[ARSCLIST] Interesting WSJ Article on when libraries should discard their holdings.

[Steve Ramm <Stevramm@xxxxxxx>]

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)