Staff Charges Library Dumped Too Many Books

The Berkeley Daily Planet raises charges of weeders gone wild at Berkeley. Several Berkeley library employees contend that a stepped-up effort to thin the library’s collection in the past year has been so rushed that valuable books were carted off in dumpsters.

April 8, 2005 by Uncategorized 4

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4 Responses

  1. Jessamyn says:
    April 9, 2005 at 3:35 am

    I heard that!
    I posted about this a few months ago and got a sort of curt email from Berkeley basically saying that I had gotten my information from disgruntled workers, not the horse’s mouth. I got a follow-up email from the BPL people explaining what was going on. I’ll forward it to folks who would like to see it. I’m not sure it totally resonated with me, but it did provide an alternative viewpoint. Of note:

    “RFID is not the culprit here. Rather, the problem is that ongoing collection evaluation was a missing priority in too many parts of our library system. Training and the clear understanding that ongoing maintenance is part of each selector’s collection responsiblity are the cures for what ails us.”

    Meanwhile my library doesn’t even have a weeding policy….

    Reply
  2. librarianscott says:
    April 9, 2005 at 4:01 am

    Re:I heard that!
    Seems like a proper response to pressure to weed quickly is to call your supervisor and let them know you will need additional time?

    Seems like going to the student newspaper would not help out at all.

    My sense is that academic libraries resist weeding more than public libraries.

    Reply
  3. SarahL says:
    April 9, 2005 at 10:34 pm

    Carted off in dumptsters?
    Haven’t these people heard of library booksales or fundraising. It’s bad enough they weeded out valuable parts of their collection, but tossing them?

    Reply
  4. Curmudgeony says:
    April 10, 2005 at 1:51 am

    Re:Carted off in dumptsters?
    To be fair, not everything weeded is saleable. Sure you might have the odd nonfiction title worthy of purchase, but in the massive weeding project I did, maybe one-tenth of what made it to the sale cart got sold. The rest of it sat…and sat…and sat. I added additional book carts for the other weeding that was showing up. And then both stacks sat…and sat…and sat.

    I wish that they could have sold, but in the end, I chucked them. My complaint came from the stubborn refusal by staffers to chuck what were items no longer even in the collection. It was as if they were scared to throw them away. Mind you, I wasn’t ripping books directly from the shelf to the dumpster, these were items pulled, judged weedable, and deleted from holdings; but they still couldn’t part with them.

    Weeding is a difficult, but necessary part of the library world. Not everything weeded is saleable.

    Reply

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