disclosure: Years ago, I was a paid
reviewer for Amazon.com.)
The reality is that readers have never enjoyed a bigger market for books.
Shoppers can buy everything from hot-off-the-press titles in mint condition
to
out-of-print rarities from secondhand dealers. They can even download
audiobooks to their MP3 players and listen to them while jogging or driving
to work.
Companies such as Google and Microsoft are promising to make enormous
amounts of out-of-copyright material available to anyone with a computer
and a
browser.
The bottom line is that it has never been easier or cheaper to read a book,
and the costs of reading probably will do nothing but drop further.
If public libraries attempt to compete in this environment, they will
increasingly be seen for what Fairfax County apparently envisions them to
be:
welfare programs for middle-class readers who would rather borrow Nelson
DeMille's
newest potboiler than spend a few dollars for it at their local Wal-Mart.
Instead of embracing this doomed model, libraries might seek to
differentiate themselves among the many options readers now have, using a
good dictionary
as the model. Such a dictionary doesn't merely describe the words of a
language -- it provides proper spelling, pronunciation and usage. New words
come
in and old ones go out, but a reliable lexicon becomes a foundation of
linguistic stability and coherence. Likewise, libraries should seek to
shore up the
culture against the eroding force of trends.
The particulars of this task will fall upon the shoulders of individual
librarians, who should welcome the opportunity to discriminate between the
good
and the bad, the timeless and the ephemeral, as librarians traditionally
have
done. They ought to regard themselves as not just experts in the arcane
ways
of the Dewey Decimal System, but as teachers, advisers and guardians of an
intellectual inheritance.
The alternative is for them to morph into clerks who fill their shelves
with
whatever their "customers" want, much as stock boys at grocery stores do.
Both libraries and the public, however, would be ill-served by such a
Faustian
bargain.
That's a reference, by the way, to one of literature's great antiheroes.
Good luck finding Christopher Marlowe's play about him in a Fairfax County
library: "Doctor Faustus" has survived for more than four centuries, but it
apparently hasn't been checked out in the past 24 months.
Mr. Miller writes for National Review and is the author of "A Gift of
Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America" (Encounter
Books).
URL for this article:
_http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116778551807865463.html_
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116778551807865463.html)
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