> the shelves were being cleared to make space—not for more books but for space itself. ... The new library has four floors. Two of them feature books
Despite the frenzy of building at most American universities, the library is forced to serve dual purpose as space for study and collaboration as well as repository of printed material. The collection is not managed on merely its own merits, but subordinated to the other, competing demands even on its 'home' turf.
At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity fetisishm.
People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that
I stayed at an Airbnb that had fake books on the shelves! I looked them up and they aren't even especially cheap. But they probably get stolen a lot less.
I'm always sad to see books discarded; some hoarder instinct in me says that there must be some way to preserve them.
My particular experience with book dumpster diving was when they were cleaning out the office of a former professor at my college, who had been a student of Dijkstra, and had nine binders with photocopies of the EWD archive [1]. I and two other students split up the books, and to this day I have three volumes of faded yellow copies of these papers. Despite the fact that these are all digitized now in some form it's still a chunk of history that I feel privileged to own.
My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place.
I used to work in a library, and this was often the case. Our basement was stuffed to the gills with romance novels that nobody was reading anymore, mysteries published decades ago, and kids books that probably related to kids from a previous generation more. A yearly sale would see the collection trimmed. Almost across the board, you could still get those books through interlibrary loan. If not from the county network, from another library in the state. In my time, I never heard of anyone missing a book that had been disposed of.
That only works if all the libraries coordinate to determine which one will hold the last copy, and if the expense of moving such books around on request does not exceed that of storage.
Given the number of books I've been unable to find when I wanted them save in the Library of Congress (which won't loan, necessitating a trip to DC, or finding and purchasing my own copy), and the number of times my ILL requests have been turned down, a last copy per system mechanism seems the best for preserving access.
40 years ago, my public middle school would periodically pick books that weren't checked out for a couple decades. They'd rubberstamp "discard" over the library's ownership mark and put them in a pile that said "free books" with the implicit declaration that those books were headed for the landfill.
I ended up with a nice selection of books on nuclear energy and radioactivity including a nice non-fiction Asimov book on the neutrino and particle physics.
Libraries are always filled to the rafters. The only way to fit new books in is to take old books out. If they didn't, they would only ever have books from the 1940s when they first built that library.
I picked up a fun university library discard the other day (month). This one is about Lunar geology. The concept of the book is so inspiring to me: "it's 1975, we brought home a lot of samples from the moon now; so what did we learn". It was fun to look through that one - a snapshot of a very exciting time.
A last copy policy will ensure that when one wants to compare a first edition of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ against a second, one can get the full weight of Aragorn's snark:
>What did you fear that I should say? That I have here a rascal of a rebel dwarf that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?'
I was at UVU recently with some time to spare, looking for old bound magazines just for some browsing.
Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look through them.
But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and the bookshelves hadn't been removed yet.
I asked the reference librarian where you could look through these, online. But she came up empty, unless you're actually a student and have access to their special subscriptions that may have these old magazines.
I have even experienced this in my personal life -- I like in NYC and when I moved here I had to get rid of a ton of books. The ones that I could not bring myself to part with ended up in boxes in my parent's basement where they remain to this day.
Many of my fondest memories growing up was browsing the bookshelves in my childhood home, discovering books that I remember to this day. Now I read almost exclusively on my kindle and the browsing experience is just so terrible. I feel I have failed my children in a real way by not giving them access to this.
Disposing of books bequeathed by a major historical figure, with that person’s underlining etc., is not routine collection management. In my own location, I would expect such books to be moved to closed stacks, or perhaps moved to the national repository library, but not dumpstered.
Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future that has few books, is so new a phenomenon that it shouldn’t yet be called routine. Objecting to this trend is still very much appropriate.
A given library system should have a "last copy" policy, and should keep at least one copy of each book which has been added to their collection --- any which can't afford that need more funding.
>Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. --- Anne Herbert
When I was very young, my father retired to a rural county in Virginia where the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the basement library --- for each Scholastic book order, the teacher would remove a couple of books (as well as the promotional poster which my purchases made eligible), then hand me the box and the balance of its contents.
Like the furrow's length which I grew to feel in my bones by helping a neighbor plow his garden w/ a horse, I feel that quote in my soul.
>A home without books is a body without soul. (or words to that effect) --- Marcus Tullius Cicero/G.K. Chesterton
c.f.,
>No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them. --- Harriet Beecher Stowe
Interesting to see the talk of “F-pattern scrolling through electronic publications”, which was new to me.
As an academic, the vast majority of my reading is on my Kobo, and I don’t think this particular medium encourages this. Sure, an e-reader is inferior to print books in terms of random access and keeping multiple pages open at once, but I don’t find myself skimming the way I might on a laptop screen or smartphone.
Also, when I (GenX) open my ereader on my phone, I read it just like anything else. And I read paper books, on two e-readers, my phone, and my computer screen.
If it's some online article, though, I definitely skim. And I'd skim if it were printed, too.
> the shelves were being cleared to make space—not for more books but for space itself. ... The new library has four floors. Two of them feature books
Despite the frenzy of building at most American universities, the library is forced to serve dual purpose as space for study and collaboration as well as repository of printed material. The collection is not managed on merely its own merits, but subordinated to the other, competing demands even on its 'home' turf.
At the risk of sounding a bit pretentious: I think the relationship a lot of people have with books can best be described as commodity fetisishm.
People see some value in the physical books themselves. They are sacred, discarding them becomes a crime against knowledge. Sure I get it, the nazis burned books; but these libraries are in no way comparable to that
I stayed at an Airbnb that had fake books on the shelves! I looked them up and they aren't even especially cheap. But they probably get stolen a lot less.
I'm always sad to see books discarded; some hoarder instinct in me says that there must be some way to preserve them.
My particular experience with book dumpster diving was when they were cleaning out the office of a former professor at my college, who had been a student of Dijkstra, and had nine binders with photocopies of the EWD archive [1]. I and two other students split up the books, and to this day I have three volumes of faded yellow copies of these papers. Despite the fact that these are all digitized now in some form it's still a chunk of history that I feel privileged to own.
[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/
My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days, that's not an issue in any real sense, especially for books that nobody is checking out in the first place.
I used to work in a library, and this was often the case. Our basement was stuffed to the gills with romance novels that nobody was reading anymore, mysteries published decades ago, and kids books that probably related to kids from a previous generation more. A yearly sale would see the collection trimmed. Almost across the board, you could still get those books through interlibrary loan. If not from the county network, from another library in the state. In my time, I never heard of anyone missing a book that had been disposed of.
That only works if all the libraries coordinate to determine which one will hold the last copy, and if the expense of moving such books around on request does not exceed that of storage.
Given the number of books I've been unable to find when I wanted them save in the Library of Congress (which won't loan, necessitating a trip to DC, or finding and purchasing my own copy), and the number of times my ILL requests have been turned down, a last copy per system mechanism seems the best for preserving access.
I fear that the availability of e-books will lead to more libraries getting rid of their last copy, not just the penultimate one.
40 years ago, my public middle school would periodically pick books that weren't checked out for a couple decades. They'd rubberstamp "discard" over the library's ownership mark and put them in a pile that said "free books" with the implicit declaration that those books were headed for the landfill.
I ended up with a nice selection of books on nuclear energy and radioactivity including a nice non-fiction Asimov book on the neutrino and particle physics.
Libraries are always filled to the rafters. The only way to fit new books in is to take old books out. If they didn't, they would only ever have books from the 1940s when they first built that library.
I picked up a fun university library discard the other day (month). This one is about Lunar geology. The concept of the book is so inspiring to me: "it's 1975, we brought home a lot of samples from the moon now; so what did we learn". It was fun to look through that one - a snapshot of a very exciting time.
(Taylor, Lunar Science: A post-Apollo view)
That is what deep basement storage is for.
A last copy policy will ensure that when one wants to compare a first edition of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ against a second, one can get the full weight of Aragorn's snark:
>What did you fear that I should say? That I have here a rascal of a rebel dwarf that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?'
Schools in poor towns don't have multiple levels or basements or even extra storage rooms. What you see is all you get.
And if you're lucky, your library may do frequent book sales!
https://www.bapl.org/book-sales/
I was at UVU recently with some time to spare, looking for old bound magazines just for some browsing.
Decades ago there were rows and rows of bookshelves, with these bound magazines, going back to the 1880's. It was so interesting to look through them.
But now there was nothing, zippo, left of that. Just huge areas with completely empty shelves. Apparently it happened fairly recently, and the bookshelves hadn't been removed yet.
I asked the reference librarian where you could look through these, online. But she came up empty, unless you're actually a student and have access to their special subscriptions that may have these old magazines.
I have even experienced this in my personal life -- I like in NYC and when I moved here I had to get rid of a ton of books. The ones that I could not bring myself to part with ended up in boxes in my parent's basement where they remain to this day.
Many of my fondest memories growing up was browsing the bookshelves in my childhood home, discovering books that I remember to this day. Now I read almost exclusively on my kindle and the browsing experience is just so terrible. I feel I have failed my children in a real way by not giving them access to this.
Yes, exploration, discovery. One doesn't stumble across items available on inter-library loan.
I could not count the number of books I picked up and enjoyed, even if only for a short while, whilst I was studying at uni.
Sensationalism. That's routine collection management.
Here's another article about the same library, the Chester Fritz Library, acquiring one of the 11 remaining copies of a 444-year-old book: https://blogs.und.edu/und-today/2026/02/chester-fritz-librar...
Disposing of books bequeathed by a major historical figure, with that person’s underlining etc., is not routine collection management. In my own location, I would expect such books to be moved to closed stacks, or perhaps moved to the national repository library, but not dumpstered.
Also, disposing of books when there are not actually space limitations, in order to create the supposed library of the future that has few books, is so new a phenomenon that it shouldn’t yet be called routine. Objecting to this trend is still very much appropriate.
You're confusing the other library in the article with the (unnamed) one mentioned in the title, the Chester Fritz Library.
Gratuitous destruction of books by librarians has been done for a while. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold
A given library system should have a "last copy" policy, and should keep at least one copy of each book which has been added to their collection --- any which can't afford that need more funding.
>Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries. --- Anne Herbert
When I was very young, my father retired to a rural county in Virginia where the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the basement library --- for each Scholastic book order, the teacher would remove a couple of books (as well as the promotional poster which my purchases made eligible), then hand me the box and the balance of its contents.
Like the furrow's length which I grew to feel in my bones by helping a neighbor plow his garden w/ a horse, I feel that quote in my soul.
>A home without books is a body without soul. (or words to that effect) --- Marcus Tullius Cicero/G.K. Chesterton
c.f.,
>No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them. --- Harriet Beecher Stowe
Interesting to see the talk of “F-pattern scrolling through electronic publications”, which was new to me.
As an academic, the vast majority of my reading is on my Kobo, and I don’t think this particular medium encourages this. Sure, an e-reader is inferior to print books in terms of random access and keeping multiple pages open at once, but I don’t find myself skimming the way I might on a laptop screen or smartphone.
Also, when I (GenX) open my ereader on my phone, I read it just like anything else. And I read paper books, on two e-readers, my phone, and my computer screen.
If it's some online article, though, I definitely skim. And I'd skim if it were printed, too.
any system with pages you "turn" certainly feels very different to reading a webpage (or PDF) with free vertical scrolling
Some people truly love paper books more than having people read books. It’s one of the more seemingly paradoxical ways anti-intellectualism manifests.
Don’t worry everyone, the Ministry of Truth will make sure we know what we need to know.