I never thought I’d be blogging about a Cracked article. I suppose it comes to all of us, one day…
During my usual evening random stroll through the internet, I came across this: 6 reasons we’re in another book burning period in history. It’s written by someone who has spent the past year ‘walk[ing] walk through library warehouses and destroy tens of thousands of often old and irreplaceable books.’
Now, I’m an adult. I’ve worked in a library. I know that withdrawn books don’t get to go live on a farm. I know a lot of them don’t even go to booksales, or services such as Better World Books. I know of the existence of the horrid thing known as the Library Skip. I know that judicious weeding must happen – that libraries (especially legal deposit) are being overwhelmed by the numbers of new books coming in, and are building huge stores and moving books into salt mines. I know that libraries have to keep stock moving, and ensure that what they keep meets their users’ needs.
But I always imagined this being done with discernment and professionalism. The image that Davis represents in the Cracked article is one of books being indiscriminately pulled off shelves and pulped en masse, with no regard for rarity or value:
Imagine holding a beautiful, dusty, illustrated volume of Shakespeare printed in the 1700s, a calligraphic message from its long-dead owner inscribed on the inside cover, and throwing it straight in the trash. I’ve been there, more than once. I could have kept it and maybe gotten a few hundred dollars for it on eBay, if my supervisor wasn’t watching with specific orders to prevent me from doing that.
Davis does go on to say that this is not usually the choice of the librarians – that they are told to get rid of a certain number of books by a certain date, and indiscriminate destruction is often the only viable way to do so.
Exaggerated? Hyperbolised? I hoped so. So I turned to twitter. The response? It happens – though, understandably, people don’t want to say when and where. A ray of hope comes from one responder, who said that while it had happened in the past, things were ‘better now’. This would fit with my impressions – I know there are collaborative collection management projects, designed to ensure that weeding is considered on a larger-scale than just that of the institution. But I worry that there may still be places where ‘chuck it all in a skip’ may be seen as the most cost-effective approach to stock management.
What do I worry about even more than that? Well, I worry about the impact of this article. Cracked has a huge readership, and it’s already spawned a response article over on NPR. These are people who probably wouldn’t usually read about libraries – a huge echo chamber escape! woohoo, eh?
Well, no. Not woohoo. Not even woo. This is bad. At a time when libraries are under huge threats from funders who deem them irrelevant, library professionals and supporters are battling hard to prove the value of libraries and librarians; to prove that we darn well do more than just stamp books.
And now? There are at least half a million people (yes, the article has 575,482 views at time of writing) who do know something more about what librarians do: they randomly destroy the very books and knowledge they’re meant to be protecting.
Am I making too much of it? Making it worse by reacting like this? Maybe. But this article gave me a tiny moment of doubt about the profession I love. Batman help us all if our opponents pick up on it.
6 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 13, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Lauren
You’re right Bethan, it leaves us wide open to attack. For example, just look at this: http://www.northwalesweeklynews.co.uk/conwy-county-news/local-conwy-news/2011/03/24/david-lloyd-george-s-books-pulped-by-conwy-libraries-services-55243-28391159/
“Local historian Chris Draper was dismayed to discover Llandudno library’s older copies of Archeologia Cambrensis , from around 1912, have disappeared from its shelves.”
Sends a shiver down my spine thinking about what we might be throwing away. It’s only through the expertise of the music librarians in Manchester that they managed to identify very valuable previously uncatalogued manuscripts during recent refurb work.
In Doncaster, the weeding of the stock that will no longer fit on the shelves (now that there are going to be far fewer shelves on which to put the stock…) will have to be done quickly (due to the pace of the cuts) and by people who lack the knowledge about what they’re throwing away (no qualified librarians to do the job). The plan seems to be just to sell off (cheaply) stock that according the LMS reports hasn’t been issued in the past year. There’s a lot of stuff that of course won’t have been issued in the past year. Scary stuff.
October 13, 2011 at 2:55 pm
bethan
It is very worrying! We can hope that these are isolated incidents, but they’re certainly not good for the profession – and are quite traumatic for us book-lovers to contemplate! It does argue for greater (not less) expertise among those who run libraries and care for materials. It also indicates that making library/archive-related decisions based purely on economic concerns is Not A Good Thing.
October 13, 2011 at 2:14 pm
Katie Birkwood
I agree that this is scary, and not least because it’s fuel for our opponents’ fire. I find articles like the one you cite frustrating though, because they generally don’t give a full picture (either of the particular event about which they’re alarmed, or of the profession as a whole).
I hope that the full picture is that yes, sometimes weeding isn’t done well, and sometimes there are ‘narrow escapes’–things recovered at the nick of time–but that most of the time librarians are constructing workable collaborative schemes that ensure the permanent preservation of sufficient copies of everything whilst allowing institutions the space to create working collections that meet users’ imemdiate needs.
Granted, my experience is all in an academic context – in the public libraries sector my knowledge comes only from the horror stories, and there have sadly been a few. And in any sector, even when things are done well, the horror stories–”local historian finds favourite books gone!”–make so much better newspaper copy than the fuller picture–”childrens’/IT/whatever provision improved through scheme to house rare materials in suitable location somewhere else”.
I fear that my magnanimous attitude is borne out of hope (and I recognise that it’s particularly dangerous kind of hope in the current situation) rather than evidence.
October 13, 2011 at 3:01 pm
bethan
Katie – you’re quite right about the lack of context in that article, which is why I immediately went to my twitter stream and begged them to ‘say it ain’t so, Joe’. My concern here was not primarily for all the material lost by this kind of slap-dash weeding (if I think about that too much I’ll cry), but about the bad image this has given the profession, at a time when we need to look as professional and united as possible.
I hope the same as you about the real situation! I really do hope that this is just isolated incidents, taken out of context, and that much more robust procedures are now in place. We’ll hope together, eh? Got to keep some optimism going!
October 14, 2011 at 12:50 pm
woodsiegirl
I saw that article too (although I didn’t see your tweets about it) – and like you, my heart sank. I think it’s incredibly unhelpfully written – as Katie says, there’s absolutely no context given, and I really don’t believe the extend of the problem is anything like as bad as the writer makes out. I don’t really understand why it was published at all – Cracked doesn’t seem to be the natural home for articles on book preservation/weeding! I wonder what the writer was actually trying to achieve?
October 17, 2011 at 11:24 am
bethan
It is all very odd! I think Cracked’s mission is to write provocative articles – not to start balanced, well-informed debates. I doubt they care at all about the issues – but hey, book-burning always makes for a good headline. They’d probably find it hilarious that we’re having this discussion! I really hope it turns out we’re the only people who are taking it seriously…