Higher Ed Libraries: Let's Get Rid of Books

[Extollager]

When All Your Books Disappear

What Does It Say about Higher Education When Colleges Liquidate Their Libraries?

millersbookreview.substack.com

These are the same institutions that feature self-righteous "banned [sic] books" displays every year, I have no doubt. Our time truly must be the despair of satirists.

 

[soulsinging]

I think there's a notable difference between digitizing based on cost savings and selectively excluding certain titles based on content.

But then I'm trying to resign myself to the idea that paper books will wind up as curiosities not so different from cassette tapes within my lifetime.

 

[BAYLOR]

I think there's a notable difference between digitizing based on cost savings and selectively excluding certain titles based on content.

But then I'm trying to resign myself to the idea that paper books will wind up as curiosities not so different from cassette tapes within my lifetime.

Putting all of our knowledge on digital storage with no paper book archival backup. What an idiotic idea that is. What those who are pushing this thing have not taken into consideration is what happens , if god forbid, The technology fails and we lose access to all of our collected knowledge ? Such a thing is well within the realm of possibilities..

 

[BAYLOR]

When All Your Books Disappear

What Does It Say about Higher Education When Colleges Liquidate Their Libraries?

millersbookreview.substack.com

These are the same institutions that feature self-righteous "banned [sic] books" displays every year, I have no doubt. Our time truly must be the despair of satirists.

As George Orwell might say " This is a double plus un-good development "

 

[soulsinging]

Putting all of our knowledge on digital storage with no paper book archival backup. What an idiotic idea that is. What those who are pushing this thing have not taken into consideration is what happens , if god forbid, The technology fails and we lose access to all of our collected knowledge ? Such a thing is well within the realm of possibilities..

Presumably the same thing that happened when the library of Alexandria was burned. We rebuild. Also, there is the trade off that digitizing may allow preservation of things that otherwise will never be reprinted or preserved because they won't sell enough copies.

I don't love it, but there's no holding back the technology.

 

[BAYLOR]

Presumably the same thing that happened when the library of Alexandria was burned. We rebuild. Also, there is the trade off that digitizing may allow preservation of things that otherwise will never be reprinted because they won't sell enough copies.

I don't love it, but there's no holding back the technology.

No , cannot hold back progress .

But putting all your eggs in one basket is not a sound strategy and this opens a whole host other undesirable possibilities with regard wot books and knowledge.

 

[soulsinging]

No , cannot hold back progress .

But putting all your eggs in one basket is not a sound strategy and this opens a whole host other undesirable possibilities with regard wot books and knowledge.

Sure, I have no problem debating the wisdom of this digital reliance, I just think the comparison to content censorship is unfounded. That's a separate topic. One is the active eradication of certain views, topics and subjects. The other is the inevitable penny-pinching budgeting of an institution that's not very profitable in a civilization that values nothing above than profitability.

 

[SilentRoamer]

Sure, I have no problem debating the wisdom of this digital reliance, I just think the comparison to content censorship is unfounded. That's a separate topic. One is the active eradication of certain views, topics and subjects. The other is the inevitable penny-pinching budgeting of an institution that's not very profitable in a civilization that values nothing above than profitability.

I'm not sure the two are as seperate as I would like.

Many of the larger companies that are digitizing content have also taken to removing certain aspects or making it "suitable for a modern audience". How long before the originals do not exist anymore? Having the majority of the worlds knowledge and entertainment digitised by a select few companies with their own agenda (whether that be financial or political) is a problem to me.

I'm not necessarily in the camp that this is all about profit, some of the major studios push specific messages - that should be beyond doubt just looking at the content.

Just my 2c.

 

[Toby Frost]

I think there's a notable difference between digitizing based on cost savings and selectively excluding certain titles based on content.

A very good point, but not one that fits the internet's narrative.

 

[hitmouse]

I like my libraries, and I have a terrible fetish for physical books, which fill my house.

Can we consider the following, and whether it is separate from the above debate:
My natural haunts are university libraries. I like the stacks, and I like to peruse physical copies of journals sitting in a comfortable armchair. Some of my best friends are university librarians, who I can safely say share my bibliophilic tendencies. However, apart from the really big general journals (Science, Nature, NEJM, Lancet, etc) the vast majority are now electronic subscriptions. A large library no longer has to buy tons of paper each year. The product is much more accessible in electronic format. yards of shelf space and expensive bindings are saved, and the university can subscribe to a very much larger selection of journals than it could ever accommodate physically. As far as my librarian friends are concerned this is a necessary and practical evolution of the library and there is no point being overly sentimental about it. A slightly more tricky corollary is the retrospective replacement of old bound volumes from the stacks with electronic copies. For example: bound volumes of specialist engineering journals form the 60s-90s which probably have near-zero usage.

 

[CupofJoe]

A few years ago at work [a university], I'd see students dragging around small and not-so-small wheeled suitcases full of books they'd need for the day. Then one year, the cases were gone. The university had preloaded all the textbooks onto tablets and sold them to the students. The sigh of relief from the students was almost audible.
As for near-zero usage of books... For over 30 years I was the only person to take out on loan one very niche book. Eventually, I made a deal with the subject Librarian and they wrote it off as lost. Luckily it found its way to a good home.

 

[OuttaInc]

I agree with @soulsinging. Digitizing a university library is different from selectively removing books from shelves because of content.

When I was a graduate student, my happiest day was the day I was able to download a pdf from my University library's website and print it out in my office instead of having to walk across campus, hunt for a book in the basement of the graduate library, and stand in line to spend 10c a page photocopying pages one at a time from a book that was so thick it wouldn't lay flat.

Obviously I'm talking about research materials, and not fiction. If I wanted fiction, I went to my neighborhood library and browsed. But I never browsed in my university library; I went with purpose, and a list of sources I needed. Digitizing all those periodicals and annals was the best thing that ever happened for researchers.

 

[Randy M.]

When All Your Books Disappear

What Does It Say about Higher Education When Colleges Liquidate Their Libraries?

millersbookreview.substack.com

These are the same institutions that feature self-righteous "banned [sic] books" displays every year, I have no doubt. Our time truly must be the despair of satirists.

I won't say recent developments make me all that happy, either, Extollager, but this one sounds a bit extreme. Many university libraries also have off-site warehousing where they store the books in better environmental conditions for their preservation than are found in the library; the turnaround time for delivering requested books is most often listed at 24-hours, but is usually less, at least where I work.

This completely undermines the chance of finding relevant books when browsing the stacks. This is made up for (inadequatly, perhaps) by our catalog listing the books to either side on the shelf with the item being searched for, with the option of scrolling either direction for more titles.
Of course, who browses book stacks any more? Most of our students are tuned into electronic media, but only a few wandered our stacks -- I work in a branch of a university library -- prior to Covid. On the other hand, there's is a constant demand in universities and colleges for more study space, individual and collaborative.

In essence, there's a balance to be struck that isn't always struck as libraries try to find ways to maintain relevance, and still serve and direct researchers in the digital age.

 

[Extollager]

It's terribly discouraging to see librarians behind the shedding of books. Reasons for dismay have already been mentioned. One thing that haunts me is the failure of imagination that I perceive. The idea is that "we" -- the professionals everyone is supposed to trust -- know better than anyone else what the needs of present and future users are. But they don't leave space for imagining that future users might have different interests and needs that mass replacement of books by digital information will defeat. We do not know what their interests and needs will be. That's why we have to be worthy trustees of those books.

I think there's an analogy here and I'll grope to express it: again and again you see national leaders march into war with the idea that "the war will be over quickly." And instead it drags on and on and is enormously more complex and expensive than was imagined. I hate that! And the elimination of library books is like this situation in that the experts -- here librarians rather than generals and presidents -- are confident that they know how things will go in the near future.

And they don't learn from mistakes. Look, years ago I read Nicholas Baker's little book Double Fold. This was about librarians and the "war on paper" in which they surrendered bound volumes of newspapers because we don't need those grimy old things, why, we can microfilm it all.

Baker's book shows how wrong that was. (That book affects me approximately the way people who don't admire Ted Kennedy would be affected by a well-researched book on Chappaquiddick.)

I'm drifting into a rant. But I am confident that in that paperless world of (ho ho) universal access, there will be enormous loss, and I don't even know just what it will be.

 

[THX1138]

Putting all of our knowledge on digital storage with no paper book archival backup. What an idiotic idea that is. What those who are pushing this thing have not taken into consideration is what happens , if god forbid, The technology fails and we lose access to all of our collected knowledge ? Such a thing is well within the realm of possibilities..

Plus, being digital it could be slightly altered over time to convey a different view without it being noticed. (This is a story plot in one of my novels.)

 

[THX1138]

We have a large public library near us that a few years ago got rid of most of its books including all reference materials. I used to enjoy going there but now it's just a large open space with people on their laptops all the time. There are some books. But nothing like it was in the past.

 

[Vince W]

You know what’s really scary about libraries getting rid of books? For me it makes that information inaccessible to people without the necessary technology. If this had happened in the 70s/80s I would never have been able to afford a computer to read that ‘digitized’ information. It’s pretty arrogant to assume everybody can afford it even today.

 

[Randy M.]

It's terribly discouraging to see librarians behind the shedding of books. Reasons for dismay have already been mentioned. One thing that haunts me is the failure of imagination that I perceive. The idea is that "we" -- the professionals everyone is supposed to trust -- know better than anyone else what the needs of present and future users are. But they don't leave space for imagining that future users might have different interests and needs that mass replacement of books by digital information will defeat. We do not know what their interests and needs will be. That's why we have to be worthy trustees of those books.

In working with librarians, I've found few who want to part with a book, some to a fault, but the majority realize there is only so much room in their library. Extollager, there has always been weeding of collections to make room for new books and to remove from circulation those books that have had little use over the years. How many libraries need 3 copies of of a 1987 textbook on Cobol? How about earlier editions of books on Fortran? 1970s books on the various conditions of cement? In the social sciences and literature collections, there's a finer determination because they don't age out of relevance as quickly, if at all (this is also true of math).

In mitigation, this is also where library consortiums come into play. Alexandria as a metaphor has been an influence on policy, so there is some coordination among libraries. For instance, in order to weed items from our stacks, not only were subject specialists involved in the determination, but data from other libraries (via WorldCat) was taken into account. We weeded any book not borrowed in 20 years and with more than 10 other libraries containing a copy. Anything not borrowed in 20 years but with 10 or fewer libraries owning a copy, we put into storage. I suspect most other college/university libraries would have a similar standard before chucking out their books. That meant that anything we didn't keep, there was a chance of borrowing through inter-library loan.

Meantime, if we buy a copy, we often get an electronic copy with licensing that allows more than one student to use it at a time. Further, especially in the sciences, much research material and publishing has shifted to online journals which eliminates bound journals, but means that current information is almost instantly available for those who need it.

 

[Extollager]

Randy, yes, I understand about weeding. (Btw I am a 1985 graduate of the University of Illinois School of Library and Information Science.) We're talking about something radically different here, as you'd probably agree.

My little university got rid of most of its reference collection, and, for our users, there was no need to keep some of those books -- old agricultural annuals and so on. But they got rid of their sets of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and Book Review Digest. Just this year the absence of the former made it harder to pursue an inquiry of mine. (I mentioned it here, the search for an article from around 1975 about publishers using cheaper bindings of books.) The university here didn't have those volumes and did not subscribe to the "historical New York Times index" we eventually needed to check. So I emailed several other universities. The main research library in the state still did have the Reader's Guide in book form, and I urged the librarian to keep them... at last what I thought for a while was THE article was found. Turns out it can't have been, but that's another story.

But anyway... you mention the claim about "study space." I can't speak for other libraries, but I know for certain that at the university here, with thousands of books from the stacks and the reference collection, & the periodical archive, gone... what we now have might as well be regarded as a storage area for unused chairs and tables. Over 95% of the available space, I would sincerely estimate, is not used at any given time. There is less reason than ever for students to come to the library, so the library's user statistics have probably fallen through the basement. This is not, of course, entirely the library's fault. The teachers evidently do not assign library work. (When I taught English there, I used to wonder how many assigned papers, whether using online sources or library materials.)

As regards the local university library, there's also the fact that the administration made them "find room" so that space could be carved out for office(s) for one of the academic divisions.

In short the library is physically smaller, it has fewer paper resources, and it is used much less than it formerly was. Sad.

 

[KGeo777]

That's the irony of technology. It is supposed to make things more convenient but doesn't it seem to get more vulnerable and perishable?
Oh well, isn't that a message of Ozymandias? Or Robert Burns' To A Mouse?

There's probably a lesson in humility or not taking things for granted.